The WSJ has done numerous articles detailing the many problems of Amazon's third party marketplace. Lead in toy products, counter fit products, products that otherwise violate recalls and safety requirements. They've also documented how easy it is to find these products, to buy them, and they're sometimes even recommended by Amazon's algorithm with that label they put on their top search result.
Amazon has responded to lawsuits with the hands off "hey it's not us, it's the seller and we're not going to vet our sellers stuff." So apparently it's the customer's job. I don't have the time or knowledge to know how to test toys I buy for my daughter for lead so I just don't buy from Amazon unless it's a hard to find book or something I'm pretty sure won't be dangerous.
I used to buy all my home gym stuff from Amazon stuff and since have switched to directly buying from brands like Rogue Fitness, or Titan and the difference in the quality of even basic stuff like weights, is just worth skipping Amazon. The dumbbells I've bought from Amazon all have some form of rust on them now.
It's that way for clothing and everything else I've tried. Amazon is a game of hit or miss trash. In the midst of the pandemic I actually could not find a Surface charger for my laptop anywhere but Amazon and had to buy it from them and I was so worried it was counterfeit. It wasn't. I was lucky.
Has WSJ released any figures as to the prevalence with this or are they just presenting individual accounts?
If I’ve gotten counterfeits they were certainly of the quality i was expecting from the brand name and I really don’t care, that’s the free marketplace baby, capitalism at full health.
> If I’ve gotten counterfeits they were certainly of the quality i was expecting from the brand name and I really don’t care
Except that the other end of that spectrum is kids toys with lead in them. Or, hell, adult toys with lead in them.
Point is you don’t really get to say “the harmless counterfeits are fine, just stop the harmful ones” when you don’t know which ones are harmful. The only way to avoid that ambiguity is to stop counterfeits as a whole. A total lack of regulation isn’t capitalism at full health, it’s poison, often quite literally!
All industries? At no point do we have pure unregulated capitalism anywhere in the modern world.
But for a specific example of high regulations and decent outcomes look at the food industry, whether that be restaurants or the food supply chain or farms. All of it is highly regulated for good reason.
I'm not sure about all the regulations being for good reason. Some do exist to protect existing players, like taxi medallions. And some, are perhaps outdated in the name of "protecting the consumer" when online reviews and reputation systems tend to achieve similar results with little oversight.
There’s a difference between “regulation is a good reason” and “the regulations that were created are good”.
Taxi medallions is a good example: NYC streets were flooded with taxis and it was slowing down traffic. And there weren’t enough passengers for drivers to make a living. So limiting the numbers did make sense. But the way it was implemented was far from perfect.
Err, is “industry” of all things what society is supposed to optimize for? That just seems like a shitty conception of both the point of industry and governance itself.
In any case if you think commodities industries are working healthily I really have to disagree. Most products are unnecessarily expensive crap. We have little consumer choice in most markets critical to people’s health and livelihood and no way to incentivize improvements.
Actually, that is 100% the natural conclusion of capitalism. It doesn’t care about states or boundaries, all you really need is the ability to control capital.
> If I’ve gotten counterfeits they were certainly of the quality i was expecting from the brand name and I really don’t care, that’s the free marketplace baby, capitalism at full health.
A free market, by definition, has full transparency; if you can unwittingly get a counterfeit, it's not a free market.
A counterfeit is meaningless in a free market—intellectual property is an unnecessary constraint on the market to incentivize production of goods.
A brand is just a label, immaterial to the quality of the received commodity. The term I would use for folks who buy an expensive item, sight unseen, and expecting proportional quality, from a third party market is “sucker”. Regulating counterfeit sales will just keep prices high and competitive pressure low, fucking us all over.
Why not simply regulate the quality of the item and force brands to compete on things that matter? Say, require phones to have offer a version with a headphone jack so you aren’t forced to shell out endless money for dongles and bluetooth sets every X years.
Amazon has responded to lawsuits with the hands off "hey it's not us, it's the seller and we're not going to vet our sellers stuff." So apparently it's the customer's job. I don't have the time or knowledge to know how to test toys I buy for my daughter for lead so I just don't buy from Amazon unless it's a hard to find book or something I'm pretty sure won't be dangerous.
I used to buy all my home gym stuff from Amazon stuff and since have switched to directly buying from brands like Rogue Fitness, or Titan and the difference in the quality of even basic stuff like weights, is just worth skipping Amazon. The dumbbells I've bought from Amazon all have some form of rust on them now.
It's that way for clothing and everything else I've tried. Amazon is a game of hit or miss trash. In the midst of the pandemic I actually could not find a Surface charger for my laptop anywhere but Amazon and had to buy it from them and I was so worried it was counterfeit. It wasn't. I was lucky.