Amazon Target of Weird Nostalgic Attack
Attacks on big business are commonplace. Providing a valuable good or service is, apparently, cause for derision and hatred. The latest example is the completely unhinged reaction to a fairly innocuous Amazon promotion that involved using an application to capture the prices of goods in other stores:
An Amazon.com promotion, which offered customers a discount if they let Amazon know the prices of items for sale in traditional shops, has provoked widespread anger, drawing a rebuke from a senator and seeing it compared to Dr Seuss’s Christmas-stealing Grinch.
The deal, which ran on Saturday, gave customers a 5% discount (up to $5) off Amazon.com’s price on up to three products if they used the retailer’s price check app while shopping in physical stores. Although books were not included – the eligible categories were DVDs, electronics, toys, music and sporting goods – the promotion prompted a furious response from beleaguered independent bookshops and from the American Booksellers Association, as well as from senator Olympia Snowe, who called it “an attack on Main Street businesses [and] anti-competitive behaviour that could shutter the doors of America’s small businesses”.
“Small businesses are fighting everyday to compete with giant retailers, such as Amazon, and incentivising consumers to spy on local shops is a bridge too far,” said Snowe, a Republican and member of the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, in a statement.
What a ridiculous overreaction. How in the world can this be construed as “anti-competitive”? Olympia Snowe, like a lot of statists who don’t really believe in free markets, conflate better businesses for anti-competitive businesses. Being successful is not anti-competitive, it’s just winning the competition.
But how is this different in substance than the very common practice of price-matching? Most major retailers will do it, and they require you to show the price of the good in the other store before they will match it. How is this even “spying” at all? Prices are not hidden, they are public information.
This is a creative use of technology on Amazon’s part to bring greater efficiency to the market. The more pricing information available to participants, the better decisions they will ultimately make. This is not anti-competitive, it is hyper-competitive.
I also don’t understand the weird fetishism for businesses presumed to be uncompetitive. What is the purpose of rhetorically protecting businesses that are losing to a stronger, more innovative competitor? It’s not to protect the consumer, whose collective choices are being fought against. It’s not to protect the economy, which thrives on creative destruction and the triumph of better business models over less efficient ones. It strikes me as little more than a sort of nostalgia, or belief that the world must remain the same as it is in whatever period of time the person found most desirable. In that sense, such anti-free market sentiment is the true form conservatism, and today’s conservatives who believe in a dynamic market place are the real advocates for progress and change.
Posted by Brian Garst on Wednesday, December 14, 2011 at 5:24 pm
Filed under Free Markets Tagged with Amazon 
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I am a libertarian-conservative blogger living in the DC area. I have a Master's degree in Political Science and work in public policy for a non-profit.
But companies doing these types of things are causing a loss of a dynamic marketplace. In this day and age of computers it would so very easy for a manufacturer to have total control over it's product, from marketing to sales to delivery, killing competiton in a free and open marketplace and thereby controlling prices via supply.
My recent post A Proclamation…
Big boxes have already put a huge dent in what was once the most dynamic of any market in the world, the small retailer. And we've seen the job loss that goes with it. You can almost relate it to modern farming – what once took many people and many peices of equipment now takes only a very few people and little equipment, and what was once an important part of the fabric of our country has vertually disappeared – farm workers. At the same time we have seen prices for that equipment skyrocket far above just the innovative features they now include. No one could just start from scratch and become a small farmer now. Will one day the ability to be a small retailer disappear too? We are already seeing small town America dry up right before our eyes.
Competition is a great thing when it's fair. But given when a company becomes large enough to do away with it's competition and can control a market it's the consumer that loses in the end.
My recent post A Proclamation…
This is simply untrue. First of all, are we not unquestionably better off than when it took a vast majority of our labor just to feed ourselves? How can anyone complain that families do not have to work 12 hour days in the fields just to put food on the table? And I find it highly unlikely that equipment of equivalent quality and capability is more expensive than in the past if inflation is taken into account, as it must be.
Second, I don't see any evidence of lack of competition. What I see are hugely beneficial innovations for consumers (I do more reading of more authors now than ever, thanks to Amazon's many features) and vast technological innovation.
One of the biggest confusions regarding market competition is that success somehow undermines competition, or renders it unfair. But a race is not unfair just because one runner is faster than the others. So long as there are no barriers to entry that prevent new competition from challenging the dominant forces, there exist the benefits of competition. In other words, if Amazon slacks off, another will take their place.