[escherize]

I'm curious how you know what's good for consumers more than they do. Would you mind explaining why it's bad for cost-cutting consumers in the long run?

Seems like amazon is content to run razor thin margins, and if they jack up the price after competitors go out of business, that move would recreate a market for item X and burn some Amazon good will.

I also find the Amazon branding on that laptop stand to be really tacky, though!

[r00fus]

Ostensibly this kind of obvious copying is the sort of thing that design patents are supposed to thwart.

Re: why - It's really basic monopoly theory - squeeze out competition, then raise prices. Are you certain that Amazon will always be content to run razor thin margins? At some point Amazon will have subsumed the buying habits of the consumers long after Rain is dead and buried. Will someone new really come along?