[gav]

> Amazon is accused of using sales data belonging to companies selling products on their platform to help them select 10,000s of products to clone and sell in direct competition to their vendors.

At the risk of being accused of whataboutism, _everyone_ does this.

The big-box stores go direct to China, often to the same factories that their intermediates were using. Walmart doubled-down on a direct-to-factory approach starting in 2010, moving from 20% to 80% direct with cost savings of 5-15%.

Your grocery store sells private-labelled goods. This market is expected to reach $220 billion by 2020.

The weakening of established brands has enabled large merchants to leverage sales data to drive product lines that provide good/better/best options to the consumer. The fact that Amazon started to sell their own products shouldn't have been a surprise to anyone in the industry. Ten years ago the complaint from brands was "big box stores are killing us", now it's "Amazon is killing us".

Pointing out that Bezos is the world's richest man and claiming he's exploiting people is a tired ad hominem attack.

[threezero]

I notice you had no reply to his comment about exploitation of workers. Why is pointing out Bezos’ massive wealth disparity “tired”? I think it needs to get brought up in every discussion about Amazon to point out how little he cares about other human beings that he accumulates so much wealth at the expense of tens of thousands of people.

[enitihas]

How is Bezos's wealth related to anything? Just because he owns more % shares in Amazon than other founders do in their companies, that makes Amazon exploitative? The Walton family has a similar net worth. Does that add to Walmart's exploitative nature. Does an increase or decrease in Amazon stock price make them good and bad, because the wealth of Bezos changes?

If you want to make an argument of Amazon revenue and growth, fine. If you think their shares are not as divided as other companies and that makes them exploitative, I am not sure what your argument is.

[threezero]

So you’re using whataboutism as an argument. I never said the Waltons weren’t exploitive. My argument is that Bezos is at the extreme for exploitive behavior considering his massive wealth. He could make less money and give his employees more. He could change company policy to improve employees’ lives. Instead he hoards wealth and sucks as much out of his employees as possible.