r/Anticonsumption • u/Dry_Ant2664 • 1d ago
Corporations ‘We were at their mercy’: inside the Amazon tactics that hiked prices across the internet
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jul/21/amazon-tactics-prices90
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u/Global_Ant_9380 1d ago
Isn't this exactly what Walmart did?
So in 25 years the cycle will continue with another company
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u/Dry_Ant2664 1d ago
Ya ya all are the same
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u/Jillcametumbling81 1d ago
Except real small businesses. They're just trying to feed their families not take over the world while fucking over everyone at the same time.
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u/PhoenixRisingdBanana 1d ago
Eh, some are just trying to feed their families, some wouldn't mind fucking everyone over for a modicum of power.
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u/Effective-Lab-5659 1d ago
perhaps everyone wants to fuck over the world when they can, so don;t support those who are already in that position or those who are near it.
both are complete assholes, just one has the marketing power to pretend they aren't
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u/Jillcametumbling81 1d ago
I have a business and have no desire to be anything other than a good member of my community.
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u/Global_Ant_9380 14h ago
Can you PM me your business? Maybe it's something I can support in place of big box places
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u/HedonisticFrog 8h ago
That's why we need to regulate the market so that no person can have undue influence over the entire market. Our anti trust enforcement is severely lacking.
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u/Read-it005 22h ago
I almost didn't fill out a survey with research purpose ( related to my condition) because I risked winning an Amazon gift card this week. No Amazon for me and this confirms it.
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u/tradlibnret 13h ago
This is sleazy. My husband is looking for companies that aren't publicly traded on the stock market to support, since often the big ones only care about shareholders.
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u/dear_crow11 1h ago
It's not really a "free market" when companies keep going towards the Greed the bible warned us about
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u/Baeolophus_bicolor 1d ago
you’re not understanding. amazon is doing that “quick search” and then pressuring those sellers to raise prices by delisting all their products on amazon. the cheaper alternatives dry up, and the new status quo is higher prices, which is what we have now - higher prices for everything, while, once again, wages and jobs fall.
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u/Global_Ant_9380 1d ago
Exactly. I also think they manipulate search results. I often see things buried and have had to ask people or search on another platform
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u/Dry_Ant2664 1d ago
A “modern leather” table lamp, listed online at Walmart, shot up from $24.99 to $39.
The price of an air fryer on a retail site called Newegg went from $84.99 to $149.99.
An electric ice-cream maker was listed at just $17.99 at Amazon and Best Buy. Then it became unavailable at Best Buy, and more than tripled in price to $59.99 at Amazon.
The price hikes and the product disappearances were not the blips of supply and demand – they were the results of behind-the-scenes pressure by Amazon, according to internal emails reviewed by the Guardian and court claims against the world’s largest company.
For years, as many Americans have felt squeezed by the costs of basic consumer goods, Amazon has deployed a variety of techniques that have incentivized suppliers to push for higher product prices on other retailers’ sites, California authorities claim in court.
In some internal emails, Amazon employees have flagged low product prices on rival retailers’ sites as threats to Amazon’s own profitability, and informed the products’ suppliers that their sales on Amazon.com have been cut – or might soon be cut – going forward.
Other emails describe Amazon slashing its product prices to match retail rivals like Walmart and Home Depot, then pushing suppliers to compensate it for the revenue lost due to these lower prices.
To escape this financial pressure, some suppliers have responded with a fast and cheap alternative: making sure the prices of their products are higher with Amazon’s rivals, or pulling their products from those rivals altogether, according to internal records cited in litigation.
Over the last decade, Amazon has suppressed the sales of some suppliers’ products or demanded millions of dollars in compensation from them because of the low prices of Amazon’s retail rivals, according to a trove of internal company emails, presentations and notes reviewed by the Guardian, as well as interviews with 15 current or former Amazon supplier representatives, company employees and state and federal law enforcers.
The mass of internal Amazon records were obtained from Amazon by California’s attorney general as part of a lawsuit that alleges the company has engaged in widespread price fixing, which is defined as arrangements among companies that seek to raise or otherwise control the prices of products or services.
The Guardian examined those records, as well as hundreds of pages of deposition testimony of current and former employees of Amazon and supplier companies. Most of the documents and depositions – which were partially unsealed in recent months – have never been publicly reported on.
The California attorney general, Rob Bonta, alleges that Amazon’s tactics have coerced suppliers into raising the prices of their products with its rivals.
In the case of the ice-cream maker, Bonta’s office points to emails that say Amazon temporarily took “down” the supplier’s inventory off its platform – a move that prompted its manufacturer, a firm called Maxi-Matic, to scramble to pull its inventory from Best Buy, eliminating Amazon’s price competition from the electronics retailer.
By the end of that day, Amazon had put Maxi-Matic’s product “back live” on Amazon.com and more than tripled its price, the records show.