Technology

BREAKING NEWS!!

Evil company known for being evil is caught doing evil things!

👏🏻 We 👏🏻 demand 👏🏻 public 👏🏻 executions 👏🏻

Nothing will change until there's jail time for executives.

oh I just cant wait for the highest profile minor slap on the wrist of the century!

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.

They're BUSTED when someone goes to prison.

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?

But but but capitalism, free market, competition, etc. etc. etc ...

Bezos was a hedge fund manager. This should surprise nobody.

If America was a serious country they would break up Amazon for this AND arrest Bezos and send him to a random Supermax for corporate blackmail, mass fraud, and unfair competition. But I fear they never were.

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.

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.

As far as distractions from the Epstein Files go, this is an exciting one.

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.

I've been telling people to stop supporting amazon for years, but everyone seems to have their reason to keep supporting them. This hopefully will be a good enough reason for people to finally stop shopping on amazon.

I haven't bought anything from amazon in over 12 years. I find everything on the manufacturer's website or eBay. No need to ever use amazon for anything.

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.

Holy shit guys! S-so, if you have a monopoly, it's like, you can do whatever the fuck you want? So it's like in THE FUCKING GAME OF MONOPOLY? Jee, we are learning something new every day

Can openers is what did it for me.

In 2015 I needed a new manual can opener. The local big-box stores had two basic styles. A cheap, all metal one that was just stamped from a single sheet, and a more expensive one with better handles.
The more expensive one had previously rusted and began to look nasty within a few years.
Amazon had a bunch of different styles at less than the price point of the more expensive one.

I bought one. It was fine. I didn’t love the operation. It cut the whole top off from the side, rather than from the top in a downwards cut. The sharp edges were on the can rather than on the lid. It would catch the paper labels and sometimes wad them up into the can while you cut. Cans with no air space would leak when opened.

Anyway. Replaced it in 2019. Amazon still had a broad selection, but all except for obvious crap was as expensive as the local big box store’s expensive option. Wound up going to a smaller local(ish) bulk foods store and bought a cheapo restaurant one for less than Amazon’s/the big box store’s similar offerings. Minimal rusting to date.

Market regulates itself or somthing.