Target via Google Express is pretty nice.

Also, why is Amazon launching this for just dogs? My cats are offended that they were left out!

If your cats are like my cats, they will only eat one brand, and Amazon isn't going to change their palettes.

The dogs I've had, for the most part, will eat anything from lettuce to cat poop. Amazon could sell cans of cat poop with bits of lettuce in it, and they'd wolf it down.

Coming in 2019 - Cat poop prime with 1 hour delivery, for when your dogs are really hungry.

> Also, why is Amazon launching this for just dogs? My cats are offended that they were left out!

They have the data of what is what people buys. They have that info for all kind of products. If it for dogs, it makes sense that it may be the best option.

Indeed. "I'm going to boycott Amazon!" as a kneejerk reaction is becoming an increasingly laughable statement.

You can pass on one or two offerings, but they're getting increasingly hard to avoid across the board.

About the only Amazon product I can't avoid is AWS, since without digging in DNS beforehand it's not obvious which websites are running on it.

I get it, but target is an odd choice to flee this - they have a house brand for almost everything they sell, from BBQ gear to baby wipes...

How on earth is Amazon getting too big for its britches? The company does absolutely nothing but help customers by destroying margins. This idea that Amazon should be avoided is very, very strange.

Retailers like Amazon or Walmart shouldn't be allowed to make their own competing brands.

Should the government seize the means of production, comrade?

Businesses should be allowed to create whatever products they want, as long as they don't do anti-competitive things like work together with their competitors to fix prices.

Free markets are important.

> Businesses should be allowed to create whatever products they want, as long as they don't do anti-competitive things like work together with their competitors to fix prices.

Or say, if they owned a huge marketplace and eventually started producing a product, and then refused to stock their competitor's product in the huge marketplace.

Do you demand that the local supermarket carry every brand of chili on earth?

I don't think that's a good analogy; there are significant differences between a local supermarket (local, items must fit in the store) and Amazon's marketplace (global, items can be located anywhere globally within reason).

The justice department(?) demanded that Microsoft stop bundling (or forcing, can't remember the specifics) IE on Windows.

Laissez faire capitalism has both benefits and risks, casual/militant dismissal of concerns can sometimes have negative consequences, sometimes very severe.

>> Free markets are important.

There aren't free markets in a pure sense and it's a good thing:

- Standard oil was broken into exxon, chevron, etc...

- Laws were introduced to prevent railroad barons from owning every industry by forcing fair treatment.

- Electricity producers aren't allowed to sell directly to their customers in many countries. They are forced to sell it to resellers.

>> as long as they don't do anti-competitive things like work together with their competitors to fix prices

That's subjective, What does anti-competitive mean? it could mean making cheaper competing products as a retailer. It could mean refusing to host your product just like it happened to chrome cast. It could be ranking competing products lower.

Amazon is in an unusual place of both controlling the market and entering the market however. That doesn't really fit with the nice simplistic ideological "Free market" concept. It's hard to see any motivation for them not to game the system if there's no regulation preventing it.

Basically every retailer has a 'house brand' of products that are manufactured by some third party. This isn't new or unique. Why do you think this is bad?

What makes you think it's a good idea to have 4 monopolies that are starting to eat every other business in the world?

This is akin to store brands by other retailers. Most store brands aren't specialized, they're generic and offer the consumer decent quality at a fair price. This forces brands to differentiate themselves in some way. This is a good thing in my opinion because it seems to weed out poor quality products.

For commodity items like sugar and salt where differentiation is nonexistent, it doesn't make sense to pay a 100% premium for different packaging.

I haven't stated that I think it's a good idea. You've stated that you believe the government (presumably) should intervene and not allow retailers to have their own brands, I'm simply asking you to explain your position.

The major supermarket chains in the UK have been doing it for years, with packaging almost indistinguishable from the well-known brand.

I tend to do a similar thing. Amazon's core product is virtually unusable to me anyway.

I don't even know what their core product is anymore.

As a consumer why do you care?

For me personally, the more a company tries to do, the less I trust them to do everything right.

I agree which makes me wonder, where do we draw the line with Amazon or any other company for example.

+1 on that one. What I don't get is that they are already giants, why would they undermine and hinder other companies from developing? I found this article very interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-competitive_practices

I want to support competition, encouraging all companies to give me a fair offer. Amazon seems to do that for now, but their power is increasing by the day. I'm not really a fan of that.

Supporting competition exists and I think everyone on theory wants to support it. However, at the end of the day consumers prioritize their own immediate concerns over long term economic concerns.

I find it fascinating how humans have such trouble operating in context of big picture and make so many short sighted decisions.

Some of us aren't consumers, we are people.

And so you want to do business with the company that will pretend hardest that it just doesn't want to get in your wallet?

We are all people but you are being ignorant if you don't consider yourself a consumer in the global economy.

Others are free to disagree with this, but I believe corporations being so large and so profitable that they have no choice but to enter multiple markets, or to do increasingly more ethically questionable things in order to keep increasing the quarterly profits and revenues, is all because of a weak anti-trust system and weak anti-trust legislation.

Companies should not be allowed to grow so large and so powerful that they can threaten multiple industries at once. I'm not necessarily saying they should be broken up as soon as they pass say $50 a year billion a year in revenues, but at the very least they should be disallowed from buying any other company as soon as they pass a similar mark or as soon as certain conditions for it being in "anti-trust mode" are met.

How are we going to have real competition in say AI, if Google keeps buying all the promising startups that come up with breakthrough AI technologies? Same for Facebook buying Instagram and WhatsApp. And now Amazon is doing the same thing.

The only answer to that right now is "maybe we're lucky and some other large corporation will buy that startup instead?" But that doesn't make me feel much better.

In the end, it all leads to at least an oligopoly across multiple industries, and a monopoly in specific industries. That's not good for consumers.

And I won't even go into how this much power and money concentrated into singular entities is bad for democracies, too. Even if you don't believe that these rich people and companies are literally buying the politicians and their votes, at the very least you should agree that they have disproportionate leverage in the government, for the same reason big banks do.

A more decentralized marketplace made-up of many more smaller companies is much better for consumers and democracies, too.