The solution isn't hoping the free market would solve this with a competing platform. The solution is to create regulations & laws that prevent this behavior.
You're either a platform/retailer or you're a manufacturer. You don't get to be both because we see the perverse incentive that happens when it's allowed.
Many years ago I worked for a small analytics company bought by Amazon. My job was to analyze and report on the rise and fall of various product sectors on the web. We were in a unique position at the time, with the ability to see what URL's people were visiting. Reports we presented to Bezos, Jason Kilar and team, were used to make acquisition and growth decisions. In one case we found that that toys and plus size women's clothes were the top sellers for ecommerce in the US. They looked at the data and backed out of buying one of the major e-commerce players in toys and instead launched their own toy site / section. It was the beginning of Amazon moving away from Books and Music and into all other products.
The point is that competitive data is what drives decisions for product and segments in all areas of retail and business. Either in house or outside. Gathering that data from within your property is no different than using an outside agent.
You are acting as if they're spying on their customers, when the customers are you and me, not the reseller using their platform/space/warehouse/services.
How come we don't see this kind of angst with other store brand items. I can't imagine these comments being lobbed at Wal-Mart's Great Value, Costco's Kirkland Signature, or Bi-Lo's SE Grocers items.
And private label doesn't mean you have to manufacture anything at all. Sometimes, you will go to the company whose marketshare you are trying to take and they will manufacture the product for you.
What really is the issue? That Amazon is leveraging its success to be successful? It's unfair that Amazon is able to see that a product category is doing well so it invests its own money into manufacturing a product to sell through its site?
Do you really think that if Amazon couldn't use the data from its own site that it wouldn't procure it elsewhere? Before any product is developed there is extensive market research done to get an idea of how much money this product could make.
Anyone can and does do this, why should Amazon be punished that its data collection mechanism is cheaper than others?
Sun pushed OpenOffice to cut MS's profits from Office
Google and MS are pushing into the Cloud to reduce Amazon's influence
Amazon is creating its own ad network and offering Twitch to reign in Google
Walmart is slowly creating its own global online shopping platform to compete with Amazon
Should Amazon ever have no competitor, monopoly regulations would kick in. But usually, all the other big players will make sure that Amazon has enough competition to not be invincible. It's not fun for small players, but they obviously don't care enough to organize and take their products off Amazon.
Btw, Amazon does not necessarily have less overhead due to Price's law: [1]
>The square root of the number of people in a domain do 50% of the work.
Should Amazon expand into every business, they would be so huge that all their efficiencies and more would be eaten up by the overhead.
Price's law is of questionable empirical validity, it's more like a useful guideline/urban legend. On the other hand, there is substantial economic research demonstrating the harms of monopolies, including vertical ones.
I'm a bit confused. Are you claiming that because of Price's law, Amazon doesn't actually benefit from it's monopoly position?
Almost. I think that Amazon cannot hold a monopoly position in all markets because its size would be so big that a smaller competitor could compete.
As a consequence, there will be an optimal size where Amazon is serving many markets, most likely the most profitable ones, thus massively benefiting [ * ], but they leave every other market open.
Depending on the future, this is not necessarily a bad position because low interest rates could seed plenty of startups which means that competitors could operate below break even points.
The question is: will Amazon ever reach that position or will its competitors make sure that all its profitable markets will dry up and its growth will be limited?
[*] Actually, not Amazon is profiting because the value of that dominant position would be priced into Amazon shares in advance. Amazon would just execute its dominant position that its investors had foreseen.
We run a DTC automotive retail website that has both white-label products and vendor products and have product development and manufacturing capability in house. We also sell through multiple channels like wholesale customers, marketplaces, (including Amazon when it makes sense), and a 2 retail stores.
Are you saying that we need to dramatically change our business model and can only either be a manufacturer or sell other peoples products because this model is unethical?
Vertical monopolisation is a mixed bag actually. Vertically integrated companies profit more with lower prices in the downstream market than a purely downstream product company because they make profit at both stages. Antitrust law is far kinder to vertical mergers than horizontal mergers.
Or a competing product emerges with a lower price and/or better quality. Step 6 would only happen if competing products are not allowed to be sold on Amazon. And even if Amazon does that, I would assume that if the delta in price and quality is big enough people would switch to buying the product on Shopify, eBay, or any other platform the manufacturer can use to sell.
The fallacy in this all too pervasive argument is assuming that once a competitor dies or is bought out, there is no more competition from now until judgement day.
This is flat out silly and has never been observed. Monopolies cannot significantly raise their prices, or competitors instantly appear.
Why wouldn't 7. be: a competitor easily enters the market because they can just make the good and charge a markup that's somewhere between what amazon is charging and 0 and still make a profit and get all the business?
If what you said about amazon having less overhead prevents the above hypothetical from happening, then what's the problem? It's apparently more efficient for Amazon to supply this good and that's what an omnipotent benevolent economic dictator would choose anyways.
>What really is the issue? That Amazon is leveraging its success to be successful?
The issue is that over the long term, Amazon is lowering the ROI on innovating and taking risks in the consumer goods space. It's able to do this because of its dominance as a marketplace.
Where it gets grey is when stakeholders privately invest or start companies that sell on the platform. Amazon chose to do it upfront with Amazon Basics but there’s nothing stopping them from creating house brands/labels even at arms length to give the impression that it’s not Amazon.
It is not illegal to have a monopoly; but it is illegal to use a monopoly you have in one area to get an unfair advantage in another.
Amazon may or may not legally be a retail monopoly - I do not know the answer. But your question can be rephrased for any monopoly and the answer would be “monopolies should be punished for leveraging their monopoly power in other markets, because that ruins the market for everyone else.”
Free markets and democracies are good at a lot of things, but self preservation is not one of them - therefore you need anti-freedom laws.
> It is not illegal to have a monopoly; but it is illegal to use a monopoly you have in one area to get an unfair advantage in another.
This is a very common misconception in the United States. It’s how a lot of defenders of antitrust law want antitrust law to work, but it is not how antitrust law does work.
This Supreme Court case explicitly establishes that antitrust laws can be used against companies which obtain a high market share simply by anticipating future demand and responding effectively and efficiently.
> antitrust laws can be used against companies which obtain a high market share simply by anticipating future demand and responding effectively and efficiently.
This would make sense as a feature. If you subscribe to the view that competitive pressure is the source of progress, then you never want any company to actually win. Like a donkey chasing a carrot on a stick, you want companies to endlessly run towards market dominance, but never actually get there - because once they do, they stop contributing to progress.
This issue us that Amazon also dictates what you are allowed to sell your product for elsewhere. It would be one thing if they just used your own data and created a competing product, but the fact you cannot sell your product cheaper elsewhere is the issue.
Anticompetitive practices include activities like price fixing, group boycotts, and exclusionary exclusive dealing contracts or trade association rules, and are generally grouped into two types: agreements between competitors, also referred to as horizontal conduct.
Thanks! I meant how would Amazon prevent it at all. (But maybe they would just sue you. But ... can't you just create a separate company to conduct off-Amazon business?)
Definitely not. Consumers are best served when you have a bunch of relatively equal players competing for their business, and where success is rewarded financially. That gives everybody an incentive to focus on continuously getting better at serving the customer through R&D, etc.
But if the reward for success is just having Amazon come in and hoover up the money you would have gotten by launching a knockoff, then suddenly there's a lot less incentive to invest in novel products. That's true both for categories where Amazon is competing and ones where it isn't currently.
I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon's replacement product is sometimes modestly worse, because a) they don't have the kind of deep expertise in a product that the original creators do, and b) it doesn't have to be as good to get the money.
And then there's after-sale support. Amazon's customer support is atrocious. The one thing they're good at is taking things back. But anything more complex and it's a nightmare.
I dislike Amazon as much as the next guy but let's not kid ourselves here. Consumers aren't looking for innovation in the paper towel market. They just want cheap stuff. If Amazon can make these products cheaper then the consumers win.
There’s no evidence that that mechanism is effective any longer. The United States regulators seem to be entirely content with fake not-monopolies (eg ISPs) lying about how much competition they have, and let monopolies or duopolies fleece millions for essential services or products as long as they spend the requisite amount of kickback via lobbying.
Admittedly those are public utilities but the attitude seems to hold true in antitrust as well. Walmart is probably the best example there, or now Amazon as evidenced by TFA.
Product feature innovation is not the only kind of innovation. Supply chain innovation provides the cost reductions needed to lower prices. And you regardless need product expertise to know where to cut costs.
As a super-obvious example, an accountant looking to cut costs at a hamburger chain might first suggest reducing the amount of meat or using old meat. But that reduces value as much or more than costs, so it's a bad optimization.
> Consumers are best served when you have a bunch of relatively equal players competing for their business, and where success is rewarded financially.
That depends on the significance of economies of scale and barriers to entry in a particular market. The term “natural monopoly” (as it’s used in economics) refers to a particular market where, because of barriers to entry, the optimal number of firms is one. Two firms would not be able to produce their good for cheaper than one firm.
Consumers are definitely better served by competitive markets than monopolies, natural or otherwise. I agree that's not always possible, and where it isn't, we generally get bad monopolist behavior, heavy regulation, or both.
I also suspect the notion of "natural monopoly" is oversold and too simple. Would it be more efficient if we had exactly one ISP for the country? In theory, yes, because then we only have to run one set of wires everywhere, and we'd get rid of a lot of duplicative equipment and staff. But in practice, monopoly and oligopoly ISPs are generally both expensive and bad. I just moved from a competitive area to a "natural monopoly" area; my internet now costs twice as much for 10% of the bandwidth, much lower quality, and much worse service.
I think that's because companies aren't static entities that reliably produce goods, even though that's what most people imagine. Instead they're temporary coalitions of individual actors hopefully prodded into optimal behavior by external forces like competition. Especially so given American business culture, which often refuses to recognize ways of thinking that might mitigate the problems.
No, this is not great for the consumer. It lowers the bar for everyone. What I find mostly on Amazon in the past year or so is cheaper imported versions of decent products. The decent products are hard to find or I have to look outside of Amazon. They've pushed out the quality and replaced it with higher profit junk.
Its kind of the same thing with Home Depot. I used to be able to buy quality hardware from a local store. Now all I have is Home Depot and they sell mostly imported junk hardware. I have to go somewhere like McMaster-Carr now for quality hardware. Home Depot has not been good for me, Home Depot has only been good for itself.
Different problems. One is the regulation of which suppliers can distribute on a platform, deceptive advertising, right-to-repair, and similar consumer protection considerations.
The other problem the article and parent comments are describing relates to the distributor/retailer creating or sourcing generic alternatives to the items sold by their existing suppliers and informing their decisions to do so based on the sales data from their own partners/suppliers.
This latter case seems ok to me, even if it sucks for suppliers, in the sense that we generally get better outcomes for customers. As long as the general regulations for consumer protection are in-place such as preventing confusion between brands and generics.
Fair enough, its not quite the same thing. Though Home Depot has a ton of its own products now too - they are doing the same thing inside physical retail stores rather than online only.
For pharmacy items where there is some regulation around the quality of the product, I find generics/store brands to be great. For products that are not regulated in some way quality is all over the place. If you search Amazon for "ul listed usb charger" you will mostly see results for products that are not UL listed - there are probably 5 times more unlisted products for sale there than listed products - Amazon is pushing a bunch of cheap and high-profit crap at me even when I try to avoid it.
Giving consumers the same basket of goods at a lower cost just increases their real income, purchasing power, and overall standard of living. Amazon is effectively distributing billions of dollars of charity to those who need it the most. They lose $2 billion a quarter on retail. That's $2 billion per quarter in subsidies to consumers.
...which is classic anti-competitive behavior. That isn't a free and fair market - it's one that's in the process of being captured by a few large incumbents.
If they raise prices then they invite an instant flood of competition and lose their monopoly. They have no power to raise prices and restrict competition. Their only competitive advantage is pricing. Amazon's only profitable products are AWS and its stock. The benefit of losing $2 billion a quarter doing retail is debatable. Would you prefer a world without amazon's subsidies given that they have no power to exploit anyone?
Your theory is that Amazon is spending $2 billion a quarter even though it gets them no long-term advantage?
If you're right, then capitalism is hopelessly bad at optimization and we should scrap it. But what I think is more likely here is that Amazon's execs understands the economics of their business way better than a zero-karma free-market fundamentalist whose pseudonym is a genitalia joke.
They get a long-term advantage in that their stock continues to rise. The stock is the product. And AWS enjoys having a household brand attached to it. And don't be mad that someone with a genitalia username is making a point your brain is incapable of making a cogent argument against, in spite of it eliciting a strong enough emotion for you to leave a comment.
Their stock will only rise if they eventually make more money. Meaning that investors expect them to be able to make that $8 billion/year up eventually. Presumably through pricing, because selling stuff at above-cost prices is where their money comes from.
Also, I only made fun of your username and your lack of karma because you were making absurd unevidenced claims like, "They have no power to raise prices and restrict competition." If you're going to say things like that, then it's not so much making a point as doing what Frankfurt calls bullshiting. [1] That combined with your very low karma suggests you're not really worth the time of a serious reply. Note the link in my bio: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19
And at least I don't resort ad hominem arguments. That's what happens when lower IQ individuals have nothing else to say and don't know how to deal with the cognitive dissonance that arises when truth clashes with their feelings. Feelings based on cartoons and TV shows that programmed you to viscerally react that way.
And what do you propose in place of capitalism? You sound like a child. Why would you want to force companies to make a profit on every product? There's something called a loss leader. How about just prohibiting all forms of charity? You make zero sense.
Good question. Actually I don't have any data for that. Anecdotally many "store brand" items of things that seem commodity-like, are things that I can get the same quality as a name brand at a lower price. This is better for me, and I suspect better for most consumers in a static situation. But the market is dynamic. Does this stifle innovation of new products? Does the reduced revenue of "brand" named producers, especially smaller ones hurt? Does the price competition produce a race to the bottom that ultimately doesn't benefit consumers? I don't know. But I would say that the considerations of increased regulations of "generics" vs increased regulation of "online markets" seem to me to involve different tradeoffs.
Sadly, the American grocery store is not optimized for consumers, so we can't draw many inferences from it. It's true that no-frills versions of commodity products are a good deal compared with heavily marketed products. But I don't see any reason to think letting individual stores dominate that market segment would be necessarily better for consumers.
I tried to look for a decent priced backpack on Amazon a few months ago but there are a gazillion listings for what appears to be the same backpack, only the names differ. I ended up just buying it straight from Aliexpress from where it undoubtedly has been sourced from one of the same (or single?) factories. There's basically cheap-as-chips level products, and then 'high-grade' which is still dubious at times whether the quality of materials is better or not. Middle of the pack product pricing seems to just be swallowed up in a race for the bottom or the top.
Tip- check out Fastenal. They don't tend to have small retail packages, so you need to buy larger quantities, but it's really nice not to have to wait for shipping. They're an industrial supplier, but all the stores I've been in were perfectly happy to sell to the general public.
> That reduces competition and allows Amazon to charge more.
that never happens, unless there's a regulation in place that prevents new sellers to get into the market as quickly as they can. When a price for the product begins to rise, it attracts new sellers, as now there's a wider price range to position your competing product.
You're focused to much on Amazon. Every company does this just go to your local Walmart, everything is white-label. A law like this would have to be applied to them as well.
On the contrary, house brand products are great for consumers. Rather than having to figure out if they can trust a brand for a product category that they really don't care about, they can just buy the house brand knowing that a certain minimum level of quality exists. This is why Amazon Basics products are so popular on Amazon: consumers know that, at the very least, Amazon can be sued, a form of recourse that is not available with most of the smaller brands and sellers on their platform.
This is me. I bought an AmazonBasics product initially, a phone cable, thinking it would be crap. It wasn't. So I bought another one, a set of HDMI cables. They weren't crap either! Then I bought AmazonBasics wash cloths as a joke. They were quite nice! Now I find myself shopping around the AmazonBasics section first. I still find it amusing in a "Spaceballs, the flamethrower!" kind of way.
Similarly how Microsoft launching Internet Explorer to beat Netscape and eat another Market was technically more competition (for a while, until they've established another monopoly and all competition ceases).
This is a frequent trick in econ 101-style defenses of anarchic markets - play with the time horizon.
If you're hungry, a soda is "great for the consumer". For 15 minutes, it alleviates that feeling. Does it follow that everyone should consume only soda?
People seem to think "capitalism" produces the best results simply because of privatization, but it is the competition that is created. It doesn't matter if the one producer is Soviet Russia or Amazon, it hurts everyone in the long run when their is one supplier.
>You're either a platform/retailer or you're a manufacturer. You don't get to be both
Ok, done.
Now what are manufacturers supposed to do when Amazon and Walmart start bullying them some other way? You just made shipping their product directly to the customer against the law.
Well, the function of anti-trust law is specifically to target massive unchecked power.
If you're the supplier with a Shopify and Amazon Merchant account, or a local grocery store with white label products, none of this applies to you because you don't have the capability to effectively hold other businesses or markets hostage, no matter how aggressive you are.
No, that's not what a platform is. You can always sell your product direct to consumer. You just can't be the intermediary for both your own and other companies' products on the same site.
Alright, so you actually can be a manufacturer and a retailer at the same time, just with your own products on a separate website.
Are manufacturers legally barred from linking to the marketplaces of its peers?
Could Amazon not just maintain two websites, and shut down the marketplace for certain goods when it feels it has enough information to sell its own versions on the other site?
If not, could Amazon not just sell the information it would have used to develop its own products to another company (which we'll assume is totally unrelated) to develop its own off-brand products, and then treat those products preferentially?
I think those are good implementation concerns. Maintaining two separate websites isn't really an option under the supposed regulation, that's still one company being a platform and a manufacturer. The second option seems alot more likely to be allowed -- but now, at least you've created a market for that information and it's not just Amazon that has access to the data. Not sure I understand why it would treat the those products preferentially though -- unless you're bundling selling that information with product placement fees, which doesn't seem to be related (or necessary). I would assume product placement would be another revenue stream for the platform, like it is now for brick and mortar retailers like walmart
The software corollary would be that Apple can no longer host GarageBand and Keynote on the App Store, and Google can no longer host GMail or Google Docs on the Play Store.
I think that's a great call-out. It's interesting that we don't see the same problem in app stores -- probably because there's not much profit motive for apps like there is for general retail.
OK, done.
Now you have Amazon Basics' products competing with Amazon Fulfillment's products on Amazon Dotcom's website. Different entities, not even under the same corporate governance.
If they are different entities, how come Amazon Basics can use the same name as the platform? Did Amazon sell the rights to another company to use their brand?
"Did Amazon sell the rights to another company to use their brand?" But of course, why not? These kinds of trademark licensing agreements are all over the place, there would be no difference here.
I would disagree, the free market is working just fine. Many brands are no longer selling on Amazon and doing very well.
We don't need laws to restrict one party from taking advantage of another in a deal... it just takes brains and some companies are using theirs to partner with other platforms or sell DTC(Direct To Consumer)
Sounds nice in theory, but deferring to the government for this is how to fuel the lobbyist industry and end up with regulatory capture.
Anyone can host a website, market their product, ship with FedEx/UPS. Preach people do that instead, rather than bow down to our government stamped and approved overlord Amazon.
The alternative to introducing this regulation is not going to a system with no regulation, it's continuing with the current framework where Amazon is actively driving competition out of the market. Opposing this regulation without an actual alternative is just defending the status quo.
> "The solution is to create regulations & laws that prevent this behavior."
I'll take a slightly contrived and simplified set of examples to illustrate why a lot of free-market advocates don't agree with this sentiment as being correct.
1. We identify this "market failing" behavior of Amazon. I.e. Amazon does it a few times and after a while, public starts to
2. Legislators make it illegal for a platform to sell the same products as their suppliers. Easy, right?
3. Amazon alters products to not be technically "the same" so they skirt regulation. E.g. Renames "Plain Artisan Soap" to "Amazon Artisanal Soap", never mind that the product they "copied" was called "Joe's Plain Artisan Soap", and Amazon's product is advertised as "cheap alternative to expensive artisan soaps".
4. We notice and we complain.
6. Amazon complains back (maybe even a few court-cases along the way?), says certain products aren't the same. E.g. Supplier sells artisan soap, but Amazon argue their white-label "soap" isn't the same, it's just soap.
7. So to be fair, legislators start coming up with a reasonable system to identify similar products, which forces amazon to identify "similar" products in order to get them off.
8. Legislators followup and create reasonable rules and exclusions how Amazon can market their branded soap, or how closely the soap can resemble an existing product.
9. Amazon happens to also have a bunch of their own genuine products that it manufactures cheaply. Perhaps a byproduct of some sort of warehouse process they have, and they use their idle machines to make it, or something. But new suppliers come on that happen to sell something that according to regulations is "similar" to those products, and Amazon gets into hot water.
10. Amazon has to put rules, processes, maybe software algorithms to identify such a case. Remember, at Amazon scale, they have thousands of new suppliers and orders of magnitude more "products" that get added each day.
11. Regulators realize it's too difficult to figure this problem out and go to court over it. So they come up with a complaints + arbitration system to address it fairly with a "human in the loop". Think DMCA, takedown requests, etc.
12. Above regulations require paperwork, and you have to register as a platform if you get requests, you're obligated to address complaints of "similar products", etc.
Amazon implements all these rules at each stage, neverminding the "good-faith" interpretation of the original and subsequent laws put in place each time. I.e. "We just don't want platforms abusing their power to undercut genuine businesses." But at this stage we've, through genuine and honest market "interventions" and reasonable rules that seem straightforward and simple and cheap to implement, created regulatory costs that by default get applied to every new "platform" that competes in a space similar to Amazon. You've now successfully put in place regulations that inhibit and prevent competitors manifesting to compete with the existing monopoly or oligopoly.
And the alternative, if I'm getting AbrahamParangi's point, is to create regulations that only apply to Amazon. That seems arbitrary and unpredictable. I understand that regulations applied equally to every company increase barriers to entry, but making special rules for specific companies weirds me out.
That's what India basically regulated with Amazon. i.e. a company can't sell proudts on their open-market platform from companies you have a stake in (or your own generics presumably?).
>The new rules could wipe out nearly half the products on Amazon.in, said Satish Meena, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. “It’s likely to disrupt availability for customers,” he said.
>The biggest beneficiary from the tightened rules could be Reliance, which is India’s largest private company and owns the country’s biggest brick and mortar retail chain.
In theory India standing up to giant foreign corporations. In practice, a huge giveaway to another giant corporation at the expense of Indian consumers and a big warning to other companies hoping to expand to or invest in India.
Or it will allow small businesses space to compete in India instead of taking a shortcut of allowing unfettered access by large corps to increase commerce, but in a way that funnels profits away from India itself.
That portion of the article is basically the opinion part. I didn't find great coverage over the full details of the regulations themselves.
Wouldn't solve anything. They'd just split their company to be separate entities but still share all the information and operate as if nothing has changed.
What they would probably do is form special relationships to give certain brands special placement and/or endorsement, but charge those brands a larger fee for the special treatment. The end result is basically the same.
I agree. I am hard pressed to think of a recent time that I advocate for an anti - monopoly government action, but Amazon and its current practices is one of those times. If they provide the platform they should not be able to compete with and undercut those using their platform. They are at such as scale that they can basically put anyone out of business to the detriment of all other businesses. This is what the legislation is designed for and it should be used in this case. Pro sellers on amazon also have to pay a fee averaging 13% per sale, while amazon products don't suffer that handicap. Its a competitive advantage the sellers cannot overcome.
If the aim is to curb monopoly powers of Amazon etc this would be disastrously counterproductive
When Joe's Custom Bike shop isn't allowed to be a manufacturer and a retailer of someone else's bike equipment, the customer is going to go to Amazon or Wal Mart to buy it. And retail giants, buoyed by the government killing half their competitors, will still find a way of squeezing their suppliers and funnelling sales data to preferred suppliers or related entities.
that solves the problem for suppliers, but creates one for consumers with lower competition. Less competition, higher prices.
*just noticed I was down voted, likely by
MichaelApproved because he has 7500 Karma and I only have 156.
I'm starting to really hate contributing to HackerNews discussions because it's fully of a bunch of bullies who pound on your karma if you don't agree with their viewpoints. Bring on the downvotes, I know HN hates any mention of it's imperfections as well. At least my conscious is clear.
Please don't break the site guidelines by going on about downvotes. It just adds noise, and since it's against the rules, usually guarantees more downvotes.
If you think there's something abusive going on, email hn@ycombinator.com so we can look into it.
Please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
To your point, though, lower competition is not always bad. I as a consumer very much prefer having to deal with fewer toilet paper suppliers if they are of good enough quality. The toilet paper industry is not one where I expect dramatic innovation brought by competition. I just want the cheapest pack that won't feel like sand paper on my delicate behind.
There are, surprisingly, quite a lot of similar industries where consumer would prefer cheap and fast rather than elaborate and innovative products.
The cheapest pack comes FROM competition. You, as the consumer, want the cheapest pack. You want competition. It's the most basic of economic principles.
P.S. making comments without a basic education of a topic is equally boring to read. I would rather you say it and have the chance to learn than silence you though.
You missed the whole point in that uncalled for attack on my education. No one here is talking about preventing all competition. Then you went on repeating an economic principle without understanding it fully. I know that because you consider it absolute while it's in fact not. In the real world, it is very rare to find an actually efficient market with perfect and instantaneous discovery where those simplistic economic laws apply correctly.
The general point is that it is generally possible to keep fair competition flowing between a smaller group of companies, as long as that group is large enough for its members' respective interests not to align completely.
All other things being equal, there can be only one cheapest pack of toilet paper in a given market, which immediately disproves your argument. After all, having 5000 toilet paper manufacturers all competing among themselves is certainly no guarantee of any improvement to the consumer for that particular criteria, because 1000, 500, 100 or even 2 would have sufficed barring collusion.
Now we can add many other qualities to toilet paper that make discerning customers keener to see past price when they're buying between competing suppliers. However, in mature markets with proven, stable demand, there comes a point where adding more actors does not bring value. Those additional entities are merely tapping into existing market value without providing marginal benefits and without forcing others to improve.
Do you believe the toilet paper industry is so ripe with innovation that its warrants as many competing manufacturers as possible, with as much competitive spirit among them as possible? Nope. In a supermarket, the pack of toilet paper that's put in shelves slightly above eye-level will be chosen way more often by consumers than other packs located a bit below. Companies do not compete on the quality of their products, they compete on the amount of money they pay for their products to be stacked the right way on the right shelves at the right location.
Back in the real world, across many industries, going from thousands of competing companies to a few hundreds is definitely not worse for the consumer.
You're either a platform/retailer or you're a manufacturer. You don't get to be both because we see the perverse incentive that happens when it's allowed.