Comment by randycupertino

Comment by randycupertino 5 days ago

103 replies

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I feel like they artificially made their prices super low for the last couple years and intentionally operated at a loss as a business tactic to force out competition and kill off local grocery stores. There were instances of their prices being lower than Walmart or other budget stores. The avocados were $0.25 each and carrots were half price of ones in Safeway, even ground beef was weirdly cheap. One time as a comparison I put the same items in my cart for Amazon fresh and Walmart and it was $21 at Amazon fresh and $36 at Walmart. WAY cheaper than Instacart too.

lelandfe 5 days ago

> operated at a loss as a business tactic to force out competition and kill off local grocery stores

Wouldn't surprise me. I know a guy who invented a device for truckers that became ubiquitous in truck stops across the US. This would've been like 2014.

He refused to sell on Amazon, so Amazon duped his product and sold it at something crazy, like half price, until he agreed to list (at which point they dropped their competing product)

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  • cmiles8 5 days ago

    Such tactics sound… illegal

    Reply View 41 replies
  • sfjailbird 5 days ago

    It has been their practice since forever. Look up the diapers.com case.

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  • Chris2048 5 days ago

    Did he have a patent?

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    • lelandfe 5 days ago

      I just looked it up - yes, and far in advance of the timeframe

      This is (or was) a very small business. An office and a warehouse, basically.

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      • dlcarrier 5 days ago

        Patents last up to 20 years, assuming all maintenance fees are paid, so having a patent far in advance of an event may mean it's no longer valid.

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    • lambdasquirrel 5 days ago

      Do you want to go up against whatever patent portfolio AMZN has?

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      • Chris2048 5 days ago

        He already had the product, what would he be going up against?

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  • felixgallo 5 days ago

    I'm not aware of any Amazon product lines or organizations that specializes in devices for truckers. Can you provide a listing?

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    • gamblor956 5 days ago

      There's no listing. The story is made up.

      While the general premise is true (big company will try to rip off small company), Amazon doesn't have the magical power to get around patent law and the economic penalties are fairly harsh, which is why most companies don't do it. And no war chest of tech patents is going to get Amazon around a patent in the trucking industry because the inventor of the trucking gizmo couldn't care less about whether Amazon patented the right to make Alexa speak in tongues.

      It's possible, and likely, that Alibaba vendors decided to rip off the product, but again...patent law is a useful tool for those who use it, and Amazon can be held liable for the sales of infringing products on its storefronts.

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      • ipaddr 5 days ago

        Tell that to a judge after 15 years millions of dollars and an out of date product.

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        • gamblor956 5 days ago

          It seems a lot of people on HN fundamentally misunderstand how patent litigation works.

          If this trucking device actually existed, and for some reason was being sold on Amazon, and the inventor had sued, he would be living large these days off the settlement.

          Yes, Amazon sellers have copied products before, but those aren't Amazon. Amazon prefers to just buy the competition (see, e.g., Diapers.com and Zappos).

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    • lelandfe 5 days ago

      Truckers are the biggest demo but it's sold under a generic category.

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      • felixgallo 5 days ago

        huh. What's the product listing? I don't think this story rings true.

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noboostforyou 5 days ago

> I feel like they artificially made their prices super low for the last couple years and intentionally operated at a loss as a business tactic to force out competition

iirc that's exactly what Amazon did to destroy diapers.com over a decade ago

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  • gamblor956 5 days ago

    Amazon did not destroy diapers.com.

    Diapers.com aka Quidsi was already operating at a loss when it was acquired by Amazon. It's whole business model was using VC-funding to offer products below sustainable costs with the goal of eventually jacking up prices once they drove out smaller/local competitors. Amazon used its own business model against it by dropping prices even lower, knowing that the VC investors couldn't afford it.

    Walmart passed on buying Quidsi when Walmart was thinking about launching its own e-commerce platform because the business model was unsustainable. Walmart decided they would rather spend several hundred millions building out their own platform then to buy an existing website with millions of customers.

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kkukshtel 5 days ago

This is basically the playbook of every "disruptive technology" startup or FAANG initiative of a similar stripe - set prices incredibly low to bleed out competition and gain market share, then raise them once you are in the dominant market position.

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  • deaux 5 days ago

    Correct, and this is why US big tech, including the big LLM players, need to be tarriffed/DSTed harder than Chinese cars by the rest of the world. They get big off of the exact dumping that China has always been accused of.

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  • HPsquared 5 days ago

    At a certain point it's not about technology anymore, but access to cheap finance. See also: Uber.

    Reply View 14 replies
    • groundzeros2015 5 days ago

      Uber is far better for me than the old taxi system.

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      • direwolf20 5 days ago

        Maybe the one where you flagged down a car on the street, but you could always call to book a taxi and those companies worked exactly like Uber — over the phone, because it was the pre–app era.

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  • groundzeros2015 5 days ago

    Nobody on this forum believes in startups or technology anymore.

    Reply View 5 replies
    • _DeadFred_ 5 days ago

      Heck, Elon's ownership of SpaceX even got to me to not really care about space travel anymore, one of my biggest passions since I was 6. But I just can't root for whatever his vision of space faring society would look like.

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      • groundzeros2015 5 days ago

        Politics consuming all other interests

        Reply View 1 reply
        • _DeadFred_ 5 days ago

          Yeah I hear you. I too wish he would have stayed out of politics. Sadly he chose not to, and not just go a little, but to go all in. And to choose to make it basically his public identity.

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      • pokstad 5 days ago

        You know rocket science was founded by literal Nazis, right? We actually brought them to America to run NASA and get us to the moon.

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      • direwolf20 5 days ago

        Kessler syndrome, but every debris piece is a Starlink transceiver.

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mattmaroon 5 days ago

And then they can’t figure out why the economics don’t work.

Phase 1: bankrupt the competition

Phase 2: ???

Phase 3: profit!

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knowitnone3 5 days ago

That's literally their MO. They've been doing that forever.

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pessimizer 5 days ago

Walmart isn't a budget grocery store, though. Its prices are higher than actual grocery stores (like Safeway.) Also, everyone is WAY cheaper than Instacart.

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  • pixl97 5 days ago

    >Walmart isn't a budget grocery store,

    The answer to this is complex, it has any number of products that are cheaper than products of similar quality from any other store. Places like Safeway/Aldi typically beat on price on very generic items that may or may not have similar quality.

    The biggest thing to watch for at Walmart is price discrimination dependent on location. Back in the days I used to shop with them (read made less money) picking a store in a poorer neighborhood could save $10 to $30 dollars on the same car of items.

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    • silisili 5 days ago

      I found Lowes (hardware) to be one of the worst about this. I lived in an area with 4 Lowes, and never shopped at my local one because of how much more expensive everything was, and never clearance. I'm not talking a couple dollars, in some cases 4x the price of one just 15 minutes away.

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      • pixl97 5 days ago

        In the days before places started requiring ID for returns an acquaintance of mine would pick up rifle scopes at one Walmart and return them at another Walmart on a route he took. Only once every few weeks to give employees time to rotate out. He could pay for a few days of gas with that arbitrage.

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  • classichasclass 5 days ago

    Not in the areas of California I frequent. Walmart is usually the cheapest around here; heck, even Target beats Safeway on some items. On the other hand, Walmart is also usually the worst at stock rotation.

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    • Supermancho 5 days ago

      Walmart is certainly the cheapest in some rather remote cities, like Fargo, ND.

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  • zhivota 5 days ago

    This is the opposite of my experience. Safeway is usually the most expensive, more than the Kroger/Albertsons chains.

    The only place that competed with Walmart on price for me was WinCo.

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