#1: I did some sleuthing, Diapers.com, originally 1800Diapers, LLC and later Quidsi, Inc. after they had expanded into other lines of business started in 2005, and you can read a PR statement from the time here: https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/2005/06/08/1800diapers-co...

From the PR statement, you can see their growth hack:

> 1800Diapers also recently added a large selection of very popular diaper bags, also at low prices with free shipping. The Company actually guarantees the prices for its diaper bags are the cheapest on the Internet or it refunds the difference.

Price matching, which is not illegal.

So let’s take a look at the website from 2005:

https://web.archive.org/web/20050301022607/http://www.1800di...

The best unit price on that page is $0.16 for 8 to 15 lb babies, which after about 16 years of inflation, comes out to $0.21 today. Pampers Baby Dry. The exact same diapers are, at the time of this writing, have a unit price of $0.21 on Amazon. Getting a link from the Amazon app on my iPad where I’m typing this is amazingly unobvious, so here’s the item model # to search: 037000862215 <—————— posted this comment and I see my iPad thinks this is a phone number. I advise readers not to click on it should the option present itself.

The company, Quidsi, Inc. was eventually purchased by Amazon for $545M in 2010. It is not apparent that diaper buyers were harmed by this transaction. The price beats Walmart’s at least, yet Walmart continues to sell diapers, and you can find competitive prices at Costco, though you cannot find the same model. At worst, diapers are slightly more expensive today, and at best, this whole line of argument is a wash. Yes, Amazon took aggressive steps against a competitor, but was it an abuse of their market power? Mind this is when Amazon was far from the size they are today by any objective measure, and ultimately the shareholders of that competitor made out well for themselves. 1800Diapers was also measuring their prices against their competitors on the front page, March 2005, with an estimated 6% sales tax rate baked into the price of their competitors, and very prominently advertised the lack of sales tax. Amazon was their only major competitor for which such a tactic would not work so 1800Diapers price matched.

#2: The people I most hold responsible for cronyism are the government officials which participated and bent over backwards so that Amazon could try to get a discount on some New York and Northern Virginia real estate. Not to absolve Amazon, they hold responsibility for initiating it, but cronyism falls squarely on the soldiers of the officials willing to sellout their own tax base, and is arguably an abuse of their power.

#3: Correct. As does Safeway, Whole Foods prior (and after) to the Amazon acquisition, Lucky’s, Albertson’s (which owns Safeway, they might own Lucky’s too) and Costco. Amazon is a website you buy stuff, and some of that stuff is Amazon products, and some of that stuff is Amazon white-label products. There are other means of buying and selling on the internet, and we are starting to see the infrastructure for that develop now.

15 years ago Walmart was the 800 pound gorilla destroying retail. 30 years before that, Sears was untouchable. Clearly it is possible to have a competitive retail landscape even in the face of an enormously dominant competitor. The small businesses that can’t make it on Amazon are in a tough business, in 10 years many of
them won’t be around, but other products and service providers will.

#4: There has been a lot of FUD around private arbitration; I have yet to see solid investigative reporting on it. The enabling law, not surprisingly from the 1920s when a lot of crap law was written, is the Federal Arbitration Act of 1926. The specific entity that Amazon uses is the American Arbitration Association, and only for claims that would not qualify for small claims court if their agreement is to be believed.

#5: The WaPo article is less scandalous than I thought it would be. 30-35% of dollars earned by 3rd parties goes back to Amazon, but a lot of it in additional spend on ads, which is basically priority placement like what you would see in any supermarket, and additional services. So it can be as high as 30-35%, but not every third-party seller is paying that much.

They also have additional options to sell in.

Retail is a tough life. You can pursue your own path and start a small business, but you’re not entitled to succeed in doing so. It sounds like for many small businesses, Amazon is an enabling technology that makes much of what they do possible, and maybe even profitable enough to continue doing so.

#6: 70% of the voice assistant market? I can believe that. I am not a fan of this entire product category, but Amazon moved early, it offered a compelling product and it is kicking ass in name ID, the quality of the assistant and price. They offered a compelling package, and people bought it. Other than being overly aggressive in invading the privacy of their customers who seem to both know and not care, is there a specific harm in Alexa dominating voice assistants in a world where a decent number of people are walking around with devices in their pockets that can respond to either Siri or Google Assistant?

I do appreciate the effort on your part, but I want you to see where I am coming from: it is easy to make bold claims based off nothing more than emotions and bad PR. Amazon has had a lot of PR, I won’t buy anything I can put in my body from them and I do the bulk of my shopping elsewhere for various reasons.

However it is a difficult proposition to simply look at big numbers, bad PR and come to the conclusion that this company is simply too big! How could it get this big?! How could we as a society allow this?

Turns out, it is mostly just that Amazon.com and many of their products and services actually are compelling. I remember when the iTunes Music Store was the only compelling game in town in its category, until the Amazon MP3 Store came in and easily took 20% of the market simply by being good and compelling on its own terms, and with a clear value proposition to potential customers. Now it is all about Spotify, Pandora, my beloved Rdio was gobbled up by Pandora and killed, Google has their own music service, Amazon has a subscription, and most people don’t seem to be buying music anymore. C’est la vie.

If you’re going to make the bold claims of this or that entity in a world where no one person or group of people seems to have all that much freestanding power anymore, put the legwork in, make a real case. Power is relative, and not always applicable, as in literally applicable in every circumstance depending on the type of power it is you are holding.

I will review the final link you sent at my leisure. For me, the hour is late. Good night, if you respond by morning, I will see it, but will likely be busy until evening. For what it is worth to you, I’ll even revisit my priors, but it’s going to be a tougher sell because your position used to be mine several years ago, but not so far long ago that I don’t remember.

That WaPo article is a good example of how I see things differently than you now. If you see a bunch of horrible claims levied against Amazon, I see a bunch of small business owners who have problems, some of them legitimate maybe, some of them not, but are a small fraction of the 2.5M 3rd party sellers the WaPo says are on Amazon making a living somehow. That’s a decent number of people doing what they do to really not have any other choice for making a living, and I’m sure I can round up a thousand of them to complain about Amazon shafting them if I tried. For reference, there’s about 2 million farms in America.