The Sin Bin • Re: Railway strikes

Amazon and the supermarkets are operating continually in anti-competitive ways. They need to be broken up to restore our free market.

A client of mine used to supply Tesco with tomatoes. Tesco would come to them and set the price, no negotiation and they set terms of something like 180 days. This isn't a free market of supply and demand, it's big businesses hammering small suppliers because they have all the power in the world.

Amazon is even more egregious. They have been allowed to expand into the marketplace. You would no doubt laud small entrepreneurs bringing products they have conceived to sell on Amazon Marketplace. However... if a product does well, suddenly an Amazon equivalent will appear. And the product of the entrepreneur will mysteriously fall down the rankings so that nobody goes to it any more. Amazon shouldn't be both the biggest retailer in the world and the biggest marketplace for goods in the world. It's a blatant anti-trust violation.

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/pressco ... ip_20_2077

Let's not even get started on how Amazon sells books. But like all huge companies its main aim is to drive competitors out of business after which it can jack up its prices. Likewise we know about the working conditions at Amazon warehouses.

If there's one ethical thing you can do today, one stand you can make it's to stop buying at Amazon, stop using Tesco and Asda and walk down the street to your local shops and buy there, or use second tier internet sellers. And encourage everyone you know to do the same. Because the dream of these big, unregulated monsters is to have no competition and the ability to jack up prices and profits in the long run, all at our expense.

Statistics: Posted by The Ghost of '99 — Thu Jun 30, 2022 8:23 pm

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