Bernie and Trump are wrong on Amazon

[JCanete]

105. no way, big companies do all kinds of things. They source a shit load from china or other nations

with cheap labor, affecting locally made products...they do what is technically illegal but hard to prove, and price competitors out of the market because they can simply take a loss for an extended period of time, and once they have a bigger share of the market they can re-stabilize their prices. Or once they are the only real known "trusted" source for something, they can raise their prices to higher than previous market value, assuming people have to buy said goods. For non-essentials they can continue to sell on the cheap to communities that have been decimated and can't afford to pay for said goods at an exorbitant price, and then, finally, close up shop when they've nothing more to draw from a community. And so much of that money is taken OUT of local economies. It doesn't stay in the community, and no, those part time jobs without benefits do not re-infuse them with any meaningful wealth. And when it comes to monster operations like Amazon and Walmart, they effect all other product companies(even the big guys) because they can charge an extortive amount of money to have them stocked on their shelves or listed on their website, and the alternative is not pretty. Its a catch 22. You can't go through alternative advertisers or box stores with far less presence and expect your brand to not take a hit, so you pay what these companies insist. Granted, that's the market. That's what other companies are willing to pay for the space on those shelves or the attention on those websites, but that's because if enough people drop out, there will certainly be the few winners who get a huge market bump. The others though...they could be screwed.


In a free market economy this is what happens, to say nothing of the influence this kind of money has on Washington and local governments and the laws that regulate these industries, determine things such as whether or not something is actually too big or has too much market power to the point where it discourages competition...etc.

Yes, quality matters(to some extent, but quality is weighed against price) when you have a choice. Go figure that a big company can offer quality, so long as there is a hint of competition. They are huge and have the capital to do so. Competing with that quality and far more important, that convenience and price point, becomes more and more difficult for other vendors.

Oh damn, that doesn't even get into the simplification of the workforce. Huge operations need less executives than hundreds of operations that used to exist in their stead. They influence a downward trend on wages. They have cookie cutter and centralized policies and structuring.