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Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
The list of businesses it has killed by engaging in the practices I noted above in response to Adder would go on forever.
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So it should be easy for you to name one competitor that Amazon has killed.
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No. But the govt can intervene where WalMart is throwing around its immense weight to force suppliers to sell to it at prices that will put them out of business, thereby creating a market in which only a handful of manufacturers and wholesalers who grow large enough to be able to sell to them in volume at such low prices, or have somehow diversified their pools of buyers enough to offset the thin margins provided by WalMart with reasonable profits from other purchasers, can survive.
WalMart's lovely folks in Bentonville offer, after making people wait for hours in its shitty corporate office, the following:
This is what we'll pay, and you can take it or leave it. And if you leave it, good luck finding someone else who'll buy as much from you as we do. Again, that is technically, in the weakest sense, defensible as competition. (A situation in which "competition" ceases to have any real meaning.) But it's a competition in which WalMart is admitting it is a monopsony. And it uses its profits, accrued in large part from its purchasing power, to put competition out of business, which, wait for it... increases its monopsony. And so it goes...
Maybe that's not a black and white classic antitrust issue, but it's definitely anti-competitive in the fairest plain reading of that term.
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So, in your world, Amazon and Wal-Mart are both monopsonists as they bargain with the same businesses. Are you aware that "mono" means one?
This is not defensible as competition "in the weakest sense." It's competition driving prices down. Not everyone deals with Wal-Mart. If you don't want to deal with them, you find another channel (because the idea that they are a monopsonist, generally speaking, is silly). Wal-Mart demands low price, because that's what they promise consumers. That's how they compete. That is competition. And consumers like it, which is why they keep going back.
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