The scale of the scheme is almost unfathomable; according to its latest investor reports, Amazon earned $426 billion of revenue in its 2025 North America online shopping business, which is about $3000 for every household in America. As Stacy Mitchell noted, prices for third party goods on the online platform, roughly 60% of its total sales, have been going up at 7% a year, more than twice the rate of inflation. And because this scheme impacts goods sold off of Amazon’s website as well, there’s a reasonable chance that it has had an impact on price levels overall in America. With a similar Pepsi-Walmart alleged conspiracy revealed earlier this year, it’s becoming increasingly clear that consolidation and price-fixing are linked to inflation.
How exactly does the scheme work? Long-standing readers of BIG may remember a piece in 2021 titled “Amazon Prime is an Economy-Distorting Lie” in which I laid out what’s happening. At the time, the D.C. Attorney General, a lawyer named Karl Racine, sued Amazon for prohibiting vendors that sold on its website from offering discounts outside of Amazon. Such anti-discounting provisions raise prices for consumers, and prevent new platforms from emerging to challenge Amazon.
The key leverage point for Amazon is the scale of its Prime program, which has 200 million members nationwide. As Scott Galloway noted a few years ago, more U.S. households belong to Prime than decorate a Christmas tree or go to church.