[zapatos]

Of all the "big tech" companies, Amazon's monopoly position is the one that worries me the most.

Google, Apple, Netflix, Facebook - you can imagine how a clever competitor can get a foothold to compete in those markets. But Amazon's ownership over the entire physical logistics supply chain through to last-mile delivery is just such a huge moat that keeps getting larger and larger.

[lotsofpulp]

Amazon is the easiest one for me, and I suspect many others, to cut out.

Walmart’s website has identical functionality for selling retail goods, including third party sellers. Target is not far behind. Newegg is all third party goods as far as I understand.

Then there is Best Buy, Home Depot, Lowes, Staples, Kroger, Albertsons, Dollar Tree, and myriad other retailers.

Amazon Music is easily replaced by Apple/YouTube/Spotify.

Amazon Video is easily replaced by myriad other streaming services.

Contrast with my choice of smartphone operating system - Google or Apple.

Or choice of operating system in corporate environments with legacy software - Microsoft. Ditto for spreadsheet software.

Even in cloud, AWS is up against Google and Microsoft.

Where is this idea of Amazon being a monopoly coming from? They even earn pitiful profit margins compared to the other tech companies.

[Aloha]

I'm an avid Amazon shopper, but.. you know who is surprisingly good for things that are not books? Target. Great experience, fast shipment sells stuff online for the same price it does retail. A second runner up is Home Depot.

Amazon Music and Video are value adds, but not why people give Amazon money.

[NBJack]

First, who said anything about profit? That isn't even part of the definition of monopoly.

The killer feature none of those you've listed has been able to achieve is the shipping logistics. This enables their vast selection to be more than just window dressing; contrast this with say Best Buy if the part or item isn't at a local store.

Meanwhile, there have been quite a few previously thriving retailers whom are now either on life support or gone. Anecdotally, I watched several major chains die at the hands of the one upon a time up- and-coming Amazon.com. The number of book stores alone that were killed off is tragic.

https://www.moneytalksnews.com/9-major-companies-face-threat...

https://ilsr.org/fact-sheet-how-breaking-up-amazon-can-empow...

[lotsofpulp]

> First, who said anything about profit? That isn't even part of the definition of monopoly.

The commenter is responded to compared Amazon to the other big tech companies. Profit margin is an indicator of how much control a business has over its market. You cannot earn high profit margins if your customers can go somewhere else if you increase your prices, which means low profit margins means competitors exist.

Shipping logistics is not a huge thing. UPS/FedEx/USPS do what Amazon’s logistics do. All the other retailers also have warehouses (including their stores) all over the US. You might have to wait 1 or 2 or 3 days longer to receive the item, but it is not huge.

I would guess book stores would have gone out of business anyway, due to the ease of shipping books and the lack of urgency of people needing them. Little reason to pay all the capital and labor costs of running a book store if book buyers do not mind buying online. And of course, ebooks came along anyway.

The big competitive advantage Amazon had in earlier years was they did not have to collect sales tax from customers in most states, and they arbitraged that into gaining market share and allowing them to invest in their logistics and expand without incurring heavy losses. But that has been gone for 5 years since the South Dakota v Wayfair ruling in mid 2018.

[OO000oo]

You left out Prime Shipping. There is nothing comparable to Prime Shipping.

[lotsofpulp]

https://marketplace.walmart.com/twoday-and-threeday-delivery...

Walmart+ is close. But prime shipping is not that big of a competitive moat. I order from all the other retailers all the time, and stuff comes in 2 to 3 days also.

[graeme]

You seem to be using monopoly to mean “big” or some other definition.

None of the companies you list are monopolies. Google is the closest in terms of market share but even that is a weak case. It is impossibly easy to get to Bing or DuckDuckGo, and there is the obvious, massive lateral threat that is chatgpt and other llm’s.

Amazon is about 40% of the e-commerce market. Much much less of retail.

[MattGaiser]

Indeed. I find the Amazon as a monopoly argument very curious when they are smaller than Walmart as a retailer. Walmart is a similar percentage of the regular retail market in the USA.

[danaris]

OK; I think we should break up WalMart, too.

The wave of consolidations that has been basically non-stop since the Reagan administration has left us with way too few competitors in way too many markets. We in tech are just particularly blind to it because of the platform duopoly that has seemed "natural" since the first major platform war between Microsoft and Apple in the '90s—there's this feeling that of course there will be a fight between a small number of competitors, and of course we'll end up with one company holding the lion's share of everything, partly due to network effects.

In a truly healthy, competitive economy, we wouldn't even be able to list the number of prominent online or brick & mortar retail companies in the "top tier" on both our hands.

[dzink]

Except that it’s financially supported by AWS. If AWS is separated, they would not be able to keep owning the logistics chain for long.

[shadowgovt]

If Amazon can't make delivering tangible goods to people in exchange for money profitable without slopping money over from the near infinite slush fund that is cloud computing, then it is using market position to stifle competition and deserves to be broken up so Walmart, Target, Best Buy, etc. have a fighting chance of staying in business to keep prices down via competition.

[Aloha]

The going theory here is that they dont have to make money shipping people shit and still own most of the marketplace because of the giant sloshy bucket of money from AWS.

[lotsofpulp]

Source? They kept their profit margins near zero during their retail only days, but Walmart/Target/Kroger/etc have only ever earned 2% to 5% profit margins anyway.

[dzink]

Read their annual reports for the past few years.

[lotsofpulp]

They were not losing money even before AWS:

https://dazeinfo.com/2019/11/06/amazon-net-income-by-year-gr...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/profit...

If their reports claim AWS profits are now offsetting losses in retail, then I guess their retail division has started losing money in the last few years for some reason. Which is odd given COVID landing in their lap.

[Aloha]

which is why I would force them to cleve AWS off, and frankly cleve off some of their logistics chain too.

[MattGaiser]

> But Amazon's ownership over the entire physical logistics supply chain through to last-mile delivery is just such a huge moat that keeps getting larger and larger.

You are ignoring the much bigger retailer that has owned a similarly complex and integrated logistics supply chain for decades. Walmart. And they do it with a lot more stuff.

[alams]

This what they said about Google. Google would be evil monopoly that no one can compete in Search and Ad business. An AI startup disrupted Google Search marker and made them panic and Google is falling apart in other areas as well by themselves.

So no one is too big to fail or compete.

[danaris]

I'm sorry; if you think Google has been in any material way "disrupted" by ChatGPT or any of its brethren, you either have been duped by propaganda from OpenAI or you are buried deep, deep in a Silicon Valley techbro bubble.

Google is still what everyone thinks of when they want to search the web, despite how bad its results have gotten in recent years. Even actual alternative search engines, like DuckDuckGo, are still very minor players in comparison.

[fakedang]

Google is still the default for search, and the monopolist on search ads. Open AI has ways to go to beat Google, and going by the recent performance concerns of ChatGPT, it's not highly inspiring either.

[whyenot]

I think Google's position is much more worrisome. As others have already mentioned, with Amazon, you can always go to Walmart or other retailers. In many cases, these days I find myself using the manufacturer's website and purchasing directly from them to avoid counterfeits.

Google (err Alphabet) is so completely dominant in search (93.125 world marketshare) and video (97.42%), and not far behind in mobile operating systems (70.89%) [and I found both of these numbers by using Google]. Of course marketshare on its own is not a particularly strong argument for breaking a company up, but Google could be a lot more evil than Amazon, if it wanted to.

[fakedang]

The thing is, if Google chose to be evil, how much room do they have? They're losing in Cloud, they're losing money/barely breaking even with YouTube, and they don't really have room to monetize stuff like Gmail, YouTube, the play store, etc else users would flee in droves.

Google really doesn't have enough room to be evil even if they tried - they've already exhausted most avenues that they could and failed. Imo, Google is actually under threat - if someone were to credibly show in detail how useless Google Ads actually are or how flawed/falsified their performance metrics are (perhaps via internal leaks a la Facebook, etc), Google could easily end up losing a lot of ad customers.

[bigtunacan]

Other retailers continue to shutdown and it's a direct result of Amazon.

Sears, JCPenney, Bed Bath and Beyond are just a few dominoes to have already fallen.

[CaptainNegative]

Sears is an amusing example given their mail-order history. Ultimately they shut down as a direct result of making no attempt to innovate or even mimic the innovators since those glory days.

Walmart, Target, Home Depot, etc. embraced the 21st century and are doing just fine. Others like Chewy only came about as a result of the new trends.

BB&B bought its way into bankruptcy by taking on debt to fund a multi-billion dollar stock buyback; external competition (including Amazon but primarily Walmart) was a secondary factor.

[mtnGoat]

Are those failures a direct result of Amazon existing? I would venture to bet it’s one of the reasons but I would also point out that Walmart has done a lot of damage as have poor management decisions in a number of the companies you listed. Correlation is not causation.

[lotsofpulp]

> Other retailers continue to shutdown and it's a direct result of Amazon.

It is not Amazon, it is online shopping in general. They never were going to survive a world where their competition can sell the same goods without having all the capital and labor expenses of a storefront.

A few of the big ones will survive due to convenience, but the niche stores where you do not need the product today or tomorrow have no competitive advantage against a website, outside of a few high end stores where richer people can afford to pay extra for the shopping experience.

[danaris]

Sears, JCPenney, and Bed Bath & Beyond are, to the best of my understanding, victims of vulture capitalism. Sure, Amazon didn't help, but they would've been in decent shape if Wall Street hadn't swooped in, drained them dry, and discarded the desiccated husks.