Today’s links
How Amazon makes everything you buy more expensive, no matter where you buy it: Most Favored Nation is my least favorite scam.
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How Amazon makes everything you buy more expensive, no matter where you buy it (permalink)
Amazon is very proud of its “flywheel”: at first, the company offered subsidies to customers, which lured in sellers. Then, it demanded that those sellers lower their prices, which lured in more customers. With more customers, more sellers piled in. Faster and faster, the flywheel spins, creating the “everything store”:
The flywheel is everywhere – they even teach it in business-schools. But Amazon is not a reliable narrator. It doesn’t tell the truth about the flywheel. To understand what’s really going on with the flywheel, you have apply enshittification to it.
First, Amazon