Author is missing a big chunk of what selling retail product requires, which is shipment and delivery costs. For a $5.49 laundry detergent, the cost to ship it your may very well exceed the price of the product if you're small retailer.
At least by paying Amazon I can avoid dealing with all that. While I may pass the price to the consumer for Fulfilled-By-Amazon fees, which tends to be around $5.18 ~ $3.5 (quick google search), it's still a lot cheaper than using something like FedEx where it costs $10-12 per order.
The takeaway here is that Amazon has democratized fast and cheap delivery by building a monopoly. As the scale of things go up, the cost of operations can really go down. Think of meal prepping, when you cook food in bulk vs each meal separately, you're saving costs on power, gas and produce.
The only question is whether we can build a public benefit corporation, just like Amazon.
In the UK amazon has completely removed free shipping in an effort to push everyone to prime. YUou used to be able to wait 5 days for free shipping, not any more.
In the German site I get free shipping over 60 Eur, but only by stuff shipped by amazon. And other vendors somehow manage to always screw up shipping, so now I have had all orders for used books that had no/invalid tracking number, not arrive and I have/had to negotiate a refund for all of these refunds with the vendors themselves instead of amazon. So all-in-all, amazon is actually good, makes stuff available that’s impossible to find locally (books in English), and does shipping well.
I think that's because in general shipping in the UK became incredibly expensive during and after COVID, and never ever went down again. Coupled with Brexit, shipping companies all pushed their prices up en masse for no apparent reason, and it's never gone down again.
This is really fascinating, only if there was a way to make your dog receive feedback as the game develops. Like make it pick color by matching placement of treat based on the color shown on the screen.
Similarly, do it for story telling narratives, game textures etc. Although I do not think the dog understands natural language so all of it will likely be a dud.
At least by paying Amazon I can avoid dealing with all that. While I may pass the price to the consumer for Fulfilled-By-Amazon fees, which tends to be around $5.18 ~ $3.5 (quick google search), it's still a lot cheaper than using something like FedEx where it costs $10-12 per order.
The takeaway here is that Amazon has democratized fast and cheap delivery by building a monopoly. As the scale of things go up, the cost of operations can really go down. Think of meal prepping, when you cook food in bulk vs each meal separately, you're saving costs on power, gas and produce.
The only question is whether we can build a public benefit corporation, just like Amazon.
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