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this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2026
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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.
Yeah. It's the same thing Uber did with pushing cab services out of business.
Not only that, but AWS is the real money maker for them. Not that retail and gaming and prime and whatever don't also make boat loads of cash, but it doesn't even graze AWS. The scale of these data centers is unreal and most of the internet runs on AWS.
I'm an industrial electrician with background on what they're ordering and installing in terms of control panels and if you saw the weekly shipments it'd make you sick. And we're only one supplier, they have others.
I think it’s worse because Bezos (ex-wallstreet) had his buddies at Bain Capital short-and-distort competing companies into bankruptcy, which has the added bonus of clearing the tax burden from the gains on those shorts.
AKA the Walmart method.
And that is why I no longer buy anything from them. I'm just embarrassed it took me as long as it did to realize what they were really doing.
The frustrating thing is we can't boycott AWS since so many of the sites we use run on it. But yes, we absolutely shouldn't buy things through Amazon or any of the other web stores Amazon owns.
I try to use eBay as an alternative, though i find every 3-4 orders i place there, i get one in an Amazon box that by all rights appears to have been shipped by Amazon. I swear people are drop-shipping stuff from Amazon to their eBay buyers.
It's easy to crush the competition when you purposely take a loss as an investment in future market share.
Ehhh not really. They operated at massive losses for a decade or more to eliminate the competition while growing their customer base. This is simply stage 1 of enshittification. You can only do this if you're unbelievably filthy fucking rich. Then at some point they needed to cash out on all the good will and reputation they developed and that brings us to the shithole economy of today where people are simply too lazy to shop anywhere else.
The other commenters here are right about Amazon's initial methods, but I'm also going to highly recommend Cory Doctorow's Enshittification for a detailed explanation of how this happens (including a breakdown on Amazon specifically) and what to do about it.
To quote a favorite singer of mine,
You could fill a man with gold, and still have room for greed.