Ehhh not really. They operated at massive losses for a decade or more to eliminate the competition while growing their customer base. This is simply stage 1 of enshittification. You can only do this if you’re unbelievably filthy fucking rich. Then at some point they needed to cash out on all the good will and reputation they developed and that brings us to the shithole economy of today where people are simply too lazy to shop anywhere else.
WesternInfidels@feddit.online 2 weeks ago
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.
artyom@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
pomegranatefern@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
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.
Entropy_Pyre@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
To quote a favorite singer of mine,
You could fill a man with gold, and still have room for greed.
MnemonicBump@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
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.
octobob@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
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.
Sineljora@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
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.
kescusay@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
And that is why I no longer buy anything from them. I’m just embarrassed it took me as long as it did to realize what they were really doing.
floofloof@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
The frustrating thing is we can’t boycott AWS since so many of the sites we use run on it. But yes, we absolutely shouldn’t buy things through Amazon or any of the other web stores Amazon owns.
frunch@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I try to use eBay as an alternative, though i find every 3-4 orders i place there, i get one in an Amazon box that by all rights appears to have been shipped by Amazon. I swear people are drop-shipping stuff from Amazon to their eBay buyers.
pomegranatefern@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
I have often wondered whether targeted internet boycott days would shake up AWS, but I don’t know enough about their billing structure to run the numbers to see how much that would dig into AWS profits + how much of their income is flat subscription fees vs. billing on number of calls and haven’t had a chance to dig into it yet.
ramasses@social.ozymandias.club 1 week ago
Use vercel instead
/s
defaultusername@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
AKA the Walmart method.
NannerBanner@literature.cafe 1 week ago
Walmart didn’t even touch amazon on this. There were articles for years about how mind boggling (and the articles were praising, not even critical of) it was that amazon’s investors were content to let bezos run amazon on a net zero or even negative profit model. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of walmart not pulling a profit.
LincolnsDogFido@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
You can’t really compare online book retailer Amazon to global online marketplace Amazon. Your underlying point is still mostly correct, but I would exclude the years that they were primarily focused on books. From my lived memory they didn’t really become the online retail juggernaut until a few years after the launch of Prime. Free shipping turned them into what it is today. So maybe the best comparison would be from like 2006-2016? Or maybe I’m wrong and thebl distinction isn’t necessary. Idk. I’m just trying to foster conversation
waddle_dee@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Yeah, I remember Amazon the book store. I still had my mom take me to the local bookstores, cause I knew them and the people, so I was comfortable lol. I remember when Prime launched. I don’t think anyone was expecting that, at the time. Free 2-day shipping on so many products was insane. And all for $89?/yr? Especially, when everywhere else online charged anywhere from $5-10. It was truly the Walmart of the online world. They ate shipping costs, which killed them, and put hurt their competition until AWS became such a powerhouse and they had a monopoly on online marketplaces.
LincolnsDogFido@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
That’s what’s crazy to me, they survived the dot com crash and were so diversified that I have no idea how they stayed afloat. I would think that all of the combined expenses across all of their ventures without a true cash cow would sink them. Instead they survived and became the trash heap of consumer rights violations that they are.