I routinely see this in biotech, I've seen hiring managers from our Clinical Science team blatantly discriminate against candidates not on linkedin, even if they come with a strong referral and have 15-page super thorough CVs with 150 credible publication references. "Oh, they're not on linkedin, this person is sketchy" - immediately disqualifies candidate.
I had a pretty slim linkedin and actually beefed it up after seeing how much weight the execs and higher ups I work with give it. It's really annoying, I actually hate linkedin but basically got forced into using it.
What's craziest to me about their editing her image is that they made her skin tone darker, which imo has racist implications. They also made her look older and fatter, and more disheveled, lowering her top. Just awful all-around.
I sat next to him in business class on a flight back from Poland to the SF a few years ago and he was so gracious, talking with and taking photos with all his seatmates. I just wanted to sleep because I was coming back from a conference and I was actually annoyed with all the "fanfare" around him which was loud and kept everyone up! It must have been hard for him to constantly deal with. He was super nice though and made time for everyone who wanted to chat with him.
My other airline celebrity encounter was Pauly Shore, who I was standing next to at the baggage carosel and thought to myself, "huh this guy sounds just like Pauly Shore" and lo - it was the man (and his entourage) himself. I always thought the voice was an affectation but nope he actually does talk like that. Woz was definitely more exciting to encouter!
I feel like they artificially made their prices super low for the last couple years and intentionally operated at a loss as a business tactic to force out competition and kill off local grocery stores. There were instances of their prices being lower than Walmart or other budget stores. The avocados were $0.25 each and carrots were half price of ones in Safeway, even ground beef was weirdly cheap. One time as a comparison I put the same items in my cart for Amazon fresh and Walmart and it was $21 at Amazon fresh and $36 at Walmart. WAY cheaper than Instacart too.
> operated at a loss as a business tactic to force out competition and kill off local grocery stores
Wouldn't surprise me. I know a guy who invented a device for truckers that became ubiquitous in truck stops across the US. This would've been like 2014.
He refused to sell on Amazon, so Amazon duped his product and sold it at something crazy, like half price, until he agreed to list (at which point they dropped their competing product)
You are on a website called HackerNews, where people are encouraged to comment on articles or "posts". You are seeing this because you are looking at the comment section of one such post.
Selling items for less than they cost to produce is known as "dumping" in international trade (where it is generally disallowed by trade organizations) and can be illegal in the US if the intent is to eliminate competition [0]. That last factor can be hard to prove, and I don't think the FTC is doing much about anticompetitive behavior these days.
Yes, I can imagine it’s hard to prove, which is a pretty good indicator it’s a slippery concept to being with. Everyone wants to “eliminate the competition”, including your competition!
The predatory pricing pattern the FTC would in theory sure over would be: selling items at an artificially low price until the competition goes out of business, then raising prices once you are the only seller left standing. It's the second step that makes it anticompetitive instead of just competitive
What does it mean to be “the only seller left standing”? If somebody’s out there making big margins because they don’t face competition, competition is likely to emerge!
Yes, but the monopoly seller has already demonstrated that they will operate at a loss until their competitors go out of business, which is a pretty big deterrent to any new market entrants. They've also demonstrated that no one will be making any money until either the monopolist or the new entrant is out of business, so who would actually launch a new business in that environment?
Yeah, it is theoretically possible to have a marketplace where "predatory pricing" is an accepted though aggressive business strategy, and I'd say that we are roughly there in the US. But the original intent behind the law on the books was to make markets friendly to new entrants, even if that meant sometimes constraining what large participants were allowed to do.
Standard grocery margins are usually lower, in the 30%-40% range, and are often much lower for promotional items. Rotating "loss leaders" to get people in the door are standard practice. IMHO that would make it hard to bring an antitrust action against a grocery chain, as pretty much every store engages in a limited amount of predatory pricing as a marketing technique.
50% is the standard retail markup, but it varies by industry.
I don't think Amazon was producing anything they sold in their grocery stores. They were probably buying the same white label items as everyone else for their store brand.
The Biden admin went slightly harder against anti-competitive actions and anti-consumer actions by companies and all the billionaires freaked out and poured money into Republican campaigns in 2024 in order to roll all that back.
What was rolled back? There was no major change in action whatsoever, only rhetoric, which is meaningless. As for funding, Trump raised substantially less in 2024 than 2020 while Harris raised more money than any campaign ever has, by a wide margin. [1] Dark money also overwhelmingly flowed to the DNC. [2] And a large chunk of all of Trump's funding came after the previous administration tried to imprison him, which rather freaked people out - even those not particularly fond of him. That also likely played a significant role in the more DGAF presidency we're seeing today relative to 2016.
To add onto sibling comment: it is specifically when they sell below cost to eliminate competition, with the goal of later being able to raise prices to recover those losses (and more) once they are the only player in town and can jack the prices up all they want. The later price elevations are what result in consumer harm, which is why it is illegal.
A big gorilla comes in and under prices the entire market. They can do that because they already have tons of money. They do this long enough to break the market and drive the competition out of business. Once the competitors are gone they jack up the prices to unprecedented levels because there's no more alternatives available and bleed the market for all the money.
This presupposes some athletic new competitor can’t enter the market and take the margin off the fat incumbent.
It’s why we have capital markets: If capturing a profitable opportunity requires spending some money, someone who wants to profit will send that money your way.
But it should only be because they indeed have lower margins or more efficient operations. It should not be funded by external money (other departments or investors), only to undercut competition too force them out only to raise prices to above the previous point after.
So a simple law could be that prices can only be raised to the point where they were at before the competition was squashed.
> Amazon duped his product and sold it at something crazy, like half price
Pricing below an appropriate measure of cost is generally considered predatory pricing. It is very difficult to enforce this, but that doesn't change the fact that it could be illegal and a violation of antitrust laws.
While the general premise is true (big company will try to rip off small company), Amazon doesn't have the magical power to get around patent law and the economic penalties are fairly harsh, which is why most companies don't do it. And no war chest of tech patents is going to get Amazon around a patent in the trucking industry because the inventor of the trucking gizmo couldn't care less about whether Amazon patented the right to make Alexa speak in tongues.
It's possible, and likely, that Alibaba vendors decided to rip off the product, but again...patent law is a useful tool for those who use it, and Amazon can be held liable for the sales of infringing products on its storefronts.
That's because criminal prosecution and product tort liability are not meaningful deterrents.
Patent litigation is a different thing entirely. The burden of proof is lower, and the payouts are higher.
To put things in perspective, Apple, Amazon, etc., have lost patent lawsuits worth hundreds of millions over trivial aspects of their devices that are just tiny parts out of thousands compromising the phone/tablet/whatever.
It seems a lot of people on HN fundamentally misunderstand how patent litigation works.
If this trucking device actually existed, and for some reason was being sold on Amazon, and the inventor had sued, he would be living large these days off the settlement.
Yes, Amazon sellers have copied products before, but those aren't Amazon. Amazon prefers to just buy the competition (see, e.g., Diapers.com and Zappos).
>“We have already initiated a more aggressive ‘plan to win’ against diapers.com,” longtime Amazon retail executive Doug Herrington apparently wrote in an email released by the committee. “To the extent that this plan undercuts the core diapers business for diapers.com, it will slow the adoption of Soap.com,” another company owned by Quidsi.
>Herrington called Quidsi Amazon’s No. 1 short-term competitor. “We need to match pricing on these guys no matter what the cost,” he said in the email.
I bet Quidsi was also selling the diapers at a loss since they were using UPS and Fedex, so not sure what the difference is if Amazon sells diapers at a loss or Quidsi was selling diapers at a loss.
The innovation would have been in the logistics buildout, which Quidsi obviously wasn’t doing.
The logistics buildout is arguably Amazon's biggest retail lynchpin.
However, it's built on a few fragile external costs.
First that comes to mind, is the comingling, which will theoretically resolve one way or another with their ending of comingling. Comingling almost certainly lowered logistics costs however...
Second being, the externality of how both warehouse and delivery workers are treated in the name of the almighty metrics. NGL I feel like the public's acceptance of their labor practices has ironically only accelerated the erosion of labor rights and worker treatment.
It's good to ask for a link (although not good to give one if this is your friend and it may affect their relationship with Amazon that you're talking about this in public), but you can't expect people to waste time thinking about your ringing ears.
Then don’t believe it and go on with your day. No one owes you a link to anything, especially if you simply don’t pay attention to Amazon’s widely-reported business practices.
> I feel like they artificially made their prices super low for the last couple years and intentionally operated at a loss as a business tactic to force out competition
iirc that's exactly what Amazon did to destroy diapers.com over a decade ago
Diapers.com aka Quidsi was already operating at a loss when it was acquired by Amazon. It's whole business model was using VC-funding to offer products below sustainable costs with the goal of eventually jacking up prices once they drove out smaller/local competitors. Amazon used its own business model against it by dropping prices even lower, knowing that the VC investors couldn't afford it.
Walmart passed on buying Quidsi when Walmart was thinking about launching its own e-commerce platform because the business model was unsustainable. Walmart decided they would rather spend several hundred millions building out their own platform then to buy an existing website with millions of customers.
This is basically the playbook of every "disruptive technology" startup or FAANG initiative of a similar stripe - set prices incredibly low to bleed out competition and gain market share, then raise them once you are in the dominant market position.
Correct, and this is why US big tech, including the big LLM players, need to be tarriffed/DSTed harder than Chinese cars by the rest of the world. They get big off of the exact dumping that China has always been accused of.
Maybe the one where you flagged down a car on the street, but you could always call to book a taxi and those companies worked exactly like Uber — over the phone, because it was the pre–app era.
Uber also gives you a price upfront, and that is the most you will pay (+ tip, if you feel like it). I don't remember pre-mobile phone taxi system that gave you a price upfront. They used to list the price per mile, and then it was up to you to figure out the distance and make sure the driver took a reasonably short route.
So no, the old taxi companies did NOT work "exactly like" Uber.
I've seen more than a few people on this forum assert that the old taxi system was/is comparable to Uber or somehow better. I even got some shit for referring to it as old, legacy, I forget the exact verbiage I used. But it is old, and it is worse. I get the price upfront, I can adjust the "class" of car I order if I'm going to the pharmacy alone or to a nice dinner. Calling ahead to preorder a taxi feels like calling to order a pizza over the phone at this point. If I called, would they even know how to handle it?
Obviously we live in a different era now where things are ordered by apps instead of websites or phone calls, but those used to be socially acceptable ways to order things.
For sure, I was there. But we also used to have to have the people on the phone read our order back to us to confirm it, now I've got a screen that does that automatically. I'm not at all nostalgic for the alternative.
The whole thing end-to-end is the ride service though. The interface is the differentiator that made Uber popular and forced traditional taxi providers to compete for once. There used to be tons of anecdotes about "the card reader being broken" in traditional taxis, because they dodged taxes by only accepting cash. Exposing the whole process through an app and handling your billing outside of the car made tactics like that less useful. Taxis thrived on hidden information games and obligation; Uber doesn't remove that entirely but the playing field is more level.
Quoted for truth. I still take taxis from time to time if there’s no wait at a taxi stand at an airport or building. I noticed in places like Las Vegas things seem better now, there’s flat rates and everyone has touchscreen payment terminals in the passenger area. I remember pre-Uber occasionally getting cab drivers that would take suboptimal routes like getting on the freeway to drive up the meter.
Also, Uber drivers tend to show up. It was always a crapshoot with regular cab drivers. I don't have experience with other car services, maybe they were better pre-Uber.
It depends on where you lived. NYC had a large number of "black car" livery services where you would call, arrange a ride, and typically get a price up front. It wasn't legal to hail them on the street, but in practice it was pretty common to hail a black car (a "gypsy cab") and negotiate a price up front. Source: I lived a few blocks north of Central Park and in Hamilton Heights before Uber was a thing and took gypsy cabs a couple of times a week.
Not in my country they didn’t. Booking or no booking, taxis did whatever they wanted. More often than not your booked taxi just wouldn’t turn up and you wouldn’t know until well after you needed it.
Heck, Elon's ownership of SpaceX even got to me to not really care about space travel anymore, one of my biggest passions since I was 6. But I just can't root for whatever his vision of space faring society would look like.
Yeah I hear you. I too wish he would have stayed out of politics. Sadly he chose not to, and not just go a little, but to go all in. And to choose to make it basically his public identity.
Walmart isn't a budget grocery store, though. Its prices are higher than actual grocery stores (like Safeway.) Also, everyone is WAY cheaper than Instacart.
The answer to this is complex, it has any number of products that are cheaper than products of similar quality from any other store. Places like Safeway/Aldi typically beat on price on very generic items that may or may not have similar quality.
The biggest thing to watch for at Walmart is price discrimination dependent on location. Back in the days I used to shop with them (read made less money) picking a store in a poorer neighborhood could save $10 to $30 dollars on the same car of items.
I found Lowes (hardware) to be one of the worst about this. I lived in an area with 4 Lowes, and never shopped at my local one because of how much more expensive everything was, and never clearance. I'm not talking a couple dollars, in some cases 4x the price of one just 15 minutes away.
In the days before places started requiring ID for returns an acquaintance
of mine would pick up rifle scopes at one Walmart and return them at another Walmart on a route he took. Only once every few weeks to give employees time to rotate out. He could pay for a few days of gas with that arbitrage.
Not in the areas of California I frequent. Walmart is usually the cheapest around here; heck, even Target beats Safeway on some items. On the other hand, Walmart is also usually the worst at stock rotation.
I received a referral bonus and where the company payroll made an error and accidentally gave me a higher bonus per the level of employee my referral reward was (they set it to the bonus level for a VP and she was a Sr. Director). So unbeknownst to me they gave me $5000 extra in my bonus that should have been only $3000, not $8k. Accounting figured this out next tax season, so then they informed me the would be clawing their error overpayment back had, which apparently is legal. Thus the $5k was taken out of my next paycheck. Their error was not my fault!
I was really annoyed and basically stopped going above and beyond for that company the rest of the year. :-/
It just seemed very petty and reactionary of them for something that was their error originally. This messed up my budget and suddenly having $5k less 9 months later that I hadn't anticipated was a bit of an unforeseen financial hardship. Also she had been my 5th referral to date that they'd hired!!
I love that example. It’s a basic exercise in “for how little money can you break any amount of trust”. Not sure how they could avoid that (besides being competent in the first place..)
I felt like they should have just written off the error and let me keep it, as by the time they realized it, it was almost a year later, and I was a high-performer who had gotten promoted twice. I left the following year for a better opportunity, but this was sort of one thing that turned me 180* from being an all-in, kool-aid drinking culture-carrier to feeling kind of bitter and shafted by them.
I once had a patient in a nursing home who was a hoarder and she would hoard pinecones from outside the facility in her room. Garbage bags upon garbage bags of pinecones. When she would go to dialysis the staff would clean out her room and toss the pinecones. So she started begging the EMTs to bring the garbage bags of pinecones with her to dialysis so they wouldn't get thrown out.
The recovery rate for hoarding is under 5%, it's generally treated by SSRIs and CBT. Recently there is potential that GLP1s may have benefits for hoarding and other addictions.
I had a pretty slim linkedin and actually beefed it up after seeing how much weight the execs and higher ups I work with give it. It's really annoying, I actually hate linkedin but basically got forced into using it.
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