How Amazon is probably ripping you off
A conspiracy hiding in plain sight.
Welcome to a Wednesday night edition of Progress Report.
I’m working on a few big stories and booking interviews for the upcoming weeks, so there’s a lot to be excited about. And on that note, if you’ve ever bought or sold anything online, you’ll want to watch tonight’s story — it’ll make you angry and ideally laugh some, too.
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It was two city heat waves ago that I sat in the steamy garage of a makeshift production studio, sweating through a three piece suit made from i could have sworn was a couch my grandparents owned in the 1980s. It somehow fit me better than any suit I’ve ever worn, despite the fact that I bought it “off the rack” from SHEIN, the ultra-cheap fast fashion online retailer whose clothes tend to fall apart at the seams. But I needed the suit ASAP, and I only needed it once, and beside, I’ve spent the last few months reporting on how Amazon, the undisputed go-to online mall for these kind of situations, isn’t exactly the cheap and convenient retailer it claims.
Next week, California Attorney General Rob Bonta will argue a motion for an injunction against Amazon that would require the shopping behemoth to end a longtime practice that has soaked American consumers and burned small businesses for the past decade. The strategy, at one point referred to internally by the company as the price parity policy, has driven up prices across industries and retailers, manipulating markets and costing hundreds of millions of Americans many tens of billions of dollars.
Evidence unsealed in April illustrate how pernicious the company has been and how clear a case Bonta has; this is real mafioso material, or as Bonta put to me, “real smoking gun stuff” that rarely arrives this blunt.
California’s lawsuit against Amazon, which goes to trial next year, is one of several seeking to end the practice, which uses the company’s market size to extract obscene fees from vendors and force price increases at every other retailer, while fooling customers into a false sense of competition.
The Biden FTC under Lina Khan also sued Amazon for its price-fixing regime, which has driven inflation enough that it’s one of the few cases against big business that the Trump administration has seen fit to continue pursuing. There’s also a massive ongoing class action lawsuit over Amazon’s price-fixing, led by the same firm that scored billions for college athletes just a few years ago. The allegations against Amazon amount to mass extortion and economy distortion, and potential remedies could see the monopoly broken up.
I spoke with Bonta, class action attorney Steve Berman, prominent Amazon sellers, and other experts for the piece below, which I wrote, produced, and hosted for More Perfect Union. If you’ve ever bought anything online — or even just watched an old film noir — you’ll want to watch this one.
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