Of course they did—the same way they bought things at the local mom & pop stores before Walmart came in, undercut them, and drove them all out of business.
Companies like Amazon and Walmart massively distort the market, and do so quite deliberately. It's hopelessly naïve to think that if they vanished tomorrow, everyone would be able to just shrug and switch their purchasing to a drop-in replacement.
That's only possible in, as someone else described it, the "spherical cow in a vacuum" type of hypothetical free market. We live in the real world, where an arbitrary number of fully equivalent businesses can't actually continue to compete perfectly for everyone's money.
Companies like Amazon and Walmart massively distort the market, and do so quite deliberately. It's hopelessly naïve to think that if they vanished tomorrow, everyone would be able to just shrug and switch their purchasing to a drop-in replacement.
That's only possible in, as someone else described it, the "spherical cow in a vacuum" type of hypothetical free market. We live in the real world, where an arbitrary number of fully equivalent businesses can't actually continue to compete perfectly for everyone's money.