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Comment by frenchman99 | Hacker News Reader

They don't threaten, they obey the court that asked them to suspend deliveries because employees were not properly cared for. Let's not turn things around.

Don't worry, if Amazon stops selling altogether, small businesses will be more than happy to take back some market share.

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I'm curious to see what the reaction of the French will be to this. I'd certainly be pretty unhappy if Amazon were turned off in my country.

Except that they won't be able to meet demands, especially for important products such as medical or safety products.

Then Amazon may need a carve-out in best practices to supply essential services, which is what every nation has had to do in this highly-dynamic crisis.

Did you mean to say company? Because Amazon isn’t a nation, they simply comply with the best practices set out by the governments they operate under.

In this case the French government gave an order, which they need more than 24 hours to comply with, so they are temporarily shutting down in order to understand the law and make changes.

Carve out can mean spin off, but it can also mean exception, including an exception to a law that lets a company operate. That's how I interpreted the parent.

I believe "Then Amazon may need a carve-out in best practices to supply essential services, which is what every nation has had to do in this highly-dynamic crisis." is better rendered as "Then Amazon may need emergency temporary relief from best practices/regulations in order to supply essential services; every nation has had to be flexible with regulation and oversight in this highly-dynamic crisis."

Amazon isn't able to meet demand for medical or safety products. Or home workout equipment. The only video game systems are from price gouging third parties. They've only recently caught up on toilet paper.

I'm not sure why you think Amazon is somehow immune.

> I'm not sure why you think Amazon is somehow immune.

The GP didn't claim that Amazon could keep up with demand.

Their general point is the whole supply chain is straining, and shutting down Amazon is going to exacerbate the issue. Maybe that's the right thing to do, and maybe it isn't, but the broad consequences are clear.

Between COVID-19 and the US-China trade war, I hope we're all taking a long hard look at supply chain diversity going foreword.

> The GP didn't claim that Amazon could keep up with demand.

That's true, but GP seems to think that we need Amazon to solve a problem which Amazon doesn't solve.

> Their general point is the whole supply chain is straining, and shutting down Amazon is going to exacerbate the issue. Maybe that's the right thing to do, and maybe it isn't, but the broad consequences are clear.

I don't think it's clear at all that shutting down Amazon will exacerbate the issue, because I don't think "the whole supply chain" is the issue. Specifically with medical supplies, the problem isn't that online retailers can't get stock to customers quickly enough. The problem is that stock doesn't exist. Unless Amazon decides to pivot into medical manufacturing, Amazon isn't the solution to this problem.

The reason Amazon is restocked on toilet paper is that toilet paper manufacture is fairly simple, so manufacturers have already pivoted to manufacture toilet paper. This is a credit to manufacturers, not Amazon.

> Between COVID-19 and the US-China trade war, I hope we're all taking a long hard look at supply chain diversity going foreword.

This we can agree on, at least.

This grossly overstates the Amazon's market share in France (17.5% of _online_ sales)

Is that supposed to sound small, because 82% is others?

Because to me it sounds amazingly large, that one company should do 17% of business for any market. And anything that is on a scale of countries, reducing it by 17% is going to be disruptive.

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