There's at least one.

Mom and pop can easily compete with Wal-Mart and Amazon if there was a level playing field. You just don't understand how twisted the playing field is because you have zero experience with retail and logistics.

The big boys get tax subsidies when they move in, they get concessions from local governments, they get favorable treatment at the border with customs, etc. and that's just on the surface. They get huge discounts from UPS for infrastructure build-outs, but then UPS again gets subsidized through the roof in the same ways Amazon is directly. So on and so forth.

Mom and pop can get the same prices out of China, it has nothing to do with scale. After you're ordering a container worth of stuff, you're not going to reduce the price of whatever you're selling by buying more. That's why Amazon doesn't manufacture much and relies on the Mom and Pop to do that sort of thing, while still kicking Wal-Mart's ass.

As far as Mom and Pop vs Amazon ... Amazon wouldn't allow them to sell on their platform if they weren't a threat. But they do and they are. There's a reason eBay is a multi-billion dollar company and has been for a while.

Amazon may yet become that. They are not that yet. Walmart has an infamous reputation for being brutal with suppliers. That reputation is far beyond anything Amazon has yet become known for. Walmart also completely dictates who has access to their vast retail system, which is still roughly three times the size of Amazon. Simply put, Walmart's system is radically more restrictive in terms of providing selling access, than Amazon - and it's three times larger.

Half of Amazon's retail sales aren't even from Amazon, they're from independent sellers, and that percentage has been perpetually increasing. For Walmart, it's almost entirely them controlling the sales.

It has merely become popular lately to point the fear cannons at Amazon. It's a cultural mania. Last week it was Walmart everyone was terrified of. In the late 1990s, every headline was breathlessly touting how Walmart was going to take over all of retail and put everyone else out of business.

That isn't actually happening at all. That comes across as what you wish were occurring. Unless you're referring to eBay's share of online commerce persistently contracting as they stagnate. It isn't a new problem, eBay as a force in ecommerce has been eroding for many years now.

It's why eBay has a $22b market cap and their market platform has entirely stopped growing. Their stock multiple is so low because nobody believes in their growth story (it doesn't have one). Over four years they've seen an average of about 6% annual growth, although that includes other non-auction businesses they had acquired. It's also why they're a juicy takeover target: the lack of growth gives them a cheap valuation, combined with good margins and a difficult to remove quasi-monopoly position in auctions. There is no future for eBay other than in the belly of someone larger, and soon.

Amazon of course has been going gangbusters on growth during that time, becoming ever more dominant in online retail. The exact opposite of what you're describing.

Can they? They aren't the ones selling those products, individual companies set their own prices - and they have to pay a cut to Amazon. Even if that cut goes to 0 (making Amazon lose lots of money), that only puts them at barely better than the rest of the market. Walmart sets its own prices.

>2) Given purchasing power scale and people like fast delivery there will only be a handful of companies that can complete with Amazon ever, so it seems unlikely there will be a 'started in the garage' business compete with them now the market is maturing.

I think this has been proven wrong time and again. There's always a way into the market.

>3) With the extra profit Amazon are making vs a competitors they can develop and buy technologies or business to keep a moat around them for a long time.

Just the same way every other company has maintained an iron grip on every market it's in...?

History repeats itself, companies rise and fall, and they gain and lose market share even when they have an endless supply of money.

The most important part of running a business like Amazon is consumer trust - and Amazon is playing a losing game right now.

It is not Amazon, it is online shopping in general. They never were going to survive a world where their competition can sell the same goods without having all the capital and labor expenses of a storefront.

A few of the big ones will survive due to convenience, but the niche stores where you do not need the product today or tomorrow have no competitive advantage against a website, outside of a few high end stores where richer people can afford to pay extra for the shopping experience.

So they've provided a worse service? I'm fine with it, if it means lower prices.

Of course they had a choice. And not only "to sell or become worthless", but also invent or innovate, as Amazon did, when it swallowed a huge chunk of Walmart's pie.

I don't know if Amazon is good or bad, neither myself nor anybody around ever used it, but if its service would not be good enough, any competitor could easily use it to conquer the market (as Amazon itself did), until Amazon would protect itself via regulatory capture.

I have lately noticed amazon is increasingly more expensive and return policies more restrictive. Yes, it is good for their business but I find amazon is getting less compelling offering for me.

And the 'very long run' part is cleverly phrased obviousness. I mean in the very long run I do not see why human with so many shortcomings would not be replaced by some superior digital form of life.

Because - I believe - people are overwhelmingly reactionary, easy to excite and short-term focused. Microsoft was the end of the world. Google is the end of the world. IBM before them. Yesterday Walmart was the destroyer of worlds that was going to kill every small business in every town in America. Countless articles were written for a decade espousing that as fact, inevitable, unstoppable. They were pure evil, everyone knew it. Nobody could compete with them. That reactionary emotionalism against The Corporate Overlords, is now retrained on Amazon as the destroyer of worlds, the evil entity that will crush everyone. Tomorrow it will be someone else.

The most interesting story about Amazon - which is being almost universally ignored - is that the growth in their retail business has already mostly stopped (some shareholders are finally noticing). In the next few years that growth will continue to trend toward between zero and low single digits. The mighty retail conquerer of worlds is running out of retail growth and mostly that is being ignored because it doesn't bolster the story of the moment that Amazon is going to eat everything.

I agree with you, but what I meant by "viable" was more from a consumer perspective.

> This inhuman model - yes, I think that is exactly what it is - will displace everything else that simply can't compete in runaway capitalism.

While I think you're mostly right, Amazon is eventually going to burn enough buyers that they go back to the more trustworthy brick-and-mortar stores.

Most people I personally know have already done this. They may search for something on Amazon, but they will go and buy it somewhere else.

I'm obviously part of a very specific subset, but it's going to hurt Amazon eventually, especially if the US takes a more consumer-friendly regulatory approach than it has for the past few years (which it will).

This is actually a great example, but not the way you intended it.

Amazon isn't beating Walmart. They haven't even dented Walmart's revenue[1]. They're just killing everyone other than Walmart.

Walmart is now unbeatable because they're so big, they can demand wholesale prices that no one else can. If Walmart wants to buy 100M tomatoes from you, you'd sell them barely above cost because otherwise you're stuck with more tomatoes than you could ever sell.

To put it another way: you can't compete with these companies because they abuse their market power (either directly or through regulatory capture), not because they're actually that good at anything.

1. https://fourweekmba.com/amazon-vs-walmart/

If Etsy can fit in just becoming another giant generic undifferentiated seller of things, then yeah, this all checks out.[0] But my question is how much room the market has for those kinds of businesses. If Etsy does become just another big generic seller of things, why keep using them over Amazon, eBay, or Walmart? What are they going to compete with them on?

It's true Amazon used to be more niche (books), but I think they were early enough that they didn't have to worry too much about someone crushing them.

Walmart was always a giant seller of things, just a physical one that went online, but I don't think they were ever really niche.

Did eBay have a niche? I thought they were also pretty much just selling generic stuff from the beginning.

[0]:

> You are the one that is having problems accepting it, but it will not change reality.

I think you're confusing not thinking this is likely with some kind of denialism/not wanting it to be true. I don't especially care a whole lot if Etsy ends up being a giant generic seller of things, I'm just not sure that'll work. At the point where Etsy is just re-skinned Amazon, what stops Amazon from crushing them?

Amazon is less than 3% of US retail. Walmart's retail business is three times the size of Amazon's retail business. And that's before we count the fact that half of Amazon's retail business, isn't Amazon at all.

Amazon is not going to actually dominate all of retail. Amazon is not going to become a retail monopoly. Amazon is not going to build a retail business dramatically larger than Walmart's retail business. The shrieks to the contrary are strictly emotionalism rather than fact-based, just as they were 12 or 15 years ago when Walmart was going to destroy everything in retail and monopolize everything. It's just as silly and absurd to pretend Amazon is going to do the same thing. What Amazon has is an early lead in online retail, because they were an aggressive first mover. Only ~10-12% of US retail has moved online. As that percentage dramatically increases in the next 20 years, Amazon's total share of online commerce will fall accordingly. They're not going to be doing $3 trillion in annual sales in 15 years. It'll be extremely impressive if they can manage to one day catch up to Walmart's retail size.

> Neither media or public sentiment towards Amazon is great right now

Public sentiment towards Amazon is extraordinarily high. They typically have the highest, or one of the highest rated brands and consumer experiences. Their customer service is routinely voted as among the best of any company.

What opinion pieces in the NY Times say about Amazon, are not at all representative of how the majority of people feel about Amazon. That's a classic echo chamber premise.

That's probably true, but the truth is that situation was an unstable equilibrium in the first place. There's absolutely no reason in a functioning market to expect (or want!) one provider to be the uniform best option at all things. Eventually everyone else starts competing.

To wit: the situation over the past decade wasn't so much defined by Amazon being better (or "not evil", given the framing I'm saying here), it was that everyone else sucked. Now they don't suck so much, and Amazon is having to compete in ways (like profit!) they used to be able to ignore.

That's a good thing, not a bad thing.

but burying alternatives, they basically drive smaller product competitors away, reducing their sales and their ability to grow and innovate.

Amazon has been blatantly copying products that other brand sold, and made them cheaper. Great for consumers if the only thing you care about it price.

Because the game is getting rigged and Amazon products will always be more prominent, no-one can compete with Amazon on these products.

You end up with less competition and less choice. Amazon can just undercut you, push you down in their listings and get the lion's share of any product type they find lucrative.

Certainly not all that bad but where do you imagine this is going if no-one else is able to compete with Amazon?

Amazon is already king and has power of life and death on countless businesses that rely on it being an impartial party so they have a chance to sell their ware.

I mean, then they'll either raise prices to pay for it, or spend money towards improving working conditions, or whatever they need to do.

But it's all extremely straightforward. There's zero evidence that Amazon is in some kind of unique position where they'll be unable to be profitable and have to go out of business, while Wal-Mart and Target succeed. To the contrary, Amazon's doing better than anyone else.

IMHO, the system is [china builds things] -> [middle man sells it on amazon] -> [consumer buys it on amazon]. Amazon needs these middle man people and has starting cutting them out by producing their own lines to create even more profit. The only way Amazon will die is if the graph turns into: [china builds things] -> [consumer buys it]. I know, I know, i hear everyone saying: that is impossible. But I don't think it is and I think that is coming.

This is what I don't get. Where Amazon will enter and who it will need to defeat has been abundantly clear for well over a decade. But all of their competitors have just chosen to lie down and slowly die.

I don't believe this to be the case. How is Amazon a monopoly, given the large number of online retailers that continue to be successful?

As long as it takes to get the monopoly.

This can't be rushed. Their competition is from i.e. Walmart. These competitors are big and a single major event isn't going to take them down. It requires a series of major events for a company of that size to fall out of serious competition. But it does happen: look at Sears. It took almost three decades, starting with a pricing scandal in 1992 to declaring bankruptcy in 2018, with many mis-steps along the way, but they did eventually fall.

> I don't really see how they could maintain a monopoly and a margin at the same time. If they had actual profit margins then other companies would compete with them.

By that logic, monopolies can't be profitable, but they clearly are profitable, so your logic must be faulty.

Once a company reaches a certain scale, it becomes very difficult to start a competing company for a bunch of reasons:

1. First to market advantage: name recognition. Amazon is a household name. A new company isn't. A new company could overcome this with marketing, but marketing costs money, and then they have to pass that cost on to consumers, and Amazon will win on price.

2. First to market advantage: pre-existing infrastructure. Amazon has warehouses everywhere, so they can deliver to most places quickly. In places like NYC or SF they can deliver something from a few miles away, so they can deliver it on the same day. They have already spent this money, so they can provide this speed at a lower cost. A new company could overcome this by building out their own infrastructure, but this costs money which they have to pass on to consumers, and again Amazon wins on price.

3. Efficiencies of scale: Amazon is already huge. If it costs them $10 to write a line of code or lay a brick, that cost is amortized across millions of purchases that occur each day. A new company has to write the same line of code and lay the same brick to provide the same feature or distribution center, but that cost is amortized across only a few hundred purchases a day when they're new.

There are more reasons, but basically, Amazon is well past the point where new companies could pop up and reasonably compete with them based on profit margins alone. They still have competition, but it's from the likes of Walmart--other giant companies that already have some of the same advantages Amazon does. It would be possible for a newcomer to compete, but it would require an extraordinary innovation which is highly unlikely.

> The reason they look like a monopoly at the moment is because they have no margins. If they change that, competition will spring up like mushrooms.

They don't look like a monopoly because they aren't yet. They have major competition with, for example, Walmart.