[mthoms]

>As a consumer, I personally like the Amazon brands, because I can at least trust them to be real products with a reasonable quality expectation, not a switchout from some crappy seller or comingled inventory with fakes.

What irony. Amazon's co-mingling is actually benefitting them in ways other than lowering costs — It's actively driving people to their house brand(s).

Amazon is pure (evil?) genius.

[jacobr1]

I'm not sure. How can it not be the case that being the global platform for the "everything store," and having people search on amazon for purchases even before google is a bigger business than selling your own white-label goods? The extra margin gained with cost-reduction from co-mingling products surely can't replace that strategic advantage, can it?

I suspect Amazon just overreached. And not because of an intentional decision going sideways, but because of having many independent teams, with smart people, each optimizing for their own area. Frankly, it is actually amazing how much cohesiveness in action and strategy actually exists, as opposed to the mistakes we see (I'm looking at you AWS console).