Comment by jimbokun
5 days ago
Two things jumped out at me.
1. Average American spends THREE THOUSAND DOLLAR year at Amazon. That’s staggering.
2. As of now the trial is not scheduled to begin until January 2027 (although the discussed injunction is meant to address that). I believe the length of time required to get a decision in court is the single biggest impediment to justice being served. It usually waters down the final judgment, makes costs prohibitive for plaintiffs, and allows perpetrators to continue benefiting from illegal behavior indefinitely. In some cases, the defendant can be elected President in the interim eliminating any chance of facing a court decision.
> 1. Average American spends THREE THOUSAND DOLLAR year at Amazon.
Where else would americans be getting home goods like soap, appliances, electronics? Vitamins, perscriptions, etc?
The answer to almost every one of those, for the vast majority of Americans, is one of like 5 megacorps. Target, Walmart, Kroger, CVS, Amazon. Things have largely stopped being available retail because of all this consolidation. If I want to go buy a multivitamin, its no joke like $25 a bottle at my grocery store, and $8 on amazon. It is just kinda... a part of people's lives now, and the alternatives all involve either spending more money or time.
It’s funny: a loved one gifted me a book knowing I’m opposed to Amazon’s practices. They let me know they bought it elsewhere and the act of paying more was part of the gift’s charm (they’ll use Amazon otherwise.)
I've found that books of all things are usually something you can get for Amazon prices elsewhere.
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Love is "I remembered."
I have found eBay to be cheaper for books than Amazon.
For vitamins/supplements specifically, there's Costco, iHerb, nootropics depot.
While they might not be the absolute cheapest options, they're usually a pretty good price and at least with those sources I'm not too concerned with counterfeit or tainted supplements, unlike Amazon [0]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20499808
There used to be 6 Walgreen's in my city. Now there are 2. I've used Amazon to fill some of that gap because the 30 minute drive is bonkers for toothpaste. COVID hit this economy like a Mack truck and helped the monopolists grab even more of a share.
Toothpaste is in basically every store. Dollar stores, grocery stores. Probably most convenience stations.
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> If I want to go buy a multivitamin, its no joke like $25 a bottle at my grocery store
Such a rort. There's so much margin in them that my grocery store permanently has "buy 1 get 1 free" deals, and occasionally "buy 1 get TWO free".
Soap comes from Costco.
Add Costco to the 5 and that’s pretty much it for options.
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Soap comes from everywhere. It's in the grocery store, drug stores. Hell it's in every hotel you stay in. Just grab it before you go and you've got a few weeks' supply.
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I'll add to the chorus who ditched Amazon years ago because of their predatory practices. I do recognize though that I'm a relatively rich American so I can afford to, but if everybody who did, could, the market might look different.
That said, how much of that $3k/year is spent on things they need vs things they bought through Amazon's upselling algorithms? I drive past the giant warehouses and I wonder, how much useful stuff is actually in there? Because when I do find myself on amazon.com most of what I see is just trash wrapped in plastic.
And it proves a point: Things are still available at retail. Sometimes it is a box store but just as often it's a smaller shop. Does it take more time? Sure! But seriously, what is everybody using all that time they saved by shopping at Amazon for? From what I see it's more shopping online.
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Average American spends THREE THOUSAND DOLLAR year at Amazon. That’s staggering.
Is it? That’s by households, not individuals. Is it really crazy to imagine a household spending $200-300/month at Costco, Walmart, Whole Foods—or Amazon?
I spend $200-300 per week at whole foods, much to my own chagrin and moral discomfort.
If it brings you moral discomfort, why do you shop at whole foods? Shopping at Walmart (or whole foods!) would also bring me moral discomfort, so I just ...don't do it.
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AFAICT, the numbers Matt’s referencing include Whole Foods so that’s a Whole Foods + Amazon.com $3,000.
Frankly, I think a lot of people have lost perspective on just how rich the average American household is: Around $145k annual income.
Not shocking that Amazon is capturing 2% of that gross.
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That's on food and consumable household stuff. I imagine some people do all of that shopping through Amazon. But on average?
I spent $3000 at borders bookstore in one year, back in the day. But Amazon gets about $100 a year from me.
You should spend less at Amazon. $100 less per year.
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This is very bad math on the part of the article. You can’t just take total revenue/number of households. I mean have they not heard of a little side business Amazon has called AWS?
Amazon is not just a US company either.
They also have an ad business. You could rightfully argue that ad spend gets passed on to the consumer.
The number Matt’s quoting doesn’t include AWS, AFAICT. It’s “North American segment” revenue in AMZN accounting. AWS is accounted separately as a global unit.
Though now that I write that, I wonder if Matt divided by the total number of North American households or the number of US ones.
EDIT: Amazon North American segment revenue divided by aggregate North American household count is roughly $2,300. But I’m guessing the real number is closer to Matt’s estimate as US households are wealthier and likely represent a disproportionate fraction of that revenue.
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Well considering over the course of four years I got around a quarter million of AMZN (and sold it as soon as it vested)…
And if you actually read the report you would see where he is still wrong.
Hint: there is more to “North America” than just the US.
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This is sadly typical arrogant HN commentary jumping off to sound clever, cynically playing on the 'engineer mentality' fallacy, having put no effort to discredit the argumen as witnessed by the now clearly stupid argument presented, yet selfishly putting the onus on others to correct. It's quite sociopathic.
Would you rather I suffer from Gellman Amnesia?
https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2021/01/18/gell-mann-amnesia/
If you can’t trust someone’s analysis about something you know about, why trust him about something you don’t?
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I dunno, going in with the starting assumption that Matt Stoller is innumerate and/or will twist statistics to support his otherwise specious arguments is not a terrible approach.
On the particulars of this number, he seems to be close enough, but it’s not nearly as shocking with any context: The average American household Walmart spend is comparable, Apple captures almost half that with a handful of devices and services.
The author ignores that a small business shoppers falls in North America retail, so only dividing consumer household is incorrect
My relatives use it for ordering office supplies for their business.
Lol, that sounds about right. I checked, our household spent $2700 last year on amazon. Only 3 things above $100 though, so it's just accumulation of lots of smaller purchases.
You can request your complete purchase history from Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/hz/privacy-central/data-requests/prev...
They will send you a bunch of spreadsheets and it's pretty easy to calculate your total expenditures. That showed us we were spending about $5k a year, mostly small stuff with very few purchases over $100. With Prime it was easy to order a little here and a little there. All those littles add up.
We got rid of Prime and now spend about $300 a year on Amazon. Half of that for Kindle books. We do spend a $100 a month more at Costco to make up for it. A nice side effect is that we have a lot less clutter and junk around the house.
I wouldn't ascribe averages to mean much. I expect there is a small minority that buys everything on amazon (everything meaning groceries, holiday gifts, prescriptions, etc) that would jack up the average significantly.
3k is less than I expected considering median disposable income is ~50k. Where does the rest go?
That figure for "disposable income" doesn't include tons of effectively-mandatory spending.
average ≠ median
Yeah, but surely this goes in the other direction rather than answering the question; average > median
Average household, not American
i’m confused why that feels staggering to you.
Do you realize how generous their return policy is? How convenient it is to order from them, and set up a subscribe-and-save for monthly household items? Also consider how many people set up wedding or baby shower registries on Amazon.
I have been avoiding amazon recently for ethical reasons but i’m genuinely confused by your comment. It sounds like you’ve never shopped at amazon lol. And with inflation…$3k isn’t even that much money in the US. That’s $250 a month.