Wal-Mart is telling some vendors they can’t run applications on AWS
foxbusiness.com
foxbusiness.com
They did much more and I was surprised that they existed this way in business
It doesn't excuse the practice and I always appreciated the clients who paid correctly and promptly, but I don't think it's limited to a specific company, and small businesses in general should be prepared for this type of short or delayed payment, from both financial and legal perspectives (credible legal backing can go a long way to establishing yourself as a vendor whose invoices are to be respected).
The problem with behemoths like Walmart is that they know you're not going to be able to stand up for yourself in a meaningful way. The relationship means a lot more to the non-behemoth, for whom it may well be life and death, whereas the behemoth can probably get a replacement vendor set up within a couple of weeks.
Lots of huge companies exploit such advantages aggressively; in many cases, it crosses the line between aggressive business and cost savings to outright bullying.
I imagine most giant corporations now behave this way, with only the little guys playing by the rules, and paying the price.
Discounting only the single invoice that follows one paid on time keeps them honest. Short or late pay me, and the next invoice gets no discount.
In the UK, for example, even before the EU directive, unpaid commercial debts accrue interest and late payment penalties and can be claimed retrospectively for up to six years. This means that you can quite legally wait until you've stopped doing business with a particular customer before then claiming late payment penalties and interest.
These rights cannot be waived by contract.
And for someone who wants to point out the lack of that regulation in the USA is still "pro-business" I'd say it's pro-monopoly, and against the 'culture of business' that was traditionally a large part of the US.
What you're describing obviously sounds different - but somewhat an extension of holding off payment for as long as possible, to the point were it becomes onerous to the vendors.
edit: for clarity, typos
If you have a small business, you need to be very leery of having a large customer.
They then intentionally delay milestone payments about 3/4 of the way though the project, watch the company fold(since that's the highest-burn part of the project) and then re-hire 2/3rds of the existing staff who are now out of a job to finish the title.
It doesn't produce the highest quality games but I'm sure it earns them a bit more money.
One party thinks they're trying to make good games, and getting paid in the process.
The other party views the rest of the world as a potential money machine, and they're just optimizing around which lever to pull to maximize their return.
Matt Levine had a fun article[1] about this happening in a different context. 'FERC built a terrible box, and the box had some buttons that were labeled “push here for money,” and JPMorgan pushed them and got money.'
One approach isn't necessarily 'wrong' and the other 'right', but bad things obviously happen if you thought you were working with a business partner, but instead you got a shark.
[1] http://dealbreaker.com/2013/07/electricity-market-rules-were...
> One approach isn't necessarily 'wrong' and the other 'right', ...
No. The truth is that one approach is, in fact, unambiguously morally inferior to the other. That morality may not match the financial implications of a contract, which should be able to assume "good faith" and "fair dealings" in their contracts.
I can understand that some people care more about the money than the morals, and will exploit contracts and the law in unexpected ways to try to make more money or gain more power. But I refuse to accept that this behavior is morally ambiguous. And furthermore, I refuse to act immorally.
Perhaps that means I will miss out on some money or power. Perhaps I will be competed out of business because of this conviction. And yeah, I'll reluctantly play the stupid game where I must by offering discounts for on-time payment instead of attempting to write in appropriate penalties and interest for late payments that I can't enforce against an army of corporate lawyers.
But I can say with conviction that acting in bad faith is morally wrong.
I did retail data analytics on behalf of large CPG companies with their Walmart, Target, Costco data for a few years. Walmart made it very, very clear for several years now that their sales/inventory data, and any apps the vendors build using it, couldn't be on AWS.
It made things very challenging for us, because Azure is too expensive and Google Cloud (especially at the time) lacked support that wasn't absolute shit.
I needed to make payroll so drove over to HQ to try to get payment. They wouldn't even let me in past the lobby. Finally I just asked everyone who walked in, "Oh, are you here to try to get them to pay their overdue bill as well?"
Eventually a confused looking guy came out and handed me a check.
On the other hand, Amazon is a massive immoral monster devouring the US economy and replacing it with something vaguely worse, year by year. It's rapidly approaching a "too big to be allowed to fail" status, and that's awful for Americans. Since anti-trust laws weren't written by a generation able to envison entities like this and the current political climate is that they'd rather die than appear anti-business... I guess the only entities with the power to push back against Amazon are in fact the other major corporate vendors.
Amazon may end up like Uber: forcing competitors to upgrade their technology, but not succeeding in stamping the competitors out entirely.
Maybe that should change. But... even if we take it at face value...
Name a company in the world that is competing at scale and cost with AWS.
In the US, Amazon is definitely nowhere near suffering a loss of customers from Google and Microsoft's offerings. and they're securing massive contracts with key institutions in the US.
There's 1 in China, I guess. That market isn't freely accessible.
Cloud services providers are a New Thing but a Thing which is absolutely critical to the world market. It's utterly unregulated right now, and that's pretty crazy given how much power it has. The only thing holding AWS rates in check is the threat of competition from 2 other American companies, and the hope of securing more critical telcom and bank contracts.
And beyond that, in terms of "simple VPS's" there are a TON of competitors and some of them are already starting to move "up the stack" by adding new features and services like object storage.
That's not to say that AWS isn't fairly dominant at the moment, but there is enough competition to keep them honest. See, for example, how they've had to continue to lower prices on a regular basis.
Azure has more locations, and is better than AWS is several areas.
What Azure and GCE both have over AWS is better performance and better cost. AWS on the other hand has more services that just work together. So you either choose ease of integration or better performance. My company chose ease of integration.
Example, Amazon owns its CDN, Amazon owns all its services. Everything is in house, developed to work together, and just works out of the box, and you are dependent only on AWS.
Azure CDN uses Akamai. So it's not entirely in house designed and built. So we are now reliant on two companies working smoothly together rather than just one keeping it together. Not a huge issue, but something my company also had to factor in on reliablity.
Same with SLA. AWS has a better up time than Azure and GCE.
Again, not to say these services are inferior, but to say Azure is a better service is a lie. Does it have better performance on networking and HDD side? Yes, but I will take slower performance over a better up time, every time.
You shouldn't ding me on voicing a clearly labeled opinion as an opinion.
> but to say Azure is a better service is a lie.
Like you did here. This is ridiculous. You have your value judgement, I have mine. They're different.
That's not necessarily true: https://www.theinformation.com/how-aws-stacks-up-against-riv...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Aircraft_and_Transport_...
Wal-Mart is pretty infamous for squeezing suppliers & vendors on price and operating procedures. Hard.
Not sure if this is the case with Snapper (article doesn't say), but that's typically how they get back into the stores.
That's what Trump should tackle if he wants to stop job migration, but it seems like he's focused on anything but regulating BigCos.
Back when Barnes and Noble was the big book store, same thing, they pressured better prices. What do you do, split up the book store into two companies, who still control the same market share and will both still put pressure on the book companies?
Last I read, Amazon mainly fights for cheaper kindle prices, because it's considerably cheaper to sell a 12 meg file than a 200 page physical book. Which I agree with publishers, only benefits Amazon and not entirely fair, but for the most part, not much ahs changed, most kindle copies are MAYBE a dollar less.
In Germany, book prices are regulated: the printer sets the price, and the price the customer pays must be this price. Only exception are damaged (e.g. books with CD-ROM, but the CD is missing) or used books.
The prices the retailers have to pay at the printer are of course different and may well be based on the # of books the retailer has purchased, but the system right now successfully prevents price wars. And yes, I am happy with that, because it ensures that authors get proper funding instead of having to fight for the scraps.
> Last I read, Amazon mainly fights for cheaper kindle prices, because it's considerably cheaper to sell a 12 meg file than a 200 page physical book
The printing and distribution costs of a book are not that high, once you have a significant enough mass of books. What Amazon wants to do here is squeeze the authors off their profit, and this must be prevented.
Books are culture, and culture must not be bowing to the demands of predatory capitalism or else we'll sooner or later live in a Idiocracy world with a movie called "*ss" the sole Oscar winner... (okay, that was an exaggeration, but still, it's a danger to culture!)
My Raptor romance novel should not be 'regulated'.
Same is similarly true for ebook distribution. It isn't like the infrastructure to do that at scale is free, either. Both in technical of copying the bits around, and in the physical of authors/editors/etc.
However, I fail to see any way in which the advantages do not weigh in on the ebook side heavily.
This is already becoming reality as the internet has made traditional copyright completely unenforceable on the general population. For example, Adobe no longer sells Photoshop as a standalone unit, but as an ongoing subscription, which gives the impression that the vendor is an active participant in usage.
I mean that culture prospers more by allowing people to create and publish whatever iteration, derivation, or alteration they want than by ensuring a small group of well-moneyed "idea owners" can utilize the force of the state to monopolize significant cultural icons and stop people from going "too far" in their cultural iterations (that is, too likely to win the favor of the public as compared to the "owner's" offering; being too desirable and competitive).
The viability of establishing a revenue stream from this cultural lather is separate from the value or existence of a fertile culture itself. Creation will always occur. Copyright is just a matter of how far those creations are allowed to grow and/or spread before they get crushed by someone else's bank account (which can have chilling effects on the back-end, preventing the incubation of certain ideas due to uncomfortable legal risk, but it won't stop the ideas from germinating).
Culture is in a bad state when disseminating the wrong ideas in the wrong medium can result in the complete forfeiture of all earthly freedoms. If you sell T-shirts bearing Mickey Mouse's image without the permission of the "owner" of that cultural icon, you may very well find yourself not only deprived of your possessions through a costly legal battle (which you have lost before you begin), but potentially also deprived of your liberty when you're jailed for criminal copyright infringement. All because our concern for an active "culture" somehow translates into preventing derivatives, iterations, or improvements, blocking normal feedback and optimization processes and hopelessly distorting the market.
Fanfic authors have been sued for getting too close to the "owner's" trademarks. It's an entirely unnatural state of affairs and it stifles our cultural maturity.
Personally, I would suggest that people stop expecting passive IP-based revenue streams to cover them, because I don't think there is a lot of money in that down the road (because the internet makes it impossible to practically enforce copyright). You'll have to create a need for an ongoing service, paid for in small units, to get people to part with their money. Software vendors like Adobe have already accepted this.
Authors typically get a 10-15% cut of print books. Amazon wants to squeeze the publishers off their profit. While they can be heavy-handed and exploitative, they are much less so than traditional publishing. It's not abnormal for an author to make more money of a $9.99 kindle sale than a $25 print sale.
I'm a strong proponent of open <EVERYTHING>. If shady behavior arises in business, government, public services, and even public discourse, I'd love to see a moderated form of public disclosure become the standard way to reveal and address such 'discrepancies'. Now that the 'net is ubiquitous, I don't see why age-old small town arbitration principles can't be applied to redress virtually all forms of grievance, as long as the public exchange is conducted decorously, as a judge or strict moderator rules could ensure.
IMO, the state of AI is getting pretty close to enabling this sort of moderator service, making it impossible for 'conduct unbecoming' to persist out of the public eye. What cellphone videos are doing to police/perp misbehavior ought to be possible for general business practices too.
A lot of conduct unbecoming like this becomes public (Intel is a good example). How many people stopped buying their products even with literal judges finding them guilty of some particularly nasty anti-competitive practices?
Indeed. If people could get cheaper clothing if slavery was made legal again, they'd do it in a heartbeat. Witness to a lesser extent the general sentiment on HN that Uber is "helping drivers", when they're indentured servants.
I wouldn't call it consumer excess when you're exploiting someone with limited options.
The problem is, there is no such thing as a moderated public exchange. Everything can be bought off, be it a journalist, a policeman or a judge. Mass media outside of countries with well-funded public media stations (think BBC or the German TV/radio stations) is always aligned to corporate interest, not to public/journalistic interest. And for what it's worth, state-funded journalism is often enough also subject to meddling by politicians.
> IMO, the state of AI is getting pretty close to enabling this sort of moderator service
lol even Facebook's content AI, which may very well be the strongest in moderating (Google's strength is lying more in content comprehension!) is not able to distinguish between an iconic Vietnam picture and child porn or remotely good at detecting propaganda. I certainly would not want the Facebook AI as a political moderator.
And if you're creating a valuable product at a good price, then you have leverage over Walmart. If you're selling a commodity, then be prepared to get squeezed. That's how it should work.
That goes against our entire economic system. We'd still be driving shitty expensive cars if that were true.
What's distinctive here, I guess, is that Walmart has the weight to get that info and then start making demands instead of just deciding whether to trust the partner.
In 2002, Walmart did more business than its next 6 grocery and general-good competitors combined. Something like that is presumably still true if you restrict to brick-and-mortar spending. If you sell something mass-market (e.g. pickles), a huge portion of all shopping happens at Walmart - you can get beaten by a competitor just for not playing ball with one retailer. Similarly, struggling companies can be saved by Walmart (e.g. Levis), but only if they concede to whatever Walmart demands.
I'm not going to take the anti-capitalist tack, here. When Walmart tells Levis to fix their supply chain and introduce products at a lower price point, that's how markets should work. They demanded reform, and that's what saved Levis - they might not even have needed to sell at Walmart if those changes had come sooner.
But the larger pattern is troubling. Walmart has so much power over smaller suppliers that it's like informal ownership - they're vertically integrating with none of the legal conditions or risk. And that helps them drive pretty serious ethical issues without ever taking direct action. Everything from monopoly creation to violation of labor laws to environmental devastation (mostly overseas) stems from Walmart's pricing demands.
They may not ask for anything unethical, but asking for a 5% price cut every year means something has to give. With such enormous legislative influence, they can bend laws and trade agreements to favor their model. With the freedom to change suppliers and limited legal accountability for their suppliers' actions, they can work with whoever's willing to behave worst, and give them a market that cripples everyone better behaved. So you don't have to sell for Walmart, but in a lot of industries you can expect to suffer for those scruples.
However, like other credit agencies, it isn't infallible and is only as good as the information it is able to gather through information sharing agreements. They have also branched into the "Improve/Monitor your D&B score" business which is pretty shady. [2]
[Edit: We also have vendors require references if we are looking to establish a line of credit. We also provide references saying how much credit they have and how often they pay on time. It is a manual process.]
[1] http://www.dnb.com/ [2] https://www.dandb.com/ (See, their credit services are totally different! They use "and" instead of "&"!)
Of course investors and larger institutions use Standard & Poors and Moody's to provide credit ratings and background histories on public companies and their stocks and bonds.
Second, the real danger in both cases (though people only see it in one, hence my point) is that you're killing off the OEMs this way. No one wants to bring innovative new products to market if some monopsonist will just force them down to the mandated n% profits.
1) Walmart doesn't pass savings to consumers, it passes them to shareholders, as they have a fiduciary obligation to do. The "lower prices" thing is just marketing; WM's prices aren't particularly low once they've driven away their competition.
2) If drug companies want to charge a R&D premium for bleeding-edge innovative products, that's fine. What's not fine is price gouging consumers for drugs they depend on to live, that are not innovative in 2017, and that are cheaply available in other countries, like the EpiPen.
Which it does, so it is a completely valid option.
There is absolutely nothing forcing them to pick any particular use for the money. Both uses benefit the company in some way. Both uses are fine. It's not like they're burning it.
>There is absolutely nothing forcing them to pick any particular use for the money.
Except this legal precedent right here:
It works hard to lower supplier and employee costs not to benefit consumers but to prop up their own margins.
I think it is funny that the people demand the government force companies to lower prices caused by the government granting a monopoly to said companies why way of the patent system....
How about we just end patents.
But secondary effects of lost sales from vendors would almost certainly upend the vendor table and make goods very difficult to get ahold of. Amazon as a delivery service (and its smile boxes, ads for its own products on said boxes, and specialized delivery frameworks) is as much of an American institution as the post office now, and growing as it takes over its own delivery and logistics.
But accounts for less than 5% of retail sales overall. Until they start hitting a bigger chunk of total sales, I would not consider them too big to fall. Walmart is too big to fall, as it litterally controls a bunch of local economies. If Amazon closed tomorrow, there would be a shitty time in Seattle, but people would just go to Ebay, Walmart, Etsy, and Alibaba.
If WalMart closed tomorrow, a good chunk of the southern states would run into a state of emergency because the unemployment rate would skyrocket, and there would be no companies to pick up the slack locally, so local economies all across the US would crash.
Many towns would lack groceries or supplies because WalMart is all they have after WalMart ran everyone else out of business. How many businesses has Amazon shut down across the entire US?
Hasn't the same thing been said about Walmart?
To wax metaphorical, I'd rather the monsters devour each other while we race for a super-weapon to defeat all monsters and protect real people.
This situation where corporations are effectively replacing the state is not exactly what I had in mind when I said the world would be a better place with a diminished role of the State in individual life.
And I think it would be very difficult for a company to offer the level of convenience and good UX that Amazon does at a much smaller scale. For example, part of why they can get very fast shipping down to a reasonable price is their huge network of distribution centers + their size giving them leverage in negotiations with UPS/Fedex/et al.
If you split Amazon into a dozen smaller companies, the overall customer experience would likely be worse.
I completely agree with it.
My hometown's retail business all goes to the Walmart super store on the outskirts of town. It's weird to be living in a Bruce Springsteen song.
http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/56abe654c08a80431d8...
1) Walmart may be the biggest retailer in the US, but they don't have half of the US homes as subscribers. Amazon Prime does. I doubt Walmart.com attracts any where near as many e-tail visitors as Amazon, and I suspect the gap is widening.
2) Amazon is decades ahead of Walmart in the online shopper experience. I grit my teeth each time I visit Walmart's website. It's slow and ugly and very clumsy to navigate or search. And it hasn't gotten better after years of this.
3) Walmart's products are mostly middle-to-down-market, even online, and that doesn't seem to have changed all that much even as they've grown their e-tail efforts. Try buying a nice watch or high-end stereo equipment there. No such ceiling applies to Amazon, probably because Amazon welcomes re-sellers (which can span all market niches), while Walmart doesn't.
So I think Walmart has a long way to go to compete equally with Amazon, and isn't a comparable threat as an all 'round monopoly.
And personally, I don't hate Amazon enough to object to a monopoly threat from them the way I do Walmart. I think ill-will does matter when it comes to federal action on anti-competition. If Microsoft were as despised as AT&T was in 1984, they would be in pieces today.
Ha- as it happens I just bought a nice watch, today, and after perusing the options on Amazon I found the same watch I was about to buy direct from the retailer. However after considering the number of knock-off items I've received from Amazon, I simply refused to trust that the watch was authentic, and ended up paying more for the peace of mind that I got from buying it direct from the manufacturer.
Amazon's lack of quality control makes it impossible to trust them for expensive items that can be knocked off. It's funny that you say that Wal-Mart is middle-to-down market, because Amazon is where I buy my household staples and some consumer electronic items and cheap crap that I'm not overly concerned with the quality. Clothing, watches- pretty much anything of quality I look elsewhere.
That said, I do buy clothing from Zappos, and I think Wal-Mart made a smart move to acquire Bonobos to make a serious move into high-end apparel.
Yes but I'm quite sure when I order something from walmart I'm getting the genuine article, not a knockoff dumped into the SKU bin by some shitty counterfitter
This is false, You can sell things on walmart.com as a reseller
https://marketplace.walmart.com/
There are not many resellers doing it, no where near as many as Amazon but many large online shops are embracing the Amazon Model, Newegg does it now, Walmart, and a few others.
Amazon is also getting more aggressive with their resellers, putting in more restrictions, heavily favoring the Fulfilled by program where Amazon gets a larger cut, increase the number of blackout catagories, and increasing the number of items sold by Amazon directly which puts huge pricing pressure on Resellers that can not get the pricing amazon can.
Several Niche and some larger brand have pulled out of Amazon completely in the last couple of years for these (and the counterfeiting problem) issues
Please do demonstrate how it is absurd.
this should be enough
> devouring the US economy and replacing it with something vaguely worse, year by year.
Luddites repeat: automation, price reduction and job shifting isn't bad for the economy and it isn't worse either
> It's rapidly approaching a "too big to be allowed to fail" status, and that's awful for Americans.
Completely unsubstantiated. Surely it's one of the larger employees, but compared to automotive there are few satellites that lives because of the induced workload - if Ford closes, all subsidiaries and most vendor will close with it; if Amazon closes, the impact will be more limited.
> Since anti-trust laws weren't written by a generation able to envison entities like this
This is incredibly short sighted, since those were written at Rockefeller peak. Entities larger than this and more looming where at the order of the day, while Amazon has a load competitors and alternatives to fend off.
> the current political climate is that they'd rather die than appear anti-business...
This political climate endured for most USA history, with shortly timed bouts into centrism, hardly something current, hardly something that slowed down the USA economic growth. cfr - Europe.
> I guess the only entities with the power to push back against Amazon are in fact the other major corporate vendors.
That's ok tho, as in not a bad thing
All in all the whole claim is conflated hyperbole that's filtered by an unhistorical view of the current situation
I think that's awful. You think you should have to fight and use substantial resources to have a say in how your life is lived. I do not share this belief.
But it's worth pulling at one string of your argument. Work is effectively mandatory for US citizens. You cannot handle any health crisis, or even eat and drink reliably, if you do not work. There is no notion of job retraining or security, and over half the citizens of the US make so little money that they effectively get subsidies from the government and don't pay taxes.
Removing these people's livelihoods without any opportunity for retraining is effectively ruining their lives. Automation threatens to do this without sharing the returns on automation with the work force it's displacing. That is an unacceptable outcome.
nope, but I see that's not stopping you to go ahead and make up things about me just to hijack a high post for your tirade about social security, to which I agree in principle, but furthers nothing the argument at hand
You haven't proven that. And its entirely possible that it's not worse for the economy in general, but it's quite awful for segments of it. And given the current attitude toward the safety net in the US, once those jobs are gone, that's it for those people.
I wish this would see wider acknowledgement.
Lump of Labor is a fallacy, people do find new jobs, and productivity does improve the economy. But none of that implies that the displaced people will be better off in the end!
Similarly, free trade agreements are economically efficient, and boost per-capita GDP. But even aside from implementation issues (i.e. agreements that go far beyond lowering tariffs), there's no particular reason that the extra money ends up benefiting the same people who get hit by outsourcing.
If anything, the studies I've seen say that being displaced by automation or outsourcing causes a permanent wage decline. The original Luddites were right - they probably saw lower wages for their entire lives thanks to automation.
Pretending that overall growth inherently means an economy which works better for the majority of people is frankly dishonest, especially (as you say) in a country so opposed to helping the displaced.
http://www.salon.com/2014/02/23/worse_than_wal_mart_amazons_...
It's not limited to warehouse workers, either. In 2015 Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld of the New York times published an expose of the hard-charging environment at Amazon, with stories about employees reduced to tears at their desks.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-...
That was so untrue, that Jeff Bezos felt the need to send out a memo stating how much he has never seen that side of Amazon, which, as CEO, of course he's never been mistreated by middle management.
Thank you.
I'm also a mod at /r/cscareerquestions, Amazonians would chime in back when this was big news, but the vast majority were always like "yeah it exists but not my team".
what is unreasonable about this? do you trust amazon?
My family had a small manufacturing business that went bankrupt years ago. At one point we were making a part that ultimately ended up on a WM product. Periodically WM's folks would come around and do a strong arm routine trying to renegotiate the contract. It got bad enough my dad adopted the habit of bringing a couple of the very burly folks that worked in the fabrication shop to sit in on meetings and reduce the intimidation BS.
They are a ruthlessly scummy business and have been for a very long time.
I sympathize however. Strong Arming small and middle sized businesses, which are the bedrock of American Capitalist Power is just egregiously scummy. This is also what I think is currently gone wrong with the American Capitalism, but thats another comment, somewhere, sometime I guess :)
Take Books and Ebooks for a good example.
Regarding the major book selling firms, Amazon are the good guys because a relatively few book firms control the market. Amazon is helping to improve the customer experience by lowering the price of books.
they're replacing an oligopoly that is exploiting their customers with a monopoly though.
amazon hasn't really started exploiting its monopoly status yet (to my knowledge) toward the consumers, but a lot of authors have already started to complain about it.
Here are stand out ones from the article. For just small business alone. I actually thought middle size business would have had figures like this.
* Small businesses create 75 percent of the net new jobs in our economy. * Small businesses pay more than 44 percent of the nation's private payroll. * More than 50 percent of the U.S. private gross domestic product is generated by small businesses. * Almost 97 percent of exporters are small businesses.
https://smile.amazon.com/dp/0143038788
It's worth reading.
"Make it cheaper or we'll make it cheaper for you."
I often keep an eye on the product number if I'm every buying electronics or tools at a big box store to see if it's different than what I find online for what is ostensibly the same exact product, as that can be an indication that you're buying a cheapened version.
The best managers there are the ones who largely disregard the incentives placed before them and respect the complexities of working at such a large scale. It sounds like the people who would show up at your dad's were enabled by management who cared more about bottom line sales than understanding how to appropriately treat a supplier with limited volume.
I'm sorry this was the experience you had, but there are just as many talented, respectful, and generally honorable people that work there and I wouldn't want them to get lumped in with the scum. (Source, have worked at WM home office)
Amazon is a massive immoral monster devouring the US economy and replacing it with something vaguely worse, year by year.
But I suppose two battling monsters beat one rampaging monster, at least.
Explain how this is wrong.
Could say the same thing about WalMart w/r/t local retail in rural America and now cities for the past 40 or so years...
WalMart has asked a Data-Warehousing service (via its customer) to please not do what it does - data-warehouse internal information about sales, revenue, etc - on their retail-competitor's servers. Data which could give Amazon sensitive inside information on WalMart's operations and financials..
I dono if they've made other less-reasonable requests, but the example provided in the article is completely reasonable.
I always find it a ironic when I've interacted with startups which have a plan to bring some disruptive thing to market that potentially competes with Amazon or Google, and yet route all their data and communication through these platforms. :)
But how do you guarantee encryption at all stages such that Amazon cannot snoop it when you have to do final mile encryption on hardware controlled by Amazon?
I mean encryption for messenger services where each end is not controlled by a third-party is one thing...but how do you guarantee the third-party in control of the hardware responsible for performing the encryption isn't snooping?
The only thing I can think of (and again this isn't my strongest area) is to not handle any data on an Amazon server that isn't already encrypted...but how does that work if you are using a service like RDS or Redshift?
And even if you could work out a super complicated security-conscious solution...is it unreasonable for Walmart to not trust all it's vendors to take such extreme measures and therefore just create a general policy against the use of AWS?
That said, it's not illegal for them to see that xxx vendor increased their storage costs/bandwidth costs by $yyy every month, and that you could look into it - without using one piece of encrypted data.
Disclosure: Former AWS
It's true of anyone selling bare metal servers too, it is just harder to snoop but the technology exists to do so.
If the latter, then I think that's just extreme paranoia. If there was ANY evidence of Amazon doing that it would destroy everyones trust in AWS and I suspect people wouldn't be able to move away fast enough (Which actually long term would be good for Wal-Mart).
If they can add a penny to the earnings or take one away from Walmart, that means bonus and stock $$$.
They have to snoop the data from the hypervisor since the only place it's available decrypted is on the virtual machine processing the data.
Couldn't they just make a copy of the vm, isolate it, and then break into that one? sure the data will be "old", but not by a lot, and it would theoretically be undetectable.
If they want to capture the entire data stream, they'll need to capture it in real-time.
B) That's likely still going to be a large amount of very usable data
In the application I was working on, they had over a TB of data, broken up into 32MB blocks, each with a unique key that had to be unwrapped by the HSM. If you stole the VM you'd get only a few blocks of readable data with it.
I assume that if Walmart values this data, they'll take similar precautions in the cloud.
My point though, is that the attack is definitely feasible. I think WM has every right to be concerned.
Of course im about to be shouted down by a bunch of posts with [citation needed], well guess what, the goal of business like this is to ensure that nobody can ever make such a citation.
There is a reason Google, Intel and Apple are extremely paranoid about their internal data, and Walmart too. Its no coincidence this goes hand in hand with being very successful and leaders in their field.
Which also happens and is fascinating.
But we also had issues with Amazon not wanting to run an appliance on vmware, so apparently it works both ways.
Why? Everyone knows that metadata count these days. Which AWS/Amazon has plenty of.
If there was ANY evidence of Amazon doing that
it would destroy everyones trust in AWS
Competitive intelligence is a thing. For all you know, Proctor and Gamble has Amazon consultants in house, and those folks may well have access to information sensitive to WalMart.
Be careful about assuming rationality from the actors here. Lots of egos and competive people are at play here, and people will do incredibly dumb things to win.
According to the article, Walmart seems hesitant to support so much profit running to Amazon. While Amazon's retail business runs on razor thin margins, their cloud business reaps enormous profits. That means that the cloud business is helping Amazon put a lot of pressure on Walmart. Without it, would they be able to eat such thin to negative margins in the retail business or would they need to raise prices and make Walmart's offerings look better for consumers?
In the article, they note that AWS was 89% of Amazon's operating income. It's likely that Amazon's thin retail margins would bother investors if AWS wasn't raking in money. It's also likely that AWS margins are helping Amazon be more aggressive in retail.
Still, I don't think it would be more paranoid than most companies to avoid using a competitor's infrastructure at that size. Amazon will prefer self-hosing email rather than using Gmail regardless of assurances.
It's not even just about trusting that the competitor wouldn't actively decide to peek into your data. It's trusting that no one in that company would take a peek even though that the competitive data could give them a huge career boost. Let's say Amazon hosts their email with Gmail. You're a struggling middle-manager at Google Cloud who has seen some failures. Maybe peek at Amazon's email and see what their cloud plans might be and when you're able to get out in front of Amazon you amaze your colleagues - maybe you have to bribe someone with access.* It's not just trusting that Google doesn't want to do this.
*Now, I'm sure that Google has safeguards to make sure that employees can't do this (or it's at least hard), but the point is that you have to trust 1) the company, 2) the employees, and 3) procedures the company has put in place to prevent nefarious data access.
AWS also has many compliance certifications (HIPAA, FedRAMP etc), sending data outside your organisation may be a no-go from a compliance perspective.
1) Slack uses AWS. While it's perfectly possible to operate without slack, chat services are valuable during outages. The kind of incident where it would be most valuable is precisely the kind of incident that would take it down. Communication services must be completely independent of the AWS infrastructure. Likewise, something like PagerDuty is effectively off limits. Though they've done a good job building resilience, PagerDuty have been affected by AWS outages.
2) Slack communication isn't encrypted end to end. While it may be stored encrypted at rest, it is stored in a method they can decrypt, read and analyse (inherent in the features they provide). Chat is filled with critical operational information, and (no matter how well you train people) passwords and other critically sensitive information. There's always an extremely slim chance that a rogue actor could choose to access information they shouldn't. That information is, also, potentially accessible to someone who might hack in and compromise the service. We've already seen Atlassian's hosted HipChat service compromised and some chats leaked. Slack has, arguably, an even bigger bullseye painted on it. (fun thought exercise: what damage could a malicious actor with access to yours slack channel do with your chat ops bots? How long would it take to stop them?)
3) feeding on from 2, to some degree, you don't control the security of hosted solutions. Audit compliance is a checklist game, it is perfectly possible to check every point on those checklists and still be inherently insecure. If you're even remotely paranoid, you've got to assume that anything you don't host will be compromised, and weigh up the risks associated, against the value and necessity of the service. Leaking operational information is a big, big risk. Amazon's security sets a high bar for paranoia. They are determined to never have a New York Times front page article "Amazon hack, credit card information stolen", or similar.
There's just no strong value in them switching to Slack, just a whole mass of unnecessary risks.
It seems that a lot of people forget that Wal-Mart dwarfs Amazon in sales volume for companies like Procter and Gamble so probably have more leverage over them than most think.
My guess has been that Amazon wants to continue to add value to the Prime program in the hopes that they can start to ratchet up the cost or create different classes of Prime to try and extract more profit. The more steps that competitors like Wal-Mart take to pressure Amazon's ability to cross-subsidize and raise the price of Prime, the harder it's going to be for Amazon to extend its lead in ecommerce.
It's been known before:
Battle of the Airlines: King 'backed dirty tricks': BA staff hacked into Virgin computers and poached passengers
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/battle-of-the-airlines-kin...
The major telecoms were all revealed to be giving American users' data, traffic, and communications directly to the NSA a few years ago. Did you move away from them? Did anybody you know?
As a historical reminder, those revelations were considered to be shocking at the time.
So once you start getting traction and customers, there's some internal product manager evaluating whether it's worth entering your market.
I don't think anyone will have a confirmed example of it happening to AWS customers - but if they are completely willing to destroy smaller vendors on the retail side with their own branded products, I can't imagine them saying AWS is where they draw the ethics line in the sand.
You could make a case for Netflix being an example on the AWS side, but I'd bet more on coincidence.
Amazon would be amazingly and utterly stupid if they were not analyzing their AWS service usage/traffic/spends by market vertical, and I'd imagine must more granular than that. That's simply to sell to people. It's not much of a leap to start using that data to direct internal development and identify unexpected areas of growth.
It's a good thing those never happened either.
CEO Diktats about using not using competitor services for anything whatsoever, are as old as Microsoft. Wal-mart is not in the cloud business, so I can only wonder if, as others have commented, it is about data security in AWS domain, since Wal-Mart's main competitor is Amazon.
We know what Google and Facebook get up to with peoples data, why would Amazon not analyze or try similar to their customers? To have all that technical capability and not be curious about stuff would be a waste.
Finally, I think it would be great for everyone (except Amazon), if wal-mart got in to the cloud. Using their leverage to create cheaper cloud would benefit us all.
Do Google, Amazon or Microsoft look at the data of their cloud offer clients?
I bet that if they do and it is know their business would go to hell
Any hint that they could have been sneaking in confidential data of customers?
So how come the VW fiasco didn't get caught years ago?
It's not inevitable; much depends on employee culture.
On the other hand, look at Uber.
Amazon may not be the most ethical company, but they've never been accused of short term thinking. It's just completely outside of what if expect from them.
Even groups with extremely stringent security protocols has trouble with people skirting security procedure. Consider the US Air Force who has control over a large collection of nuclear weapons. They have some of the most stringent procedures like Chain of Custody (any time a weapon changes hands a verified ledger is written to by the recipients and deliverers and sent elsewhere for archiving and oversight), Two person control (There are always two people with every weapon and every launch code container) and about a dozen other extreme procedures they still occasionally "lose" a nuclear fucking bomb.
The last time they lost one they accidentally left it loaded on an airplane on a low security runway. Any construction worker (which are always on every Military base) could have walked up to the plane and hauled off with it. Thankfully this didn't happen and hopefully runway security would have intervened, but this goes to show that as long as people are involved there can and will be mistakes.
To drive this point just a little harder, the Air Force has strong motive to not lose weapons and Amazon might have financial incentive to look on occasion.
I re-iterate, what about Amazon, a company, a collection of individuals, makes them better than other people?
If someone actually authorized snooping on customer data to get a competitive advantage, you'd know. I spent five years at Amazon, and if there's one thing they instilled in you it was customer obsession. Someone would leak that it had been done just out of spite of the exec who ordered such a violation of the culture.
Now they are dealing with a much more nimble and capable competitor. Yes, Amazon has its own unreasonable policies that squeeze vendors, but at least they have reasonable tech in place and they move fast when it comes to support and service. Case in point: Applying to be a third-party seller on Amazon takes days, Wal-mart Marketplace takes 6 weeks.
I am not sure if this latest Walmart policy reflects incompetence, misguided policy, dirty tricks, or a combination of the three, but it serves to push vendors away from Walmart and into Amazon's tight embrace.
I got the impression they would turn the screws on industries to get cost savings via scale. This move seems odd.
> For many suppliers, though, the only thing worse than doing business with Wal-Mart may be not doing business with Wal-Mart.
We really are slipping into the 1870s.
But it is a better "military" tactic than an economy based on David defeating Goliath.
We discovered this during the industrial revolution, and the modern liberal democracy and ideas around fair play, consumer protection, competition as an important mechanism in a market economy, etc. grew out of what we learned.
Unfortunately, for some bizarre reason, we seem to be systematically dismantling most of those protections, despite knowing exactly what's going to happen. (Hint: it rhymes with 'huge, uncontrollable corporate behemoths owning all the means of production, channels of communication, and legislative agendas').
Of course, every generation seems to have its insane economic ideas. My great-grandparents had Communism. We have whatever you call the squirming progeny of identity politics brutally inseminated by Reaganomics.
It's worth noting that the USSR's model was also ridiculously inflexible, and the whole idea of a "5 year plan" probably sounded silly back then too.
Wal-mart hosts many Coinstar machines, but I have yet to see one that will produce Amazon gift certificates. You have to go to Coinstars hosted at grocery stores for that. So, they have a contract with Coinstar that specifically mentions which firms may have gift certificates on Coinstar machines.
Who knows, this may be a boon for the grocery stores?
http://www.coinstar.com/KioskFinder?element=Partner&parmName...
You wouldn't be able to run quite a few apps like tinder without google play if it weren't for what amazon did.
If Amazon were to have to give 20% of all transactions made through any of its Apps to Google, considering Amazon runs on making no retail profit, how do you think thats going to go?
Ok sounds reasonable from an information security standpoint
> Snowflake Computing Inc., a data-warehousing service, was approached by a Wal-Mart client about handling its business from the retailer, Chief Executive Bob Muglia said. The catch: Snowflake had to run those services on Azure.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
"Some have speculated that Muglia and Ballmer disagree about the development and future of Microsoft's cloud computing platform, Windows Azure, but no details are available. So for now, at least, the departure remains somewhat of a mystery --- as is the blunt way that Ballmer handled it."
http://www.computerworld.com/article/2470214/social-business...
http://www.networkworld.com/article/3037428/cloud-computing/...
1. Giving their largest competitor money
2. Relying on them not to peek at their data for competitive advantage.
Which are the items that Walmart has objections with.
Amazon outside of its own created content seems to lack.
I've exceedingly rarely been able to find someone on Netflix I wanted to watch when it was not on Amazon. Amazon actually I'd say is the better experience for me, since they'll typically have an option to rent/buy content that they don't have in their unlimited library, where Netflix you're just SoL.
Honestly, it's not an unreasonable request from a corporate security standpoint.
The real question is do they access it in compromising ways?
This is generally legal.
Might be cheaper to not sell to them (though revenue might suffer)
Because Amazon's tactics aren't bad for business or consumers?
This is one of those things where you are going to have to explain to consumers why they should be outraged in order for them to realize how awful it is. By most measures, Amazon is one of the best companies for consumers to buy from.
Forcing customers to support their unwanted video service by bundling it with the next-day shipping service was a completely transparent move, and every Amazon customer I know a) saw straight through it, b) doesn't use it and c) would like to stop paying for it.
Later when watching TV on the big screen would keep the little one up, Prime Video was the only way to watch a lot of things (on the PC).
Want the shipping, want the video.
Then consider myself and several that "I know" as a counter to your personal anecdote and the people that you know. You can argue that unbundling is preferable, but in my case I use the video and music portion more than the shipping portion.
This has not been the case for a long time, most Amazon products are filled to the brim with fake reviews and they do not appear to care at all.
They've also been having massive problems with fake chinese goods being sold as the real thing, which is compounded by said fake reviews on those products.
If you don't want Prime (I have no use for it), it's now £20 minimum for free (Amazon Logistics) delivery.
Price-wise they're not even that much cheaper in the UK
It wasn't all that long ago when you'd phone or email your order to the merchant (with credit card number!) or even send it in on paper, you'd be lucky to get any tracking number at all and still wouldn't know what day or even what week your order would be delivered on.
But now people get upset about a 12 hour delivery window.
I'm not sure this quippy needs a reply ... but seriously, you should respond with more then a pure logical fallacy.
Say we accept that Amazon does these things (the parent didn't actually provide any evidence / argument for that case). Pointing out the hypocrisy of the other party (or 3rd party) is not a valid rhetorical argument why they should be allowed to do it (Walmart).
Actually, this is not quite true in this case. I pointed out the fallacy but also the fact he uses no argument / data to prove his point. I made no such claim that his statement is false (or because of the fallacy is false).
But it seems to refer to tech contracting firms who are implementing software services for WalMart. WalMart is saying they do not want their proprietary algorithms and information running on servers owned by their main competitor. That is very reasonable and sensible.
The thing is that I'm not actually sure if any of the alternatives engage in this kind of practice as well.
Not to mention Walmart already has a reputation for being the bottom barrel brand, they can't compete with Amazon on price, Amazon even has leeway to increase the value of its products and services and say "we're not Walmart".
Maybe an AWS price increase potential is a risk they dont want to take
> they can't run applications for the retailer
Wal-mart doesn't really want it's data on Amazon servers. Amazon is pretty aggressive about mining any available data on competitors.
Amazon buys Comcast. The End.
Paypal owning lots and lots of revenue data of eBay competitors.
The real bosses, in the capitalist system of market economy, are the consumers. They, by their buying and by their abstention from buying, decide who should own the capital and run the plants. They determine what should be produced and in what quantity and quality. Their attitudes result either in profit or in loss for the enterpriser. They make poor men rich and rich men poor.
The consumers are merciless. They never buy in order to benefit a less efficient producer and to protect him against the consequences of his failure to manage better. They want to be served as well as possible. And the working of the capitalist system forces the entrepreneur to obey the orders issued by the consumers.
The consumers are no easy bosses. They are full of whims and fancies, changeable and unpredictable. They do not care a whit for past merit. As soon as something is offered to them that they like better or that is cheaper, they desert their old purveyors. With them nothing counts more than their own satisfaction. They bother neither about the vested interests of capitalists nor about the fate of the workers who lose their jobs if as consumers they no longer buy what they used to buy.
Can't prove a negative, you know. You gotta prove positives.
It was originally alleged that corporations hold all the power in an economy unless they are kept in line by a powerful government. I countered, stating consumers actually are the holders of power in a free economy and provided some praxeological arguments to support that claim. @s73ver then made a generic claim that history refutes my argument, without providing a single example. One merely has to provide an example of a corporation which yielded more economic power than the consumer in a free-market economy.
> Can't prove a negative, you know. You gotta prove positives.
I really have no idea what negative you're talking about here.
When Walmart sets aggressive standards for its suppliers, it does so in the interest of maintaining that position, because they know that the customer will not hesitate to switch to a retailer that they perceive as being more advantageous (which usually means cheaper).
It could even be seen as honorable that Walmart is on the ground doing the hard work of pressuring suppliers to ensure that they actually are able to offer rock-bottom prices, instead of just relying on marketing voodoo to create this as a phantom impression in the consumer's mind without actually attempting to affect it.
The system can either try to restrain this core human tendency to jump at the most advantageous thing, in the belief that such disloyalty is a primal impulse that does not belong in 'civil society', or it can attempt to recognize this tendency and account for it organically rather than ruling it out of bounds.
The extent of such tradeoffs, authoritative restriction meant to prevent damage v. organic re-routing such that damage is minimally disruptive, is always a matter of context and subjective judgment. We get into political snafus when we adopt one side of this scale as an ideal with near-religiosity and overemphasize the negative costs of the opposite side.
Economics can't really fix such a core design flaw in human nature, it has to be the other way around, IMHO.
Your solution is that the same people who you think are too stupid to look out for themselves in a market will form a state and magically do collective action to fix the very problem they were individually to stupid to solve.
The problem is just, that for lots of reasons, we know that such collective action is incredibly hard. Collective action is hard in general, but if you take into account that the interest of different people are totally different it becomes close to impossible. This is well known and well researched. The only reason we can actually make collective action happen at level of modern states is because it is coercive. Voluntary collective action would never produce the Iraq war for example.
Yes, humans make mistakes in markets. Everybody knows that, but there is no solution for this. Humans always make mistakes in every possible system that can exist, humans don't change. So the reason why we want a market system the waste majority of the time is because people are accountable for their own choices and have to deal with the consequences. In markets we call this profit and lost, this is the mechanism why markets in the face of the same human errors have continued to produce growth in the last 200 years.
We need free human agency and allow people to make mistakes while perusing their lives goals and attempt to solve their problems in creative ways. That what we call individual freedom. This will generate prosperity.
The idea that you can solve human irrationality with human institutions is a fallacy. Human irrationality is a fact, and the argument needs to be what system of relation produces the best outcome.
In a purely Libertarian world, there wouldn't be any corporations, since corporations are a legal fiction that depend on the State for their existence.
Then what, in that world, do you call the artifice by which humans cooperate to sell other humans the the services the non-existent state isn't providing?
But, to be fair, I am biased. So there's that.
So I agree with your statement here.
Even your own comment is not new. The complaint that there cooperation turn into feudalism is as old as capitalism. The problem is just that it never happens, 200 years of fantastic growth. Improvement on every human indicator possible in almost every dimension. Those are facts.
These things became about because big and small cooperation compete within a framework of law to produce what consumers want. Yes, there are many bad laws and bad enforcement, but capitalism is the only system that has ever produced long term sustainable growth.
I urge you to study governments and how accountable they really are to voters. I think nobody that has actually studied political economy and political science and uses the same view of human nature in both governments and markets, will think that government is the superior solution for the waste majority of problems.
The problems inherent in government solving all these problems you would like to solve, are huge. There are knowledge problems, intensive problems, disagreements about what even should be done and more, the inability of independent action in multiple directions at the same time and the list continues.
You complain about amazon, but 10 years ago, I remember that I usually had to pay lots of extra money for shipping. Now, I never do, not to mention that everything is cheaper and when I ship something it arrives faster. You can call if corporate feudalism all you want the benefits are clear.
> powerful corporate oligarchy that is only accountable to shareholders.
In the system I want and that we mostly have corporation are accountable to law, specifically civil law. Civil Law is the institutions we have that allows anybody to sue if his rights were violated. This is the central mechanism to limit cooperation, and it has worked millions of times in the past. Law is an emergent process and it evolves.
My problem with many progressives like you seem to be is that you don't seem to have a appreciation for this mechanism. You just want a powerful top down bureaucracy that can monitors, controls and guides everything. This is costly, easily manipulated and dangerous to a far greater level then Amazon could ever be.
Instead of a huge centralized environmental agency that has to be everywhere and monitor everything, we should have system where a person who feels his right are violated should be able to sue and attempts to enforce his rights. There need not be a clear definition from some agency what exactly the allowed level is, rather you have to prove harm to yourself and the court system has to produce some judgment call on what is acceptable in society. This is how Common Law was created, and economist who study it today, are fascinated by how it handles complex problem.
Instead of ever increasing regulatory bureaucracy and every increasing size of the state to fix every problem we should recognize what a wonderful tool the legal system is and how we can evolve it in a better direction. This is how you create a market economy with efficient handling of conflicts. It will be dynamic and it will focus on problems people actually care about, rather then whatever the latest 'cause' is that some bureaucracy wants to fight'.
One general system that is hard to manipulate and lobby rather then 100 specialized agencies each one deeply interdependent with the people the are supposed to regulate. Even worse if they actually solved the problems they have been assigned their would be no need for them to exist. Did the bureaucracy built up during the prohibition area vanish when prohibition ended? Laws that are no longer relevant cost almost nothing, bureaucracies that are no longer relevant will find some way to make themselves relevant.
The puzzle is the same as was during the time of the founding fathers. How can you have a government that is both powerful and constraint. I think a different more acceptable solution has to be found then a call for ever greater ever more powerful government to constrain ever more powerful cooperation.
I don't claim to have all the answers but when I hear 'a powerful government accountable to voters' and I remember basic political economy then I am afraid where those sort of calls lead.
I think you are overestimating how bad capitalism is and you idealize democracy institutions.
Some suggested fields of research for further study into the subject. Law&Economics, Public Choice Theory, Selectorate theory, New Institutional Economics, Industrial Organisation and more.
Just so I recommend one concrete book I will recommend 'Choosing in Groups: Analytical Politics Revisited'. This book essentially show how incredibly difficult and complex collective action really is. A powerful government that is accountable to voters is easy in theory, but the practice is incredibly difficult.
Oh yeah, Netflix is on AWS. Amazon is doing pretty much everything, I expect/predict in another two years they will launch a music streaming site a la Google Music/Spotify.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/dmusic/promotions/PrimeMusic https://www.amazon.com/gp/dmusic/promotions/AmazonMusicUnlim...
Yup, Amazon kinda sucks at marketing so many services, but who does better ?
They've been selling music for almost a decade! They started selling DRM Free Mp3s in 2007 [1]. Now you get limited streaming music with your Prime membership and access to a full streaming library for about $10/mo.
[1] en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Music
Amazon tries to incentivize customers to use 5 day ground shipping by offering credit to Pantry to tries to push its credit card as a means of payment. Perhaps all their other services can continually subsidize Prime (as well as internal logistics management), but it feels like price hammer could fall at any time.
Here's an analogy. Let's say Walmart rented out space on their trucks to any company that needed it. Would Amazon be crazy to tell retailers on their platform that they can't use Walmart trucks, or they don't want Walmart trucks driving up to their loading bays? I don't think so. Corporate espionage is a real thing.
Its just a bonus that Amazon is a garbage company who deserves as little business as possible.
Yes there are ways to make sure Amazon doesn't have easy access to it, while still hosting with them, but they are hard, and at the end of the day, physical access trumps most of those security controls.
Also, Walmart are SUPER paranoid about their internal data.
Maybe amazon would look at the data, maybe they wouldn't but if they did they would do it in a way that was nearly 100% impossible to ever prove.
Corporate espionage is a very deep rabbit hole, and goes on far more often than people think it does.
Why give them the opportunity to do so?
Remember: If not them, Amazon certainly would have done the same.
"Walmart employs an astounding 2.1 million people. In the United States alone, the company employs 1.4 million people. This is a staggering 1% of the U.S.'s 140 million working population."
They sell 1/2 a trillion worth of stuff. They have a bigger economic impact on America than google, Facebook,Apple etc.
People really underestimate how much of an impact this has. Here's a completely made up example. Let's say a person of a family of 4 goes grocery shopping once per week. This person buys 30 grocery items on each shopping trip. The difference between Wal-Mart and the local place might only be $0.25 per item. Is it really worth it to go somewhere else to save $0.25? No, unless you're saving $0.25 on everything you buy.
At $0.25 per item with 30 items each week and 52 weeks in a year, this shopper saves $390/year or a little more than $32/month by going to Wal-Mart. $32/month is pretty meaningless to most people who command a developer's salary, but there is a sizable portion of people in the US who could really use an extra $32 each month. That's the difference between Wal-Mart compared to the local shop, and that's the reason why Wal-Mart edged these small stores out of business.
My family actually drives past regular stores because of the selection at a super center.