Heres the issue with what Amazon and the other generics are trying. This has been done before. It only kind of worked, during the 1970s there was the “great move to generics” every store carried them. Everybody bought them. Then they disappeared by the mid-1980s. Do you know why? Because it costs almost as much to make something that is as good as the brand name goods as it does to actually make the brand name goods.
The costs of the decades of marketing are already paid for. The brands can make do with an ongoing marketing budget, people try the no names, generics, amazon basics, whatever you want to call them. Fine if they are good enough they keep buying them a few brands fall a few percents or die. The rest the consumers go back to the brands that are actually good and keep buying them.
Look around, the generics that worked are now the ‘store brands’ in the big-box grocery or home-improvement stores. They hold enough shelf space where people buy them, and when they don’t they disappear. That’s the way things work. Sure Alexa is Amazon’s entry into this market, but if I say ‘buy soap’ and Alexa gives me soap that doesn’t work as well as I am used to. You can be sure that next time I will either go to the store and buy what I want or tell Alexa — ‘Buy dial, damn-it’ the next time (or ivory, etc.).
This is no more than an adjustment, it happens. Sure Amazon is getting too big, but not because of its controls of online shopping. It’s too big because it is beginning to control other segments that synergize with online shopping. This is the kind of thing that caused the breakup of Standard Oil — when they started controlling not just the oil production and sale but also the shipping, transport, conversion to plastic, fertilizer and started looking at acquiring unrelated businesses that used oil. So Amazon controlling not just online shopping but starting to build CPUs, other computer components, running server centers, building autonomous vehicles, buying brick and mortar stores. These are all things they have done in the last year or two that should be triggering anti-trust alarms, but with the current administration in charge wouldn’t.
Oops, another rant as a response. I may have to start writing articles rather than just responding.
