
Amazon's Stealth Brands: Everything on Amazon Is Amazon - pdog
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/15/style/this-is-also-amazon.html
======
dschuler
"it's about the scale that Amazon does it at" "it's just they do it on a
massive scale" "This is something that Amazon is great at" "Target is doing
the same...but they just don't have the massive scale" "As a consumer I love
what Amazon is doing" "Lots of respect to those guys" "the most important
advantage Amazon has: it has data...with this data, it enters markets and
undercuts its competition at the perfect price point"

At some point I feel like I'm being astroturfed.

People are amazed Amazon sells pasta and batteries under their own brand?
Sounds like Ikea to me.

Amazon has several problems they haven't corrected in years - generally not
great prices, fake products being co-mingled with genuine items, fake reviews,
flaky or slow shipping (esp. with their own delivery people). I've even had a
few brand new books arrive with binding or cover damage. Ugh.

~~~
giancarlostoro
They really need verified vendors that Amazon can vouch for. These vendors
would need to be tested without knowing by Amazon to make sure third party
ones are not being sneaky. Especially if customers complain.

~~~
neogodless
Twice I've got 12 mouse traps from Amazon. Each time it's been a different
vendor (not Amazon.) Literally 20 minutes ago I just checked the mailbox, and
there was a padded envelope in it - my latest (third) order of mouse traps,
from a third vendor. Inside the envelope? ONE mouse trap.

Sorry, anecdote and vent. But yes, we need verified vendors that actually ship
you what you order.

(I'll be a good boy and pick up mouse traps from Home Depot. I've learned my
lesson the hard way.)

~~~
ams6110
You must have a lot of mice? I've had great luck with these:
[https://www.homedepot.com/p/Tomcat-Mouse-Snap-
Traps-2-Pack-B...](https://www.homedepot.com/p/Tomcat-Mouse-Snap-Traps-2-Pack-
BL33505/202021750)

~~~
neogodless
Well the first order was at my old house. The next was last winter when we got
the fall/winter influx. That repeated, even worse, this fall. The Victor Snap
traps work great. But we need a bunch of them (and we'll probably need to find
entry points and try to reduce that if we can.)

------
notatoad
This was actually a fairly interesting article, except for the strange tone -
amazon isn't hiding that these are their brands, they seem to be flagged as
"our brand" all over the place. so what's with the mspaint red circles
pointing out incredibly obvious associations? Is this supposed to be satire,
or does the author really believe they've discovered some sort of conspiracy
here?

~~~
AndrewKemendo
As the article points out, the practice is nothing new, it's about the scale
that Amazon does it at.

And that's basically the point for everything Amazon does. They aren't doing
anything other companies don't, it's just they do it on a massive scale.

With "store brand" specifically, the idea is that Equate or other store brands
were well known to be comparable, if slightly less good versions of name
brands. In economics terms they were "substitute goods" from brand names, but
depending on quality they may not be "perfect substitutes."

In the case of Amazon, if they have brands that are at first glance _not_
Amazon brands, but actually are amazon brands, then they are kind of doing an
end run around what was an implicit agreement between consumers and retailers.
Namely that a retailer will make it explicitly clear, with obvious branding,
what is a "store brand" and what is not. Simply stating "our brands" isn't
obvious enough to make that connection if you are only spending 30 seconds on
a product description page.

This is something that Amazon is great at actually.

~~~
dixie_land
> Namely that a retailer will make it explicitly clear, with obvious branding,
> what is a "store brand" and what is not.

how are brandings such as Kirkland Signature(Costco), Simple Truth(Kroger) or
365(Wholefoods) any more obvious than what Amazon is doing with "our brands"?

~~~
jld
The fact that those brands are used storewide make them more identifiable as
store brands.

You can buy simple truth milk, chicken, soup, and diapers at Kroger stores.

Amazon has multiple distinct brands per category, which makes keeping track
much harder.

~~~
thenanyu
Kroger:
[https://www.kroger.com/b/ourbrands](https://www.kroger.com/b/ourbrands)
Macys: [https://www.macysinc.com/macys/private-
brands/default.aspx](https://www.macysinc.com/macys/private-
brands/default.aspx)

Many of those brands are not obviously private label. Whole Foods and Costco
are the exception in that they have only 1 store brand that everything is
labeled under. This is probably because they are high-value brands unto
themselves and it's advantageous to put their own stamp on it.

------
thenanyu
The most telling paragraph in the article is the last one:

> "As is often the case with Amazon, what seem like strange or inexplicable
> new behaviors are often old retail strategies unfolding on the internet,
> quickly, and in plainer view. Brooke Mille is no more a lie than any other
> brand: It’s just newer and faster and more online. And it has a lot more
> company."

In other words, nothing new here, Amazon is doing what retailers have always
done, just on Internet scale. As someone who worked in retail for a long time,
I kept waiting for the punchline but I should have read that last paragraph
first.

It's hard for me to figure out why this is newsworthy. I wish the New York
Times would stop publishing stuff like this. Amazon does a lot that is
interesting, evil, novel, etc. to report on. This article just adds noise.

~~~
petra
>> In other words, nothing new here

Up until now, when i read stories about the market share of Amazon private
brands(and i'm quite curious about that subject), i never heard about those
kind of hidden brands mentioned in the story. And of course, they we're
mentioned in market share calculations.

Taking that into account, it's possible that Amazon has or will have:

1\. A large/dominating market share in many categories.

2\. It would be a secret, preventing questions about a monopoly to rise.

------
aresant
On the extreme end of "brand value you've got Kanye West selling a 100% cotton
t-shirt for $120. (1)

On the other end you've got Amazon not even bothering with a logo and selling
a 100% cotton t-shirt for $14.99. (2)

And the Amazon shirt is rated 4.5+ stars.

As a consumer I love what Amazon is doing,

Retail "brands" are the most notorious of all of the middle men.

And they had to be - how do you deliver a product to a physical retail
location that needs at least a 2 - 3x on each product sold to pay the rent,
the front of house employees, etc?

As a result these "brands" were never product innovators, mostly they're
perfunctory with giant marketing budgets to build their "brand value".

Remember Nike's "pumps" innovation back in the day? Was that a product
innovation or was that a marketing innovation?

And this reality in retail brands has led to all sorts of notorious abuses -
on the subject of Nike they famously figured out how to arbitrage child labor
- relying on shit hold labor conditions for ~30 years until they got caught
truly well and good with their pants down w/a famous LIFE Magazine story.(3)

Amazon's supply chain innovations flattened the market, and now we see cases
as laid out here where the overseas factory owner is building the brands, or
building the brands in collaboration with Amazon. It's not going to be
perfect, but at least it's a step in the right direction.

Amazon is clearly in the middle of calibrating their own own morale compass,
but as a consumer I delight in seeing the mid-market retail kings getting
stomped on.

(1) [https://www.okayplayer.com/news/style-kanye-west-
apc-120-pla...](https://www.okayplayer.com/news/style-kanye-west-
apc-120-plain-white-hiphop-t-shirt-sells-out.html)

(2) [https://www.amazon.com/Goodthreads-Short-Sleeve-Crewneck-
Cot...](https://www.amazon.com/Goodthreads-Short-Sleeve-Crewneck-Cotton-T-
Shirt/dp/B06XW6GDZC/)

(3) [http://mallenbaker.net/article/clear-reflection/nike-and-
chi...](http://mallenbaker.net/article/clear-reflection/nike-and-child-labour-
how-it-went-from-laggard-to-leader)

~~~
Retric
15$ for a cotton T-shirt is still a huge markup.

And the way this operates, Amazon is just a middleman somone else manufactures
the shirts they just don’t provide the brand. Which means the actual
manufacturer has little reasons to care about quality.

~~~
paulcole
> 15$ for a cotton T-shirt is still a huge markup.

How does the profit and costs break down on a t-shirt sold online?

Curious to hear since you sound like an expert in the field.

------
mogadsheu
Bezos read about Rockefeller’s old plays.

Standard Oil had a large number of small subsidiary oil companies under
different names, many of which weren’t clearly understood to be owned by
Standard. It was one of their ways of preventing anti-trust accusations
against them.

Amazon Prime is effectively a postal commerce version of Standard’s rail
rebate system.

Lots of respect to those guys, whether you agree with their actions on a moral
basis or not. They’ve been reading up on their history.

~~~
winningcontinue
Amazon as a retailer doesn't make much money. Margins are thin, and even
thinner with their free shipping. Creating their own private brands of
consumer products are not going to make them much money, but it'd make sure
they control not just the sale but the production of the item itself.

------
benologist
Bezos recently talked about how Amazon would eventually fail, it seems
inevitable when you commandeer your vendors' profits _and_ claw back any
disposable income your workers have _and_ demand massive tax breaks to
complement massive tax manipulations. Vacuum up all the money and what will
people spend on Amazon?

Apple seems to do the same under Cook too, focusing obsessively on making sure
their suppliers don't have any undue profit whilst they themselves demand
$100s in profit per telephone, to toss on $100s of billions they desperately
avoid taxes on.

The only profit these organizations want to pursue anymore comes at someone
else's expense, rather than creating more value.

~~~
odonnellryan
Bad for people as a whole? Sure. Good for people who have 1/10th+ of their
portfolio in Amazon? Absolutely.

~~~
imustbeevil
Down 12% in the last month though. I guess you could say everything is down,
but that's kind of the point when billionaires and corporations hoard all of
the money.

~~~
i_cant_speel
That's my fault personally. I recently put a significant amount of money into
it. It happens every time I buy something.

~~~
lurquer
You too? For the benefit of the greater good, I’ve stopped investing for
several years. I just couldn’t stomach the damage I was doing to the markets.

------
Animats
As the article points out, Costco just sells their own stuff under the
Kirkland brand. Much Kirkland stuff is made by major US brands, and is often
identical to the branded product, but cheaper. They don't bother hiding that
it's their own brand.[1]

Amusingly, Costco sells their Kirkland items on Amazon. Or, rather, somebody
called "ShippedFast" does. Now who's ShippedFast? They seem to be in Florida
and the phone number maps to a residence. But Amazon doesn't disclose the
identity of the seller.

[1] [https://hip2save.com/2018/09/11/brands-costco-kirkland-
items...](https://hip2save.com/2018/09/11/brands-costco-kirkland-items/)

------
ctvo
The article doesn't go into the most important advantage Amazon has: it has
data on what sells well and what markets it should enter using existing brands
on its marketplace. With this data, it enters markets and undercuts its
competition at the perfect price point.

~~~
briandear
Then consumers win. The competitors can lower their prices/increase their
quality/improve efficiency and consumers get to buy better products for less.

~~~
partiallypro
Amazon often has higher prices than Walmart & Target, but people still don't
shop Walmart online because Amazon is convenient. Amazon knows the perfect
price point to stop people from shopping around to other online outlets, that
doesn't mean it is giving the lowest price to consumers.

People will, in person, buy something from Walmart instead of Kroger over $2,
but Amazon has somehow figured out how to keep people on their site by
properly measuring demand elasticity.

Not to mention most listings on Amazon now are ads for products on Amazon.
Tide, etc pay for top placements in the stores. So Amazon gets fulfillment cut
and money from ad revenue. It's pretty impressive.

------
onetimemanytime
They're pulling a Google...they've started to eat their tail. Google, for
those that don't know, started with the goal of sending you to the best site.
Today, oh well, it's virtually all ads /google products. They're trying to
make you click their most profitable ads

~~~
odonnellryan
I half agree. Google is still pretty good for finding information on many
subjects.

~~~
scottlegrand2
Indeed but the cognitive load of scrolling through those ads, especially on
mobile, is part of why everything is perceived as sucking these days IMO.

It's like there's a late-stage capitalism barrier to entry to get to the good
stuff on every platform these days. I mean who out there actually wants
autoplay videos and unending push notifications?

------
0xddd
What is the idea with these garish MS Paint graphics? Am I the only one
finding them incredibly distracting?

~~~
dvtrn
No, that really threw me off too, not because it's objectively bad, but
because I know and have seen how NYT is capable of some really impressive
feats creating visualizations and visual aides for their stories; it's
objectively bad _considering the source_.

~~~
Cenk
Yes, because the graphics are a visual joke. The illustrator, Tarcy Ma, does
great work: [http://tracyma.com](http://tracyma.com)

~~~
dvtrn
_the graphics are a visual joke._

It sailed _way_ over my head apparently, what's the punchline here?

~~~
bobthepanda
It seems to be parody of conspiracy sites. Which would make sense, given that
none of this is actually that crazy or hidden as a conspiracy.

Intentional terrible graphic design has been used before by other notable
publications like Bloomberg: [http://incitrio.com/wp-
content/uploads/2014/09/tim-cook-bloo...](http://incitrio.com/wp-
content/uploads/2014/09/tim-cook-bloomberg-cover-01.png)

------
mikeash
"Is Amazon" meaning "is made by other manufacturers and white-labeled for
Amazon" apparently. Why is this interesting?

~~~
ikeboy
Antitrust concerns when they compete with their own vendors and give
themselves advantages

~~~
mikeash
Are they competing with their own vendors when they’re paying those vendors to
make the stuff?

~~~
ikeboy
They aren't paying the same people. If I sell my own brand, and they make
their own brand and pay someone else to make it, they're competing with me on
a platform they control and they give themselves advantages - such as showing
up ahead of me in search (Google got fined a lot of money for this exact
practice), putting links to their products on my product page saying "buy our
brands instead" (yes, they really do this, see
[https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/02/amazon-is-testing-a-new-
feat...](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/02/amazon-is-testing-a-new-feature-that-
promotes-its-private-label-brands-inside-a-competitors-product-listing.html)),
giving themselves exemptions from policies they apply to third party sellers
like review manipulation bans (see Vine program), etc

------
petra
So Amazon offering more and more business services, or in other words doing
more tasks that other businesses used to do.

And the interesting thing is, that they found almost a risk free way(for
them), to do those tasks. Which fits Bezos's experience as an investor, always
dealing with profit vs risk.

For example, for small/medium companies, creating efficient supply chains for
varying demand was risky. But for Amazon, with it's size and great demand
control and forecasting, it's probably not that risky.

The same with creating a new private brand - Amazon has a lot of knowledge of
what sells, They control free ad inventory, and they control their customer,
via search.

So it would be interesting to ask: what things businesses do are still risky -
and would be left to external companies to do ? And what risky things can
Amazon de-risk and take in-house ?

------
diebir
Amazon is useless for high end outdoor gear. Not just gear even, but clothing.
If something is available, it is often past years models, odd colors, sizes
and the prices are non-competitive.

------
dana321
Amazon definitely focus on quantity, not quality.

Everything works.. Just and no more.

Their web interfaces and APIs are clunky, and there is a lack of any way to
flag up an undelivered package.

------
lucas_membrane
I don't read the gray lady on account of the paywall, but this is something I
have noticed somewhat in recent days. For the usual reasons of distrust of
excessive economic power, I have not bought from Amazon for a few years.
However, as part of that, I have bought from Abebooks until the last month,
when I learned that it was owned by Amazon. I had previously run some quick
searches trying to learn who owned Abebooks, and did not find anything. It is
also not evident on the Abebooks website. Looking for another source for
books, I found an on-line vendor that looks similar to Abebooks, listing used
and new books for sale from various booksellers in diverse places. I checked
it out and could not link it to any overly large enterprises. That was good,
and the other site prices are not obviously higher than Abebooks, but the new
site adds $4 shipping on each book, so my cost for used books is now up about
25%. Not good, but I'll pay it to not feed the monster.

So, as both Abebooks and the new site list used books for sale by various
bookstores, many of the same books are listed on both sites, and my new vendor
might even present a better selection of what I look for. That's good. But
some of the vendors that offer the lowest prices deal only through
abebooks.com, ie Amazon/Bezos, and they list very many books on the
Amazon/Bezos site. Coincidentally, one of them, the Book Depository, shown as
being located in England, is owned by Amazon, ships free to the US, but when
the packages arrive, they appear to have been shipped from the US.

All of that is business as usual for a megacorp, but another bookshop that
sells beaucoups of books through Amazon's abebooks is Seattle Goodwill, a non-
profit. This raises my eyebrows because I live in a state near Seattle in
which Goodwill's non-profit status has been in question because of high
compensation given to its executives. I suspect that the relationship between
Amazon and Goodwill may be somewhat complex. Amazon gives its customers free
shipping to donate items to tax-exempt Goodwill, Goodwill then sells the items
through an Amazon subsidiary, Amazon gets a commission on the sale, what's
going on? Goodwill is a non-profit that does 'job-training'. Are 'trainees'
not earning Seattle's high minimum wage part of this business? What does this
operation look like? Anyone know?

------
Agathos
I wonder: if I sell something on Amazon and make it an Amazon-exclusive brand,
will I find it easier to keep counterfeit knockoffs out of their inventory?

~~~
ikeboy
Yes, you pay an extra 5% commission or so but get real "gating", nobody else
can sell it

------
viburnum
This is so Amazon can sell you garbage and avoid tarnishing their brand. For a
while anyway.

------
dqpb
The real story here is why is NYT systematically attacking all the FAANG
companies?

------
sgustard
Amazon's been well known for relentless A/B testing of every last pixel in
their checkout UI. This is simply an extension of that A/B testing mentality
to individual products. Flood the user's search results with a litany of
similar and confusingly-branded products and see what sticks.

