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BREAKING NEWS!!
Evil company known for being evil is caught doing evil things!
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
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.
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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.
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They're BUSTED when someone goes to prison.
For now they're just SLAMMED
Just wait until they get BLASTED in a strongly worded email.
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👏🏻 We 👏🏻 demand 👏🏻 public 👏🏻 executions 👏🏻
oh I just cant wait for the highest profile minor slap on the wrist of the century!
Yeah don’t worry. They’ll get a small fine and will appeal and drag it out for years
I could see them threatening something absurd like no longer shipping to California.
Dont worry guys well give one of the richest men in the world a 100k fine!
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.
Unfortunately, they are a master at driving local businesses out of money. Buying a certain pet food at my local retailer (a franchisee) would be about $30. On Amazon, it's $25 (and sometimes even $15-20, if you do the subscription discount). At the local store, I'd have to pay more and drag the stuff home on my own feet.
It's the Walmart model. A lot of the frustration is that it's a systemic problem where individuals are incentivized against their best interests and the best interests of their communities.
Because shareholders. The Line, must go up.
Thankfully (/s) Amazon has enough money that it's cheaper to bribe politicians than provide a better product. So systemic solutions are that much more difficult.
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This is why you shouldn’t buy US
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.
Nothing will change until there's jail time for executives.
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.
The Guantanamo Bay detention camp is a stain on America and a threat to all of us now.
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.
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As far as distractions from the Epstein Files go, this is an exciting one.
Can't wait for them to be fined one penny for every $20B made.
Hey now, don’t get your hopes up.
Bezos was a hedge fund manager. This should surprise nobody.
Bezos was a Senior VP by the age of 30, working for D.E. Shaw, and was a rumored heir for taking over the business after he retires. Bezos would have made billions and managed a major hedge fund. Set for life.
But that was not enough for him, he wanted to hoard hundreds of billions of wealth instead, so here we are. How perfectly healthy and in no way a mental illness.
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
Market regulates itself or somthing.
I heard there was an invisible hand that I should trust.
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I'm always a little shocked when people ask me if my product is on Amazon. I never even considered it because I've known what they are for so long; it's been a bit of a wakeup call that most people still have no idea how fucking awful Amazon is. It sucks struggling with market visibility, selling just from my own website, but it beats the hell out of being bullied like this until I'm big enough to have my product stolen and copied by Amazon Basics.
And nothing will be done about it probably
Kinda suspected they were doing that. Looked at some drywall panel lifts this morning and saw one for $75. Shipping however was $247. Dropped that like a hot rivet
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this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2026
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