No they shouldnt, that is anti-competitive. Grocery store shelf placement is paid for my brands. If Kirkland pays for better placement they get better placement. Not just because they are the inhouse brand.

When did stores start having to treat all the products they sell equally?

They never have, but grocery stores also do not prevent you from selling your product for cheaper elsewhere.

Does Amazon prevent you from selling on other platforms if you sell on Amazon?

They state you cannot sell your product anywhere for cheaper than Amazon.

Have you ever heard the term "monopoly"?

They do by soft power -- leveraging their position in the market to make the alternatives completely unprofitable, thus literally preventing you from selling on other platforms.

the word monopoly gets mistakenly used in place of anti-competitive all the time.

Are you describing predatory pricing? Where they sell at a loss to put competition out of business or to grow faster? Or are you trying to say its not profitable to sell on ebay or shopify instead of amazon? Amazon using its scale to clone products and sell them with low margins, in an effort to prevent competition from springing up is anti-competitive, but its not them being a monopoly.

I'm using the word more in a literal sense than a legal one.

All I mean is the e-commerce space is becoming increasingly "monopolar" due to Amazon's activities.

Are you asking whether promotion of an in-house brand is anti-competitive behavior that should be subject to antitrust laws? That’s really not a question that’s been decided by society already, certainly not something that should just be assumed to be a positive trend.

The trend is quickly becoming stores that sell almost exclusively store brand, augmented by other companies products to fill their cracks. Target, Walmart, and Costco would prefer to be Ikea than ebay. In many ways, I like it. I want target products, I go to target. I trust them to stand behind the quality of their product. Same goes for Kirkland. I dont go to Amazon to buy Kirland, anymore than I go to Best Buy to buy an Echo. Great Value I expect to be cheap but safe and not counterfit. Sure Wal-Mart might not be the most ethical business partner, and might be putting companies out of business, but I expect their store brand products to be what they say on the label.

The stores pushing their brand helps with the paradox of choice, comparison shopping, recommendations and reivews, and blame when something goes wrong. I expect them to do the work of selecting the best product and standing behind it. Its department store scale boutiques, store brand product curation (basically white label rebranding, maybe custom runs off the factory lines) is a feature, not a bug.

Amazon is doing a very similar thing by buying brands. Hopefully someday there is more to Alexa than voice, and there is a single something that allows you to see basic status and config of all your amazon products and services, whether they be Echo, Fire, Ring, Eero, Twitch etc.

> I dont go to Amazon to buy Kirland, anymore than I go to Best Buy to buy an Echo

I actually do go to Amazon to buy Kirkland. The nearest Costco is far enough away and not sufficiently cheaper than the Walmart supercenter a mile from my place to justify a Costco membership.

Best Buy is actually a good place to buy Amazon devices if you have a nearby Best Buy. They price match so the price is generally the same (and better if it happens to be a time when Best Buy is having a sale and Amazon is not), and you get the thing right away. Oh, and Best Buy takes Apple Pay and cash.

Buying Kirkland on Amazon, means someone walked into a costco, bought it, and resold it. From both a cost effective and auditing a warranty trail standpoint, that sucks. Incentivizing people to stock their homes full of costco products to resell is a market failure, we shouldnt encourage that behavior, but instead address the market failure. You can buy costco products at costco.com without a membership.