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wait, I thought that it was covid and supply chains and such and actually that the profit motive encourages them to lower prices because competition and so on
You're forgetting one thing, Amazon has no real competition. Do you have a cloud service that makes you profit hand over fist so that you can dump that money into a loss leader service like amazon delivery?
No?
Well then they're going to undercut you to the point of zero profit margin to suffocate your business.
eBay all the way, boys and girls.
What’s even wilder is that Amazon made no profit for the first 20 years of its existence, something the Feds claim makes Amazon even more dangerous as they spent considerable time building their network and have now turned on full money making mode.
That was just creative accounting so they wouldn't have to pay tax.
Oh... this huge pile of revenue? That's not profit. We're reinvesting it into logistics and executive salaries. We lost money this year. -Amazon
Do you mean Amazon the website? Surely they were making money somehow…
It means for the first 20 years they spent all of their profit on expansion / R&D
profit =/= revenue
So, where do we sign up for the class action?
So you can get 5c and the lawyers get 95c for each dollar?
No.
Because I don't trust the FTC fines to be enough to discourage Jeff's actions.
An expensive class action would help hold him accountable.
Plus, he got rid of the mandatory arbitration agreement. So Amazon is open to a class action on this as far as I know.
Jeff Bezos isn't even the CEO of Amazon anymore.
Still the largest shareholder
That's kind of moving the goal posts. The shareholders definitely put pressure on the CEO and leadership of a company. And I think they should be held responsible in some cases for the fallout of badly enacted anti-consumer policies. On the other hand though, the CEO is the leadership who is held responsible for enacting policy.
Honestly better than amazon having it
It's probably something they already budget for. I would argue for lawyers fees being capped and the fines being 5x the value of the damage done.
Does this mean there will be another penis shaped rocket? 😕
Well I didn’t think that they LOST money using it!!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
WASHINGTON, Nov 2 (Reuters) - Amazon.com (AMZN.O) used a series of illegal strategies to boost profits at its online retail empire, including an algorithm that pushed up prices U.S. households paid by more than $1 billion, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission detailed in a new court filing on Thursday.
... Amazon used Project Nessie to extract more than a billion dollars directly from Americans' pocketbooks," the FTC said.
Amazon spokesperson Tim Doyle said the FTC "grossly mischaracterizes" the pricing tool and the company stopped using it several years ago.
Amazon paused the algorithm during its Prime Day sales events and the holiday shopping season when there was more media and customer attention on the online retailer, the FTC said.
The FTC called Nessie's algorithm an "unfair method of competition" because it manipulates other online stores into raising prices, allowing Amazon to do the same.
In the complaint, the FTC noted that Amazon does not allow other big online stores such as Walmart.com to sell on its platform.
The original article contains 661 words, the summary contains 167 words. Saved 75%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
I feel like proprietary software should be open for auditing for reasons exactly like this.
"Amazon extracted $1 billion of wealth from Americans through secret price aising algorithm."
wow they might get a slap on the wrist and a 50 dollar fine for this.
aaah, innovation™
It’s just bait and switch anymore.
They offer you a plan that has “x y z”features, then they make new plans with “v w z” features that are lesser that what baited you into accepting the first plan and charge you the same - or more.
Bait and switch…just with a sufficient gap to make you not want to leave.
robots keep paying me my return in things I didn’t want to return and even giving them a notice about it I just get a robotic response where they just ignore me,,, but ok. I’ll just keep the money and the product then since they don’t seem to be counting their losses against whatever ‘scheme’ wins they think they got going on. stares at giant hole in the ship
What?
He keeps returning rocks and telling Amazon they're products and claiming amazon is just kind of doing jt. And doesn't know he gon get caught