Tag: amazon

Five Tips for Interpreting Amazon Reviews

 

I’m back once again to help you navigate the confusing world of Amazon reviews.  My hope is that following these five tips will save you several hours of scrolling and clicking for just the right product, as well as an extra UPS trip to send back a crummy product.

Tip 1: Consider any average rating below 4.5 stars to be a yellow flag.  Yes, 4 out of 5 stars looks pretty good when you’re scrolling. But if you keep in mind that there often seems to be a disproportionate number of five-star reviews under any product, due both to possible systemic corruption and to buyers’ seeming reluctance to shave their enthusiasm down to three or four stars, you’ll realize the one- and two-star reviews may have figured prominently in the final count. Just a quick scan through the reviews, and you’ll quickly notice if you have to wade through a big batch of noisy, unhappy customers before you get to the glowing comments.

In Chasing Amazon, the FTC Ignores Consumers

 

To no one’s surprise, last week the Federal Trade Commission, joined by some fourteen mostly blue states, launched its antitrust attack on Amazon by charging that the firm enjoys durable market power in two adjacent markets—the “Online Superstore Market” and the “Online Market.” The basic charge of monopoly insists that Amazon, like other monopolists, raises its prices above their competitive level in ways that reduce welfare for consumers.

But in Amazon’s case, the FTC’s claim is unique in at least two ways.  The first is that the complaint does not make any reference to the well-established consumer-welfare standard, lest it call attention to the Chicago School of Economics whose analysis the FTC rejects. Nor does its complaint ever consider any efficiency justifications, even though these are part of any balanced assessment of Amazon’s business model that has benefited some 170 million Amazon Prime customers, all of whom are free to take their business elsewhere.

But there is indeed a deep ambiguity in the FTC’s complaint that must be identified. The New York Times ran a story that describes a “cage match” between FTC chairwoman Lina Khan and Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and executive chair. The Times notes that Khan has been “relentless in exposing what she sees as Amazon’s monopolistic ways,” while Bezos “would stop at nothing to deliver the low prices and speedy delivery that shoppers craved.” These two titans are talking past each other. Bezos’s search for lower prices should normally be regarded as a lust to outdo the competition, which would mean that the only conceivable antitrust claims that the FTC could bring are that of predation: offering prices so low that it drives out the competition, leaving it free thereafter to raise prices once all competitors have abandoned the field. Indeed, in her oft-cited student note in the Yale Law Journal—“Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox”—Khan puts this predation theory front and center when she writes that “the economics of platform markets create incentives for a company to pursue growth over profits, a strategy that investors have rewarded. Under these conditions, predatory pricing becomes highly rational—even as existing doctrine treats it as irrational and therefore implausible.”

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Season 1 is over! What did the people of ricochet think … Good, Meh, Suck? I liked it. Episodes 1, 2, and 8 were strong. The middle of this season was a long walk in the woods.  I think Episode 8 was a good-? Especially after the last three clunkers, I think they brought it […]

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Ok, we are almost through this long walk together. Another mixed episode… Mr. C may be in a coma, I don’t think we got a nap update last week!?!??? With Galadriel/Numenor storyline being so weak it’s hard not to say we can only give a Meh or Suck grade. Preview Open

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Are You Ready For Some PAY Football?

 

How much would you be willing to pay to be the exclusive home to an NFL game? How about $67M per game? When you break it down, that’s what Amazon Prime is paying the league for its package of Thursday Night Football that debuted Thursday Night.

I expect the coverage to be unremarkable. Amazon has done nothing but hire broadcast network veterans to run the show. For everyone to get comfortable with each other, they’ve been taping practice games for weeks. Will there be moments that Al Michaels and Kirk Herbstreit step on each other? Maybe. But the only wildcard in this pack is the production truck itself. While it comes from one of the leading providers of remote facilities, Game Creek Video, it’s brand new. And brand new anything that complicated comes with surprises. That’s why Bezos paid for all those practice games.

The real question is will the audience be able to find it? Your benchmark will be $16.4 million, that’s the combined numbers between the Fox/NFL Network simulcast of the same package last season. Interestingly, Amazon is only promising advertisers 75% of that, around 12M per game. (For perspective, the worst draw in the NFL – a matchup between two losing teams late in the season draws around 4M on a Sunday afternoon.)

Laboring Under a Delusion

 

In its most recent issue, the New Yorker gloated that in “one of the biggest labor victories since the nineteen-thirties,” the Amazon workers at a Staten Island warehouse voted—2,654 for and 2,131 against—to form a union. The union victory was organized by the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), a grass-roots, home-grown operation that operated outside the traditional channels of organized labor, but with substantial material support and strategic advice from old-line unions. The vigorous union campaign highlighted worker grievances that included a demand for improved safety conditions in light of the COVID virus, higher wages, longer work breaks, better grievance procedures, and a shuttle bus connection to the Staten Island ferry. In the run-up to the election, two key union organizers were fired and one warned. All were black. Amazon claimed it was for violating social distancing rules. The workers claimed that it was an illegal effort to fire them for their organizing efforts. Because of the ALU’s success, further union-organizing campaigns at Amazon are now in the offing.

Union optimism about the ALU election should be tempered by the long litigation struggle that lies ahead. It is an open secret that many businesses that are generally liberal on social issues—think Howard Schultz, who has just returned as the head of Starbucks—are widely and correctly regarded as anti-union. This posture is taken for the simple reason that unions are bad for business—period. To the progressive mind, that anti-union posture is a high political sin. President Joe Biden has already cheered on the Amazon workers, saying, “Amazon, here we come.” But there are at least two major reasons to question the merit of his position.

At a theoretical level, the purpose of any sound system of labor law is to improve the overall productivity of the employment relationship, which includes the welfare of firm workers as one part of that calculation. But union elections are, at best, an imperfect way to achieve that objective. About 45 percent of the Amazon employees voted against the union, which means that the net overall gain for current workers is small indeed: the dissenting workers certainly have legitimate concerns. Why pay union dues, typically at 3 percent, that will eat into any future wage increases? Why encourage management-labor confrontations that will sever direct worker-employer relationships, which could price the Staten Island facility out of the market or could lead Amazon to divert some of its business to nonunion warehouses where costs are lower and profits are higher?

Brooding Over Cicadas? Just Eat Them. The UN Says So.

 

“Brood X” Cicadas are making their appearance in a big way this weekend in northern Virginia. They’re a nice, harmless, and (eventually) noisy diversion from our current theater. But just wait – someone will politicize them, too. You know it’s coming.

In a sense, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan already has. He’s declared the months of May and June as “Magicicada Months.” Never missing a chance to promote his state, he notes that the bugs sport the official colors of Maryland.

April Showers Bring . . . Woke Weatherproof Styles Ad

 

Amazon April front pageIt is perfectly natural for retailers to pitch products to the season or occasion. We should especially expect on-line retailers to pitch rain gear in April. So, the presence on Amazon’s homepage of two boxes, “Men’s weatherproof styles” and “Women’s rain-ready styles,” is unremarkable. We have also come to expect the leftist virtue signaling, in the form of the latest approved intersectional hashtag and special emphasis on Black Lives, showing that they Matter to Amazon. Yet, what are we to make of the visual presentation of how Amazon thinks a black man should look?

The top right image is a Amazon screen capture from the evening of 11 April 2021. There is a web page wide top banner advertisement that rotates. The advertisement you see is for an Amazon Prime original series, Them, with each season intended to tell a tale focused on African Americans, and apparently on white people as racists.

Them‘s first season is grounded in the historical reality of the second Great Migration (1940-1970). This was the second wave of the Great Migration (1910-1970). American blacks moved from rural areas to inner cities and from the old South to the North and West. Walter Mosley set his Easy Rawlins private eye series in Los Angeles, with the series starting in 1948. If you have not read any of the series, you likely at least recognize the Denzel Washington movie based on the first novel, Devil in a Blue DressSo, Los Angeles is a good setting for a series set in the 1950s, as well as convenient for the video/movie industry.

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Tuesday’s big headline in the financial world is that the world’s richest man, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos – also the owner of the Washington Post and Whole Foods, supports higher taxes in Joe Biden’s “infrastructure” plan (although he does want bipartisanship “concessions” – on the details). Good luck with that, in the Schumer-led […]

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On this episode of “The Federalist Radio Hour,” President of the Ethics and Public Policy Center Ryan T. Anderson joins Culture Editor Emily Jashinsky to discuss Amazon’s recent attempt to deplatform his book “When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment.”

On this episode of The Federalist Radio Hour, Molly Kinder, a David M. Rubenstein Fellow in the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution, joins Culture Editor Emily Jashinsky to discuss her research into how big corporations such as Amazon and Walmart used their skyrocketing profits in the midst of the pandemic and whether their workers benefitted from the financial growth.

 

Make Amazon Pay … for What?

 

A Yahoo! finance article brought to my attention a recent open letter sent to Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos. The letter has been signed by “401 parliamentarians” from around the world including some of the usual suspects from the US, among them Michigan Congresswoman Rashida Talib.

In the article, Talib is quoted as saying “This pandemic has exposed just how broken and wrong it was to allow a man with this amount of wealth to get away with not paying his fair share.” Everybody knows what someone’s fair share is and it’s obvious when they’re not paying it. Right?

Howard Husock talks with Shelby and Eli Steele about their new documentary, What Killed Michael Brown?, and Amazon’s refusal to make the film available on its Prime Video streaming platform.

The documentary is written and narrated by Shelby Steele, a scholar at the Hoover Institution, and directed by his filmmaker son, Eli Steele. It is available through their website, whatkilledmichaelbrown.com.

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On Monday night, my iPhone turned off and wouldn’t turn back on. That’s just a minor personal inconvenience with a straightforward, if not pricy, solution—right? So the next morning, I scheduled an appointment at a repair shop for that afternoon and tried to log in for work. And that’s where the “minor personal inconvenience” snowballed. […]

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I ordered a whip from Amazon. No, not the kind of whip you see in those movies you know you shouldn’t be watching, but a 102 inch variety that screws on the end of an antenna mount. I am a ham radio operator. And, while there are only a few online stores that sell primarily […]

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Amazon is creating a new series based on Tolkien’s Middle Earth. It will be set in the Second Age, the age dominated by the long-lived men of the island of Númenor. Here are the latest (but not so recent) rumors about the production. The Tolkien estate has announced the constraints it has placed on Amazon’s […]

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