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It Takes Eleven

Quoth the Raven...
Staff
Feel free to read or ignore.

I've railed about Amazon in the past, and how they have destroyed both American manufacturing and small businesses. I went several years without being a Prime member or ordering anything, and then I did relent and ordered some things off my wife's account, and watched Reacher on my wife's Prime TV.


This article hammers home the ruthless nature of this company. They make Walmart look like a not-for-profit. I had an opportunity to invest in Amazon delivery, actually gave it some thought to have one of my boys run it, but I told the guy hawking it that as soon as they have you locked in they'll squeeze the drivers. The guy said no, they need you too much to do that. I'm so glad I passed.

This is just the delivery side. There are many stories of businesses doing very well selling on Amazon, only to have Amazon go directly to the company's Chinese or Indian manufacture (they require the companies to disclose their manufacturers to sell on Amazon) to make knockoffs for them to sell as their own.

Prior articles on their theft:



This has renewed my resolve to avoid them. What bastards they are, and how lazy and ignorant we all are to allow it.

Tim
 
They have the analytics on what selling. They can easily recreate at as an Amazon basics product. They've been doing this for a while now.

I was complaining Saturday when we're up in kalispell and couldn't find a tripod. The ability to get something in 2 days has impacted our ability to get things now at a local store.

I may soon even up going down the same path.
 
OT: I was surprised we didn't see more attention paid to their price hike last month. I guess most looked at $20 bucks a year as no big deal. I couldn't get past that's $20 bucks times @150 million members just in the US alone. Billions.

I agree with your points here, Tim. I'm left weighing the alternatives. I just bought a handle for my string trimmer/edger/blower/a bunch of other tools (Ryobi) and the least expensive one I could find ran right at $15, with another $12 to ship it here. Sure, that's not indicative of all shipping costs. It doesn't take long to recoup $139 in shipping alone.
 
Amazon and WalMart are almost necessary evils at this point. Especially as inflation takes a bigger chunk out of people's paychecks. The alternatives to Amazon are not any better, and many are actually worse for consumers. The real culprit in most of this is Congress, who refuses to find ways to support American manufacturing and keeps finding ways to make it even cheaper to buy everything from China.
 
Amazon and WalMart are almost necessary evils at this point. Especially as inflation takes a bigger chunk out of people's paychecks. The alternatives to Amazon are not any better, and many are actually worse for consumers. The real culprit in most of this is Congress, who refuses to find ways to support American manufacturing and keeps finding ways to make it even cheaper to buy everything from China.
We've all done it to ourselves. I read several years ago that moving manufacturing offshores over the last 20-25 years reduced inflation by about one percent a year. Walmart drove part of it, or responded to it and got ahead of the curve. And we just took it.
 
Free trade isn’t free. It has cost us our manufacturing base. Protective tariffs work. In my line of work only the Germans and Brits could match American toolmakers. I remember disassembling new Japanese, Chinese, and other countries tooling and getting them production ready for customers that thought they were getting a good deal.
 
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