California is suing Amazon for price fixing
and some documents were unearthed this week.
What did we learn? Yeah,
we Learned that if you've been comparison shopping online,
that it's a total joke
because these big retailers are actually working together
behind the scene means to raise prices
and lock step. An example of this,
the company that makes Canine Naturals,
the pet food, Amazon went to them and said, yeah,
we want to see the price go up on some of your products
and can you go please talk to chewy?
And so they did.
They talked to chewy and chewy and Amazon raised their prices together.
This is price fixing. I mean,
straight up price fixing. We see Home Depot involved in this.
Allergen, which makes eye drops,
we saw them working with Amazon to raise prices across different sites.
Levi's Hayes Skull candy that makes the earbuds.
We saw it with a fertilizer maker.
It's just extortion in broad daylight.
And they're writing about this in these emails
just like outlining this scheme to each other and talking about it.
One involving the maker of Canine Naturals,
they actually have a smiley face emoji when they report back to Amazon.
Like, oh, yeah,
we got the price up at chewy for you.
Smiley face emoji. In this casual way,
they're just like raising prices together.
Then there are other situations where Amazon clearly is so powerful
and they can simply use their power,
power over the supplier, maximatic.
Which makes ice cream makers,
Amazon emailed them and said,
we're seeing the price of your ice cream makers
lower on other websites and basically
we're gonna turn off your product
so people won't be able to buy it on Amazon.
And of course, Amazon's huge.
You can't afford to lose your sales on Amazon.
So what do we see these folks do?
They go and, uh,
raise their prices on the other sites and then Amazon is like,
okay, great,
we've turned your product back on.
It seems like they're really like emboldened.
Is there any shame or indication that what they're doing is illegal?
One of the most striking parts of this is
there's a section in what was unsealed.
It shows that Amazon's training materials actually told employees,
don't do this in email. You should do this over the phone.
And what that tells me is
that this is happening at a much bigger scale.
It's probably still going on today
because all of these examples that are in email,
those are when employees are slipping up.
So how often did this happen over the phone?
We have no record of it and they're probably still doing it.