[ChrisLomont]

>By saying that you're basically throwing the whole concept of "fairness" out of the window, so that's no argument.

Is fairness forcing people to spend more money on less desirable products and firms simply because those firms exist?

That seems pretty unfair to me. And it's been shown to be bad economics time and time again.

Fair seems letting people decide which business they want to purchase from, even if that means less desirable ones don't get paid.

[amelius]

It's not a matter of all or nothing.

A different way, for example, would be for Amazon to let small bookstores share in the profits, as a compensation for putting them out of business in such unfair way.

(That would be fair, but it is unfortunately not how we have organised things.)

[asdfasgasdgasdg]

Why should small bookstores get a medal for being worse than shopping for books online. I can make dozens of worse experiences than Amazon. Should Amazon have to pay me for each one that is unprofitable?

[ChrisLomont]

>for putting them out of business in such unfair way

Again, is it fair for good and efficient businesses to be forced to support bad and inefficient businesses?

If so, what will stop people from starting inefficient businesses to make the good ones hand them charity?

Most of our standard of living increases is the result of inefficient companies and processes being replaced by more efficient ones. What you propose slows this down (or perhaps stops it completely), so now is it fair you're robbing the future of quality of life gains simply to hand charity to inefficient actors?

Do you routinely buy overpriced goods to support your beliefs?

This is simply bad economics, and it's the kind of belief that leads to terrible societal outcomes when enough people enforce this via political power.

I find it fair for companies to compete for customers via better products, lower prices, better service, or any combination of things their customers want, and those companies that cannot compete through obsolescence, inefficiency, market changes, to fade away. This seems pretty fair to me, and has less societally painful side effects than any system I've seen tried (and I've read quite a bit on such things).