Technology

I recently wanted to get a pre-workout, I looked it up on Amazon and then I went to the company site to just order directly from there. It was like $10 cheaper on Amazon because of free shipping and subscribe & save.

My last post being unclear. Amazon has about as much a strangle hold on the tech sector as Walmart has on retail. They don't. You get the product you paid for. AWS is no different.

Check Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox by Lina Khan (FTC). A very detailed review of how Amazon is a monopoly and how they dodge antitrust legislation.

There are other online shops besides Amazon. I find an alternative for almost everything that I order and it's not more expensive. And finding the right product inside Amazon is so exhausting nowadays that it's not more work to compare different web shops.

It's hard to compete when you're basically a warehouse and your market is the literal population of the internet.

Yeah, microcenter, even if it's the only computer/electronics store for 100 miles, can still only hold so much, and they only reach people in/around their city at most. It's not like people are crossing state lines to get to a computer store.... Unless you live on the border of your state, I suppose.

Amazon has, at the very least, dozens of warehouses across the country that can deliver whatever it is you want with remarkable efficiency because postal/parcel services have been systematically improving over the past 50+ years.

I'm not saying I'm a fan of Amazon, but bluntly, is it really surprising, in the slightest, that Amazon can out price everyone else?

So the way it’s ruining those markets is by making more goods available at lower prices?

Amazon is a place where you have to deal with fake items and getting fraudulent returns shipped to you as new. Your reward for this is maybe a 5% discount.

Brick and mortar will always be more expensive and there are always cheaper options than Target. I used to love Fry's but they are no more.

I enjoy this narrative of "being forced" to go against ones own morals and principals by big bad companies because one just absolutely has to have a product for as cheap as possible.

You went to two stores and then straight to Amazon. That doesn't mean they have a monopoly, that means you really didn't try that hard to find an alternative.

If you think you have no other choice you are right because you stopped looking for one.

So politely, how does Amazon offering a better price on a niche paper product conflate into them having a monopoly on the "tech industry"?

I'd posit the real thing here is that Amazon's warehouses allow them to keep less-purchased products around in stock that a brick-and-mortar retail store simply wouldn't bother with at all, but that's been the case for decades at this point.

And, yes, printing out images has become an uncommon activity and I can't say I'd blame any of the larger stores for only having a single expensive option available, but that's their decision, not Amazon's.