BREAKING NEWS!!
Evil company known for being evil is caught doing evil things!
this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2026
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It's not like that even try to hide a lot of the shit they do.
Stuff like:
- locking authors into exclusivity contracts with Kindle Unlimited/Audible (monopoly abuse/anticompetitive*
- Advertising items as "on sale" - especially around Prime Day/Black Friday etc after jacking up the price a few weeks in advance
- Items with "free Prime shipping" but the exact same item without Prime is less about the shipping cost
- Stuff like Kindle ebooks shown with a discount price when no other medium exists, it was never sold at the listed "regular price" to begin with, and/or it's only available from Amazon in the first place
👏🏻 We 👏🏻 demand 👏🏻 public 👏🏻 executions 👏🏻
Nothing will change until there's jail time for executives.
But but but capitalism, free market, competition, etc. etc. etc ...
To be fair, this is a result of the lack of competition or the formation of trusts, hence why we had anti trust laws
New evidence shows Amazon, its vendors, and competing retailers are price fixing, hiking up prices for consumer products and making Amazon richer and richer
So, jail time it is for Jeff Bezos, right?
You joke, but...
Well, yeah, it's just a joke. Not a funny one, either.
You can stop buying from Amazon whenever you choose to. There are online alternatives to every product they sell. You don't need to be part of it. Whatever excuse you give is wrong.
Sure, but don't deflect the responsibility to fix the economy onto the individual, this is a problem of monopoly and should be treated as such.
Time and again, across years and product categories, Amazon has reached out to its vendors and instructed them to increase retail prices on competitors’ websites, threatening dire consequences if vendors do not comply.
Yes, buying from alternative websites is the bare minimum and the bar is so low it's underground. But that's beside the point: Amazon is price fixing across the internet.
And that higher price is because you cannot charge less than Amazon, but to list on Amazon you have to pay a search priority fee that has balloned from 10% to over 40%.
Thats why it's better to skip the first pages of search returns, or just find the exact same thing on AliExpress for 50% less.
I've tried, but some companies only sell their products on Amazon, even when going to the products website, they link back to Amazon when you click the Buy Now button.
I buy things on eBay sometimes and it's shipped by Amazon with a gift receipt lol
I buy direct from the manufacturer whenever I can.
The prices outside of Amazon will be higher though, that's the reason for this enforcement, the "Amazon tax". Cory Doctorow has been talking about it for a while. I'm glad to see someone that can do something heard it.
Finding stuff outside of Amazon isn't easy, though. Search engines barely show results for anyone outside Amazon, Walmart, and ebay. Too often I'll find a retailer for a while only for Amazon to buy it later or otherwise destroy them (I miss Woot and Jet and Fictionwise and Bookpool, &c).
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I’ve pointed out Valve doing basically the same thing; games can’t be priced lower than Steam on competing game storefronts (not Steam key resellers), or Valve will threaten to delist your game. Which would be essentially kill it. And they obviously do this to protect their chunky store fee.
But personal loyalty goes a long way.
I’m trying to reframe the perspective here, not drag into an argument about Valve. A whole lot of people feel good about finding “deals” on Amazon, about Amazon services that have helped them, and especially about the value and convenience the whole platform provides. It’s easy for Lemmy to hate on Amazon, but for the average person, I think this is a harder sell than most of us realize. They’ll dismiss it as the “market working” or California sensationalism or, more likely, just filter it out as noise in their feed, just like most PC gamers would when they read something bad about Valve.
The Valve example sounds similar, but I think Amazon is comparably more nefarious:
- Valve chargers developers $100 per title, and a revenue sharing fee that starts at 30%
- in exchange, devs must follow Valve’s content and pricing policies (which requires developers not to undercut Steam’s prices
Amazon has a few different tiers for sellers, but in general, they charge:
- Monthly fees ($39.99 / mo)
- Referral fees (8-15%)
- Fulfillment and refund fees, which includes additional storage fees
- Advertising fees (for keyword bids or sponsored products)
Valve is kind enough to offer free promotion on the home page (if your game is popular, or has a sale), and digital games are much easier to scale, versus manufacturing and holding physical inventory. They also do a lot of nefarious shit (loot boxes..), but I’d argue at least their partners aren’t being squeezed quite as much.
This is exactly my point; it’s easy to jump in and defend Valve for their good points when, at the end of the day, they take a third of all profits for themselves and have a pseudo monopoly with their platform, just to start.
One can make similar positive points about Amazon, about how much they can save retailers and consumers, especially before they enshittified so significantly.
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oh I just cant wait for the highest profile minor slap on the wrist of the century!
Dont worry guys well give one of the richest men in the world a 100k fine!
Yeah don’t worry. They’ll get a small fine and will appeal and drag it out for years
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The issue I've had with the "Just shop somewhere else. Don't use Amazon" is that it's very US-specific response. Amazon has absolutely dominated the online shopping space in Canada for years because they are one of the few companies that dealt with the biggest reason why shopping online in Canada has been difficult: Shipping. $20-$40+ domestic shipping fees are normal in Canada for most other retailers which means you could be paying double the cost of your order (or more) just on shipping alone, so as soon as Amazon came in and offered free coast-to-coast shipping they had basically won the market instantly. There were teething issues, of course, and their earlier shipping contractors were horrendous but they did smooth most of that out.
Nowadays they still have very little competition that can beat them on shipping, but there are more and more options popping up. There are some Canadian online stores that offer free shipping or free if over a certain reasonable amount. The COVID pandemic really pushed a lot of local retailers to set up affordable online ordering and delivery systems for local customers, so that has also become an option. Aliexpress has also greatly improved their free shipping process to Canada and considering most of what Amazon sells is just rebranded Aliexpress stuff, it's a great way of getting the same items for cheaper if you're ok waiting a few extra days. So most of my online purchases these days have been a mixture of Canadian retailers and Aliexpress.
Went to buy my replacement Bluetooth speaker from the same company my last one was from.
They don't ship to Australia, Amazon was literally the only option.
Yeah, IIRC when a bunch of large corporations got away with doing this in the 1980s and 90s, a lot of us just assumed it would keep happening. Some people have tried raising the alarm about this, but have been shouted down pretty consistently.
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There was a time when Amazon was not full of scummy rip-off products, when it was not playing games with prices, when it was not a cloud-computing powerhouse, and you know what happened?
That's right, they crushed their adversaries (retail shopping) and earned billions in profits. They won.
But somehow that's not enough winning, there isn't enough winning until all the value has been vacuumed up from the world.
Bezos explicitly undercut the competition for years to drive all of the competition out of business. Amazon took as much time from 1997-2016 to make as much profit as they did in 2017, which is also (not) coincidentally when they hit peak market saturation and were able to start raising their prices.
So what you're talking about was real, but it wasn't like, "back when Amazon was good", they were just preparing for what they are now. Having a huge monopoly on just about everything has always been their win condition, and they're no where near done winning.
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I cannot express enough how angry I am that people still use amazon. Major cringe when friends tell me all the shit they buy on there. I used it 10 years ago a couple times, never once since then. Its shit, slave labor, and enriches billionaires. No one forces you to use it.
I avoid Amazon as much as possible, though on occasion I've more or less had no other reasonable choice. But that's happened something like 4 times in the last 10 years or so.
The big problem with boycotting Amazon is that while it's easy enough to avoid buying from their online store as much as possible, AWS (Amazon Web Services) is pretty much unavoidable if you're using the modern internet.
Once all the competitors are gone, they will increase the prices to absurd, heartless levels
Its always the plan. Walmart. Discord. They all do the exact same thing. Which is why we must resist.
Feel free to provide goods to my rural community any time! You can’t believe that poor people have budget consideration and seek the cheapest product?
Use eBay or literally any other site. What is so specific to amazon that you need ? Amazon isn't even cheaper in many cases if you actually search.
It’s cringe because it’s affordable and convenient? Whenever I buy something from there I always price compare online and it’s the cheapest hands-down. Some people don’t have the luxury of constantly considering geopolitics and large-scale repercussions when they’re just simply trying to get by.
It super depends on what you’re buying. Personally, I just go without in order to avoid them. The only things I ever buy from Amazon are things I cannot find anywhere else that I need to have, such as water filters for the lead pipes in Montréal.
We don’t have the luxury to ignore how bad Amazon is. Amazon is aware of this and does everything it can to force you to buy from them by under cutting other businesses until competition dries up. Every time I can buy something for a little bit more and skip Amazon that’s a huge a win for everyone from the original supplier, the more local store selling it, and the working class in general.
Edit: Reading and writing more comments, I’m gunna find a way to get those filters from elsewhere even if they cost a bunch more.
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As far as distractions from the Epstein Files go, this is an exciting one.
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