every major retailer has store brands, and I fully expect they all use their sales data to inform their generic products business, and all of their suppliers expect that too. As a consumer, I like that Amazon is upfront about what products come from their brand. Good luck browsing through the plumbing and electrical fixtures at Home Depot or Lowes and figuring out what crappy store brand stuff and whats not.
(1) it's not just about generic products. Amazon uses the same approach to decide what non-generic products it should become a direct seller of, potentially (and normally) negatively impacting 3rd party sellers.
(2) HD and Lowes have almost no generic/store brand stuff at all. There are a few exceptions, and they likely do represent fairly profitable sections of their overall business. The main ones I am aware of: lighting, ceiling fans, toilets/sinks, flooring. That leaves huge sections of these stores without generics.
(1) You don't think HD and Lowes and Safeway and Walmart and every big retailer doesn't use their sales data to decide which products to try to disintermediate distributors and other middle-men in the supply chain?
(2) I'll concede HD and Lowes have a lot of departments without store brands [1], but raise you the local grocery store, which doesn't.
[1]: The pattern I see is that the stuff marketed mostly to contractors is less likely to be infected with crappy store brands than the stuff marked mostly to DIY'ers. I suspect its in part because pros will learn whats quality and whats crap a lot faster than DIYers, because the latter only buy a ceiling fan or whatever once a decade.
Amazon has done a lot more than you describe. Their marketplace has been a major online venue for retailers not just manufacturers and distributors. Companies (typically small) that focused on small niches (e.g. triathlon equipment). Amazon has siphoned off the best-sellers and high margin items from these sellers, making their businesses somewhere between less profitable and completely unviable.
The model here is not "Safeway and Walmart and every big retailer [ using their sales data]". It's more akin to the flagship store in a mall actually owning the mall, and requiring that all customers check out via their registers. Every other vendor in the mall surrenders all their sales data to the flagship, which it uses to decide how to use its own internal spaces to sell with higher volume and/or profit.
The own-brand stuff that Amazon is doing is dubious, but sure, I agree that many large retailers do it. Most large retailers do not operate 3rd party retail marketplaces, however, where they can siphon sales data from largely unsuspecting 3rd party retailers.
> figuring out what crappy store brand stuff and whats not.
Don't they usually have only one store brand? Or maybe two, if there's a premium option? I don't think I've ever questioned which is the store brand. I know I've questioned which non-store brands are of dubious origin though (e.g., knockoffs)
