You seem to be arguing that the same principles of government should apply at every scale. I don't think that can work. Should the small town consider purchasing a couple B2 bombers? Should the national government decide if my road needs to be repaved?
The plan we are discussing is a plan for national scale governance, and since your example is not on a national scale, the plan would not apply. If the isolated town wishes to enact their own laws to regulate Walmart, they may do so.
The locals may govern themselves locally. National leaders govern on a national scale.
Don’t be so cavalier in shrugging off the person you’re responding to. This kind of national scale governance is equatable to “centralized planning” governance. You have to consider it from the local economy perspective, otherwise you’ll be perpetuating inequality in many parts that you don’t see.
A town is more open to competition, anytime a third player can open up a store with relatively small investment. Meanwhile to take on a dominant player like Amazon is extremely hard.
I believe the line is drawn at ‘large-scale winner-takes-all players’. It doesn’t necessarily have to be fair but it is supposed to benefit the entire economy. As long as there’s a relative balance between the economical power of competitors no measures are required.
Except that the specific example everyone sites is Amazon, and Amazon isn't even in the double digits of all retail in the US [0]. WalMart on the other hand is 8.9% of all retail [1] -- nearly double what Amazon captures. Neither one is that much of the total market. Online is also a surprisingly small portion of total retail still, esp. when you start looking at the magnitude of the numbers.
Just to get this out of the way, I’m not saying it’s a good measure but I think it’s trying to tackle a real problem.
Regarding the ecommerce market share I’d like to know the current numbers and the trend over the years. One should not wait for 99% to start taking measures, all competitors will be dead by then.
Regarding the physical stores Amazon isn’t really trying to capture it as the barrier to entry is much lower than online and margins are low anyway.
> A town is more open to competition, anytime a third player can open up a store with relatively small investment. Meanwhile to take on a dominant player like Amazon is extremely hard.
You think it's easier to open a physical store to compete with Walmart than to spin up an ecommerce site to compete with Amazon?
A physical store, at a minimum, has built in advertising based on location. Budget in local advertising and people will shop there if prices, service, location, and the products are good. I couldnt even imagine how a new online store would be able to start competing with Amazon. There are existing webstores that over the years have lost a lot of business to amazon (Newegg, Sweetwater, B&H Photo, etc). Even local stores are losing business to amazon.
For sure. There are so many more parameters to physical store. Proximity is a HUGE one. Quality of service. Specific items that they stock. These kinds of things allow smaller stores to exist in my small town even while there is a huge supermarket nearby.
On the other hand, I do not use ANY one-stop site for online shopping outside of Amazon.
How is a Walmart easier... Amazon style disruption was the only way Walmart could ever be challenged, precisely because Amazon’s logistics are easier. These kinds of brick and mortar decisions at the town level have like 10 year consequences at a minimum, if not more.
It’s extremely difficult to project forward 10 years in tech.
Sibling comments make a point on how a physical store is easier to bring to market.
> It’s extremely difficult to project forward 10 years in tech.
I think this is a common misconception. Tech giants rise mostly because they create new markets. Since their beginnings nobody beat Microsoft on operating systems, nobody beat Google in search, nobody beat Facebook on social network market share.
The point would be that once you're dominant in a market it's very hard to be moved away and it takes more than a decade. I find it hard to believe a 1T dollar company can be outcompeted during less than a few decades.
Also as the tech/online market matures things naturally tend to slow down.
> I think this is a common misconception. Tech giants rise mostly because they create new markets. Since their beginnings nobody beat Microsoft on operating systems, nobody beat Google in search, nobody beat Facebook on social network market share.
Isn't this just another way of saying survivor bias? They are big because they survived and out-competed the competition, no? There were and are other operating systems, other search engines, other social networks. And sometimes even having the same things said about them... Think MySpace before Facebook. Until they got conquered.
These giants are huge because the internet -- to some approximation -- has no geographic boundaries. It's much easier to consolidate and hold power when you don't have to literally expand to every corner of the world where people physically live to capture them. Amazon and Facebook can acquire entire towns with nothing but a few more servers in the rack.
I agree that the internet is a more liquid and prone to winner-takes-all market. That’s why regulators tend to apply different rules.
I’m not sure if MySpace could be considered a giant at the time. Sure, it had popularity and market share, but it was not spraying billions around buying up competition or consolidating its business (Instagram, Whatsapp).
So Facebook didn’t take down any giants, instead it won a fair market competition. That was my point.
If there's only 1 Walmart store in a small town (no competitors near by), does that mean they can't sell their house brand there?
What about a Walmart in a town with a Target and 80% of the sales are at Walmart? Can Target sell their house brand if Walmart can't in this scenario?