How Amazon makes everything you buy more expensive, no matter where you buy it

Most Favored Nation is my least favorite scam.

Tonight (Apr 25) I’ll be in San Diego for the launch of my new novel, Red Team Blues, at 7PM at Mysterious Galaxy Books, hosted by Sarah Gailey. Please come and say hi!

Tomorrow (Apr 26), I’ll be in Burbank, signing Red Team Blues at Dark Delicacies at 6PM.

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”:

https://fourweekmba.com/amazon-flywheel/

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 is good to its end users. Then it claws back the benefit to those users and delivers them to sellers. Then it claws back from sellers and takes everything for its shareholders. Then, it turns to shit. Enshittification.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

Amazon — like other platform businesses — externalizes its costs onto its suppliers, then harvests the majority of the reward. Uber drivers take the risks — car and fuel payments, unpaid time waiting for a ride — and then it creams off most of the money that riders pay to get from A to B:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

You can think of this as the eucalyptus tree strategy: eucalypts drop oily leaves around their base. The leaves pile up, trapping heat among all that oil until, eventually, they burst into flame, burning down all the vegetation for miles around. The only things that survive the conflagration are the eucalypt seed-pods, which need fire to open and begin germinating. Meanwhile, all the potential competitors for water, sunshine and soil nutrients have been incinerated, forming a rich, ashy…