> How is that different than a department store?

I think it is different. When a department store buys a third-party product, it pays for it and the Store bears the risk of the item not selling. If Macy's decides to make their own brand, they did so by transferring risk from manufacturer to themselves in the beginning; if a product didn't sell enough, they had stake in it. There are some successes (store-brands) and some failures (brands they bought, never worked)

In the Amazon Basics case, AMZN doesn't own inventory for the product at all. All the risk is to be borne by the 3rd party manufacturer. When Amazon looks at its data and sees a product succeeding, it creates a Basics product with no risk - it knows this thing sells. There is no way Amazon can 'fail' per se.

This essentially is the difference. Any manufacturer is likely scared of success on the Amazon Marketplace. If too successful, it can be Amazon-Basic'ed.

> The consumer (along with Amazon) is a beneficiary here. The losers are brands trying to sell commodity items at a markup.

I think in the short-term for that product - yes, the consumer finds a cheaper product, but Amazon will always have an economies-of-scale advantage.

However, long-term, I think innovators will not know if making a highly successful product (which is always difficult to sell cheap because scale isn't achieved) is worth it.

I found this episode from Planet Money pretty informative: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/02/22/697170790/anti...

> How is that different than a department store? If you go into housewares at Macy's you'll see their own branded stuff along with other brands. So at issue is not the practice itself, but rather that the digital marketplace makes it easier and more efficient.

It's 100% the exact same thing. Go to Walmart and see thousands of "Great Value" products and you'll get the exact same thing. Warren is off her rocker on this one. We have real tech monopolies in the Cable/ISP industry but we're talking about Amazon and Facebook.

> 1) How is that different than a department store? If you go into housewares at Macy's you'll see their own branded stuff along with other brands. So at issue is not the practice itself, but rather that the digital marketplace makes it easier and more efficient.

The difference would be Amazon's [alleged] monopoly power.

> 2) The consumer (along with Amazon) is a beneficiary here. The losers are brands trying to sell commodity items at a markup. The play is not to undercut all the power strip sellers (to take an example) and once they are out of business, jack up the price. The play is to take the margin due to marketing and brand equity from the sellers and split it between the consumer and Jeff Bezos, so rather than being harmed, the consumer benefits from this.

That seems like a very charitable way of describing the situation, and even if accurate may only remain true in the short term. Whether undercutting branded sellers is the goal or not, that's exactly what's happening--even as you charitably describe it. What happens ten years down the road when those brands are gone due to Amazon's allegedly benevolent undercutting?

I'm not sure about the ultimate merits here (in fact, I'm a bit skeptical of the claim that Amazon has all of the market power that some say it does). But I think you may be dismissing this all a bit too quickly.

On #1 I too had the same question, but I think the difference there is that department/grocery stores are re-sellers. They've already bought the goods from the third-party and are choosing to re-sell it at a markup. Amazon on the otherhand is a platform which only enables the initial sale.

Regarding your second point, that is only good for the consumer in the short term. In the long term it harms consumer choice by making it untenable for smaller companies to sell on Amazon when they know a cheaper AmazonBasics version will be released as soon as they see any success.

The difference is that none of those examples dominate their market. The problem isn't "Amazon uses their platform to promote their own products" it's "Amazon uses their market dominance to promote their own products which might not otherwise be competitive"