This will likely not be useful: now you can't buy iPhones, and many companies will perform "assembly" in the United States to get around these kinds of things.
If I'm buying clothes for the gym, I don't want to buy "ROWILUX" or "YAKER" or "YSENTO" brand. I've bought enough to know they're all junk. Just show me the stuff that people actually put effort into! If I'm looking for an iPhone, I'll search for iPhones. If I'm looking for tank tops, show me the ones that aren't going to disintegrate after a month.
Those have ruined Amazon for me. Literally any search you do will yield pages of junk knockoff products with a name like that, all uppercase. It's ridiculous, really.
> If I'm buying clothes for the gym, I don't want to buy "ROWILUX" or "YAKER" or "YSENTO" brand. I've bought enough to know they're all junk. Just show me the stuff that people actually put effort into!
This is actually how I feel about self-published books. Amazon won't stop recommending them to me. I bought a couple, and the writing quality is truly atrocious. So now self-published just means I am guaranteed not to buy the book unless it gets a meaningful recommendation from someone trustworthy.
And I once bought the cheapest available toilet paper from Lucky. It was terrible, definitely not worth the minor savings.
On the other hand, I don't really think it's wrong for Amazon to be selling self-published books, or for Lucky to be selling ultra-cheap toilet paper.
I don't disagree, but why can't the market itself solve that instead of requiring government intervention? Just don't buy from people who don't disclose their supply chain (and perhaps rely on government to punish those who commit fraud by lying).
Because it’s cheaper to lie and accountability would require the government anyways. If forced arbitration and class action bans weren’t a thing then maybe private citizens could band together and sue but that method of accountability has been effectively killed.
Then you just get people lying about their supply chain. Markets require a certain amount of trust to function and that requires strong institutions to keep bad behaviour in check. Without that foundation you don’t really have a market, at least not for long.
I wouldn’t expect a market to stop this kind of behaviour but to simply put a price on it - “oh you want the non-toxic version? That’s an extra $20 please.”
> I wouldn’t expect a market to stop this kind of behaviour but to simply put a price on it - “oh you want the non-toxic version? That’s an extra $20 please.”
That isn't a market solution, it's a bad-faith caricature. Obviously, no vendor is going to offer you a choice between toxic and non-toxic, because doing so would mean admitting one of their products was toxic.
The market solution is branding; some vendors will build up reputations, and those good reputations will let them charge a higher price. This very minute you're commenting in a thread that's mostly about how Amazon's poor offerings are blackening its name.
But isn't that the same thing in effect? There will be two vendors, one of whom is trusted to provide non-toxic options, and one of whom is lesser known and $20 cheaper.
This happens today. A friend of mine is particularly sensitive to slightly-bad milk, so they buy a more expensive, known, organic brand of milk at the store instead of the store brand / local farmer's brand, because they have problems with store brand milk often enough.
It is similar, but I wouldn't call it the same. Some differences that I think are important:
- The shady no-name vendors are not trying to offer a toxic product.
- The shady no-name products usually don't cause problems. I wouldn't support outlawing store-brand milk because of your friend -- I drink store-brand milk all the time! As you yourself state, your friend is unusual.
I remember reading a teardown of a knock-off charger for Apple products which was (1) significantly cheaper; and (2) didn't include some safety measures that genuine Apple chargers do. The risk there was starting fires, not poisoning yourself, but to me the principle is identical.
The risk of starting fires is much higher with a knock-off charger, but everyone, vendor and customers, agrees that it's undesirable, and in practice it generally doesn't happen.
> The market solution is branding; some vendors will build up reputations, and those good reputations will let them charge a higher price.
And the scammer will simply use the brand without license and profit from the reputation of the original manufacturer. Nobody can do anything about because there's no government to enforce laws.
Why do you need the strong institution to be a government? Why can't Amazon itself be that strong institution out of emergent market demand that it start doing that?
(I guess another way of phrasing this is, Amazon is notoriously bad at removing poor-quality or counterfeit products from their storefront. How have they nonetheless become one of the most successful marketplaces? Is this a sign that the market doesn't actually care as much as we think they ought to? Or that they do care, but market mechanisms are ineffective at expressing this desire and so government regulation actually is needed?)
There's a really strong in-built faith people have that if you buy something, it's essentially non-harmful, and functions at least marginally for its intended purpose. This is actually part of US law (US Commercial Code Art. 2) (which is where we get that BSD license final clause from) - if this warranty isn't explicitly disclaimed, I think most people would assume the products they're receiving are genuine, of at least passable quality, and not actively toxic. Amazon isn't enforcing any of these on its sellers, thereby taking advantage of a huge amount of trust in the system - either the trust is going to be lost, at great detriment to goods markets as a whole, or someone needs to step in to enforce these statutes, since Amazon is unwilling to do it themselves.
manufactured in china isn't the same as shipped from a chinese seller. i think it would be difficult to profitably use the assembly workaround for small cheap stuff that gets sold by junk peddlers a la this press release
