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: Itβs 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.
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.
The Times has somewhat recently decided that they are going to demonstrate that they understand the tech industry by reporting on anything and everything that happens, although this often gives the opposite impression.
As they say, man bites dog is a story. Dog bites man is not. But if you're new to the dog bite beat, you may not know what's news and what's not.
It's not only the nytimes but readers on hackernews and other general social networks. It's attracted a discussion from their users. This article makes the top 10% of most active posts in the past 24 hours. Readers see Amazon and assume something sinister is going on that they need to pay attention to, when it's probably not the case. I blame the readers as much as the publishers. After all, journalism today is all about chasing the readers and clicks.
> "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: Itβs 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.