Whenever I asked about this, they said you still had to provide product for sale wherever the customers were. The large retailers all want you to believe that you can make up for the lower price in vast quantities their store front provides.
"Our milk supply expires at the end of the week? 50% off!"
And then they raise the price of eggs, bread, peanut butter, and other frequently purchased items by 5 cents each.
I mean there are areas where peoples only choice of ISP is Comcast and equally the Government wasn't forcing people to buy Standard Oil.
Any monopoly is bad because it allows them to ignore consumers as there is no competition.
Telecoms were totally built by govs. Back in the days govs were obsessed with controlling the means of communication, so all the related biz was due to the monopoly right.
> AT&T established a network of subsidiaries in the United States and Canada that held a government-authorized phone service monopoly, formalized with the Kingsbury Commitment, throughout most of the twentieth century.
> With $18.8 million spent in 2013, Comcast has the seventh largest lobbying budget of any individual company or organization in the United States.[62] Comcast employs multiple former U.S. Congressmen as lobbyists.
Sure, nothing to do with the government. Go ahead, try to bypass FCC and establish a new telecom company. It's literally pushed by the gov, as in any heavily regulated domain with patents and other monopoly rights.
As for robber barons, that's mostly an antitrust myth to scare people
> After 1900 it did not try to force competitors out of business by underpricing them.[37] The federal Commissioner of Corporations studied Standard's operations from the period of 1904 to 1906[38] and concluded that "beyond question ... the dominant position of the Standard Oil Co. in the refining industry was due to unfair practices—to abuse of the control of pipe-lines, to railroad discriminations, and to unfair methods of competition in the sale of the refined petroleum products".[39] Due to competition from other firms, their market share had gradually eroded to 70 percent by 1906 which was the year when the antitrust case was filed against Standard, and down to 64 percent by 1911 when Standard was ordered broken up[40] and at least 147 refining companies were competing with Standard including Gulf, Texaco, and Shell.
What? Your local Cafe does lobbying? Only magacorps do that, and yes, they use it to protect themselves from competition.
And no, protecting yourself from competition using lobbying, monopoly rights, patents, regulations means exactly this: big biz uses government to ensure its monopoly/oligopoly, aka governments creating monopolies.
>Comcast like that is weird to prove a point of government and telecoms
Comcast is using government to ensure its marketshare is not an example of government forcing people to use the service?
It exactly is IMHO.
Then articulate your point more clearly.
Sure, many the American megacorps are using the government for their own sake. That's exactly proving why US is such a crony state, where big corps are protected from competition by a huge apparatus of bureaucracy.
What's your point? If they use the government it's not the government's fault? Government is literally a mean of establishing oligopolies and shifting the bargaining balance from people to corporations.
I don’t buy that you didn’t know I didn’t mean everyone because of articulation. As if such a basic point needs to be specified so much.
You can't buy a competitor if he don't want to be sold. Neither can you threat somebody with violence if the government does its job. I don't even comprehend how the absence of interventionism presume allowance of such violent measures. Don't confuse violence with "non-competitive practices". The latter are seldom harmful, or at the very least much less harmful than those leveraged by the allowance of interventions.
So they've provided a worse service? I'm fine with it, if it means lower prices.
Of course they had a choice. And not only "to sell or become worthless", but also invent or innovate, as Amazon did, when it swallowed a huge chunk of Walmart's pie.
I don't know if Amazon is good or bad, neither myself nor anybody around ever used it, but if its service would not be good enough, any competitor could easily use it to conquer the market (as Amazon itself did), until Amazon would protect itself via regulatory capture.
There's plenty of problems with market capture by a single entity, government or no.
There is no "moving into the market", because as soon as a market consolidates around one or $very_small_number of players, cost of entry and market capture make competition impossible. So competition ends.
This is where we are now with tech. It's basically impossible for anyone new to compete with Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc. It's also where we are with established players in other sectors such as Airbus.
The only two things that can break the logjam are government action to split up monopolists, and the invention of a new market space with a viably low cost of entry.
It wasn't always that way... or, at least, not for such a large proportion of the economy. The problem is that economic models and resulting policy is still based on assumptions that, due to technological change, no longer hold. The logic is usually sound, but the assumptions are ridiculous (see, e.g., abuse of the Coase Theorem).
It's far past time to re-evaluate this perspective, but we keep running into that Upton Sinclair quote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
Are prices high, or are prices so competitive, so low, so good for consumers, that competitors have literally been complaining about it for years?
Now, tell me again why you think prices aren't competitive?
Not market mechanism, governments protecting big biz. Without legislative protection a monopoly doesn't last long, as Standard Oil example shows.
A typical cycle of crony-capitalism is: build big biz on a new market -> lobby heavy regulatory framework and a set of monopoly rights which make entering impossible for any new competitor -> push your shills in some agency like FAA, FCC or FDA -> enjoy your unconditional domination.
> The only two things that can break the logjam are government action to split up monopolists
This factoid has failed so many times it's astonishing it keeps being repeated. A century of anti-trust failures without a single example of a decent outcome, yet people still bring this up.
A devil's advocate view: perhaps the supplier was buying low cost appliances from China, built in factories with who knows what labor standards or whether the work was compulsory, made almost certainly to a lower quality than appliances made in North America, taking advantage of China's currency and trade manipulation to mark up the price and make a larger profit than if they had distributed appliances made in a western nation with labor and wage standards.
Now the U.S. is putting the same tariffs on Chinese imports that they put on U.S. imports to their country and the supplier is having difficulty getting Amazon to bear the cost of the supplier's desire to keep the same margin.
OP is framing this like it's wholly Amazon's fault and not just a common failed negotiation.
Ford motor company is huge and may have, for all I know, abusive practices towards it's suppliers. But Ford is certainly in the oligopoly, not monopoly category. Ford could be absolutely the only game in town for a given small or medium sized company but this doesn't mean Ford controls markets on the supplier end, which I believe is the measure of monopoly control.
(No fan of Amazon here, just trying to understand what you're saying.)
Source: Have built price optimization software for Amazon Marketplace sellers in the past
If you look at Amazon guidance, $X-million / year means you don't hit the threshold to get an Amazon rep. If you're over $10 million / year you do get a rep. Either increase sales to get a rep or stop being a vendor.
The biggest problem is `agreements that restrain trade` is a monopoly practice that happens across the board. They're a black box AND have tiny support systems for their marketplace.
One recent example. A client was on track to be selling $X-million this year of some appliances. Our client was forced to to stop selling because of trump tariffs. Amazon won't accept a "higher price" from our little company that only sells $Xm/year. I guarantee they're talking everyday to the teams at frigidaire/honeywell/GE/etc.
If their systems would transparent this wouldn't be a problem but their algorithms have blackbox variables for the big brands.