Not much time to do an inventively profane rant because I’m at work, and I definitely don’t want any of my co-workers to know I’m posting this, but here’s the gist of it:
I work for a publishing company. Every year around this time we offer a holiday sale (40% off) on our website that runs for a week. This year, someone from Amazon called asking to speak to the President (who they didn’t get; they had to settle for the VP of Sales & Marketing). Apparently, they were pissed off at our sale because they wanted to offer the lowest prices for every product they carried. So they threatened to pull all of our products from their site unless we changed our discount to 30% off (to match them). This is after a massive advertising and e-mail campaign to promote our sale. We agreed (we can’t afford not to have our stuff available on Amazon) and sent out about a billion e-mails to people telling them we had to change our discount amount - we threw in free shipping on top of this (which we don’t usually do), to ease the pain a bit. This was yesterday. Today, apparently after having gotten some lawyers involved, Amazon agreed we could keep it at 40% as long as we linked to them on every page of our website. This is making things a nightmare for our Customer service department (which, thankfully, I’m not a part of) as well as our accounting dept., and basically throws a wrench into our whole promotion and our sales, which directly affect me (and all employees) in the form of profit sharing/possible Holiday bonuses.
Anyway, WTF? Is that shit even legal? I realize Amazon’s not acting as a monopoly, really; they couldn’t absolutely force us not to have our sale. But it seems, at the very least, extremely bullying, and probably skirts the line on ethical trade practices, though I admit this is nowhere near my area of expertise, and I’m sure there will be some corporate apologists along to straighten me out.
In conclusion: eat a dick, Amazon! I shan’t be shopping with you again.
Lesson here is that there’s a price for cheap merchandise, kiddies, and you’ll pay one way or another. You’ll pay at the cash register, or out of your paycheck in either your company becoming less profitable and having to make cutbacks, etc.
Our workforce is currently out on strike, in part due to our company having to close plants and making cost cutting efforts. Many kids won’t have a christmas gift under the tree this year. I wonder if it was worth it for that 19.99$ DVD player or $29 vacuum cleaner?
Exactly. Obviously, I wasn’t in charge of making the call, but even if I was, I doubt I would have done anything differently. I would have been pissed (as our executives all were), but standing up to Amazon on this would have only hurt us overall - hat publisher can afford to have its inventory unavailable from them these days? And it’s not like we would have “taught them a lesson” - they’re the biggest boys on the block, and can afford to lose our inventory without breaking a sweat.
As clnilsen pointed out, these practices from the giant megacorps end up fucking people in ways many of us probably don’t even think about. Luckily, I live in an area where it’s easy for me to ignore Amazon or Wal-Mart and shop at mom & pop stores for (most) anything I need, but a lot of people don’t have such wide-ranging options, so the retail ebhemoths know they can stay in business without worrying too much about boycotts or bad press.
I can understand caving in to this particular, last-minute demand.
But are the executives at the OP’s company now in a meeting trying to work out how to change their business model so they aren’t reliant on Amazon for their profitability? If not, then they can hardly complain when Amazon chooses to flex its market power on them, when that same market power is also apparently what keeps them in business in the first place.
As someone critical of many of the operations of modern capitalism, i have no trouble with criticizing the business practices of places like Wal-Mart and Amazon. As clnilsen notes, Wal-Mart’s buying power essentially allows it to dictate to its suppliers, and keeps many of them on the verge of unprofitability, and in the same double-bind as the OP’s company—they can barely afford to supply products at Wal-Mart’s prices, but they also can’t afford to drop Wal-Mart as a customer.
Thing is, though, this sort of thing seems to me to be an inevitable consequence of the capitalist system. I don’t want to sound like i’m channeling Lenin here, but his arguments about monopoly capitalism were, in many ways, quite reasonable. Sure, pro-capitalist economists argue that when competition results in oligopolies and monopolies, this inevitably leads to inefficiencies and distortions in the market and paves the way for new companies to enter. But, while this is a nice theory and seems logical in many ways, in the real world it can be extremely difficult, for a variety of reasons. Rather than being a distortion or an aberration, the sort of near-monopoly and/or near-monopsony positions enjoyed by companies like Wal-Mart and Amazon are the rather unsurprising and predictable result of the modern capitalist system.
Is that system good? Well, i guess it is if you want a DVD player for under 30 bucks. And there are no doubt many benefits that accrue to wealthy countries like the United States, and also to poor countries who can supply labor and/or products for this system. But it seems to me that many people laud the system, on the one hand, and then complain when the almost-inevitable consequences of that system come back and bite them on the ass.
I agree with you, mhendo; I am a capitalist, but I think there are many problems with the system. Essentially - and I claim nothing more than the most basic understanding of economic systems, so I’m fully happy to be proven wrong and hear counter-arguments- capitalism seems like the best option available. I’m not aware of any real world evidence for the superiority of competing economic models that have been put into practice.
I work for a huge international manufacturer. One of the high ranking managers confessed that the one thing that keeps him up at night is the Walmart Catch 22. They basically dictate the terms or they pull your product off the shelf and overnight you lose 30% of your sales. Now we can play hard ball as well and threaten to pull all of our products off their shelves, but that’s a risky game to play and no one wants to be the first to blink.
I buy a lot of stuff from Amazon but had no idea that they participate in such low handed business practices. I may have to re-think my shopping strategy.