[giaour]

Selling items for less than they cost to produce is known as "dumping" in international trade (where it is generally disallowed by trade organizations) and can be illegal in the US if the intent is to eliminate competition [0]. That last factor can be hard to prove, and I don't think the FTC is doing much about anticompetitive behavior these days.

[0]: https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...

[twoodfin]

Yes, I can imagine it’s hard to prove, which is a pretty good indicator it’s a slippery concept to being with. Everyone wants to “eliminate the competition”, including your competition!

[giaour]

The predatory pricing pattern the FTC would in theory sure over would be: selling items at an artificially low price until the competition goes out of business, then raising prices once you are the only seller left standing. It's the second step that makes it anticompetitive instead of just competitive

[twoodfin]

What does it mean to be “the only seller left standing”? If somebody’s out there making big margins because they don’t face competition, competition is likely to emerge!

[giaour]

Yes, but the monopoly seller has already demonstrated that they will operate at a loss until their competitors go out of business, which is a pretty big deterrent to any new market entrants. They've also demonstrated that no one will be making any money until either the monopolist or the new entrant is out of business, so who would actually launch a new business in that environment?

[twoodfin]

“Imagine profitability doesn’t matter to ownership, and investors will accept losses—and less losses than a more efficient competitor—indefinitely.”

Even Amazon had to eventually find its way to profitability.

[giaour]

Yeah, it is theoretically possible to have a marketplace where "predatory pricing" is an accepted though aggressive business strategy, and I'd say that we are roughly there in the US. But the original intent behind the law on the books was to make markets friendly to new entrants, even if that meant sometimes constraining what large participants were allowed to do.

[bushbaba]

Selling it at cost though isn’t. And the cost to make a good is often less than 50% retail

[giaour]

Standard grocery margins are usually lower, in the 30%-40% range, and are often much lower for promotional items. Rotating "loss leaders" to get people in the door are standard practice. IMHO that would make it hard to bring an antitrust action against a grocery chain, as pretty much every store engages in a limited amount of predatory pricing as a marketing technique.

50% is the standard retail markup, but it varies by industry.

[kay_o]

I'd be unsurprised in this case that Amazon could produce the product profitably for less than half the cost due to scale.

[giaour]

I don't think Amazon was producing anything they sold in their grocery stores. They were probably buying the same white label items as everyone else for their store brand.

[krferriter]

The Biden admin went slightly harder against anti-competitive actions and anti-consumer actions by companies and all the billionaires freaked out and poured money into Republican campaigns in 2024 in order to roll all that back.

[somenameforme]

What was rolled back? There was no major change in action whatsoever, only rhetoric, which is meaningless. As for funding, Trump raised substantially less in 2024 than 2020 while Harris raised more money than any campaign ever has, by a wide margin. [1] Dark money also overwhelmingly flowed to the DNC. [2] And a large chunk of all of Trump's funding came after the previous administration tried to imprison him, which rather freaked people out - even those not particularly fond of him. That also likely played a significant role in the more DGAF presidency we're seeing today relative to 2016.

[1] - https://ballotpedia.org/Presidential_election_campaign_finan...

[2] - https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/dark...

[triceratops]

> As for funding, Trump raised substantially less in 2024 than 2020 while Harris raised more money than any campaign ever has, by a wide margin.

Does that include the $44b spent on the Twitter acquisition?

[specialist]

Enforcement.