I’ve been working in the last few years of getting rid of big tech services. PayPal and Amazon are left. I’ve been questioning the need for PayPal in a world of virtual credit cards. My main reason for using it was security of purchase but I feel this need is no longer there. BTW, equivalent EU service to PayPal that is equally well accepted? Feels like this one may be more difficult to satisfy.
Hey irotsoma
I do feel your dilemma
I would drive for an hour to buy anything from a small store rather than buying from amazon and increasing their profits. Obviously one person has no impact upon their obscene profits.
Amazon is the curse for small business and all its employees, drivers, sellers and customers.
good reseacrh here:
https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-paradox
The authors conclude that getting the best price on Amazon requires that you “first spend considerable time searching through pages of results and then utilize, at a minimum, spreadsheet algebraic capabilities to determine the product’s full price…[and] somehow de-bias from the psychological effects of anchoring, and labels such as ‘limited time deal’ and ‘Best Seller,’ as well as many other subtle psychological influences.”
Amazon says it’s entitled to use the consumer welfare cheat-code to get out of antitrust enforcement because it has so many bargains. But to get those bargains, you have to pay such minutely detailed attention – literally spreadsheeting your options and hand-coding mathematical formulas to compare them – that you’ll almost certainly fail. The price of failure is incredibly high – a 25-29% overcharge on every purchase.
The Amazon Paradox has dropped, and it drills into another way that Amazon overcharges most of us by as much as 29% on nearly every purchase, disqualifying it from invoking that consumer welfare cheat code. The new paper is “Amazon’s Pricing Paradox,” from law professors Rory Van Loo and Nikita Aggarwal, for The Harvard Journal of Law and Technology:
The authors concede that while Amazon does have some great bargains, it goes to enormous lengths to make it nearly impossible to get those bargains. Drawing from the literature on behavioral economics, the authors make the reasonable (and experimentally verified) assumption that shoppers generally assume that the top results in an Amazon search are the best results, and click on those.
But Amazon’s search-ordering is enshittified: it shifts value from sellers and shoppers (you!) to the company. A combination of self-preferencing (upranking Amazon’s own knock-offs), pay-for-placement (Amazon ads), other forms of payola (whether a merchant is paying for Prime), and “junk ads” (that don’t match your search) turn Amazon’s search-ordering into a rigged casino game.
From 2023:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/
https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/22/23885242/amazon-prime-tv-movies-streaming-ads-subscription-date
I hate Amazon as much as anyone. But you can’t live in a post capitalist wasteland without those kinds of things. There is no ethical consumption in such a world and avoiding using one toxic company just required using another.
I use tracking sites for things I can wait for and I shop around, but they almost inevitably have the best prices especially after considering shipping costs, exchange policies for defective or damaged goods, and especially for clothes and shoes, return policies.