| > Which is determined by a combination of your profit margin and your volume. Yes, and a lower margin keeps the volume high by making it more difficult for people to compete. > And again, how is that determined? Does profit margin often play a role in dividend policies by any chance? Yeah the amount of profit impacts the decision to issue a dividend. > Are you trying to argue that Amazon is in an underdog position and has to fight for market dominance in online retail right now? Are you trying to argue that there's some fundamental rule that says that if a company has a way to increase profit margins, they should always ignore it and lower costs instead? No, and no. > I mean think through what you're saying right now. Amazon did see record profits this year. Did they lower the price of Amazon Prime? Did they lower the threshold of free shipping from $25 to $20? They didn't, because getting record profits doesn't change their positioning strategy in the market. Even ignoring the basic theory, what you're saying is observably not true, because we can look at Amazon's profits increasing right now, and the shipping prices aren't going down and they're not paying their workers more. Look, its clear that you have a perspective and you’re not interested in other perspectives. Good, do you. > The cost of a product's inputs do not determine what it is worth. Only the market determines what a product is worth. The moment you tie it to cost of material/labor, you are no longer talking about Capitalism. I’m not talking about what its worth, but what it sells for. My point has as much to do with accounting as it does economics. > And? Accelerating automation is good. It's going to happen anyway, and it's a waste of time for us to make factories miserable trying to delay it. And again, even if you don't like automation, no one who opposes automation is arguing that the solution is to make jobs awful. And so it is disingenuous to push unions as though they will help workers out when you know you’re actually helping convince amazon to replace them. |
I'm not going to force anyone to debate with me, but if your economic theory says that Amazon's prices should have dropped this year, and they didn't, then your economic theory is wrong and/or incomplete. That seems like a pretty straightforward test.
Sometimes companies make more money and they don't lower prices, pass those increases onto workers, or expand. This is something that is observable just by looking at price/wage trends in different industries/companies and comparing them with the associated profit increases.
We know that "profits go up, prices go down" is too simplistic and/or flawed of a model to talk about the real world because it's not accurately predicting what companies do in the real world.