With major distribution warehouses in Oklahoma City and Tulsa, Amazon was met with an antitrust lawsuit filed by Oklahoma and 16 other states who joined the Federal Trade Commission in accusing the giant company of running a monopoly.
The Attorney General’s office did not issue a statement explaining why AG Gentner Drummond decided to join the FTC.
“We would not, beyond the language in the complaint,” said spokesman Phil Bacharach in a response to an inquiry by OK Energy Today.
“Today’s lawsuit seeks to hold Amazon to account for these monopolistic practices and restore the lost promise of free and fair competition.”
She said the complaint laid out how the company has allegedlly used a set of punitive and coercive tactics to unlawfully maintain its monopolies.
“The complaint sets forth detailed allegations noting how Amazon is now exploiting its monopoly power to enrich itself while raising prices and degrading service for the tens of millions of American families who shop on its platform and the hundreds of thousands of businesses that rely on Amazon to reach them.”
Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Nevada, New York, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin joined the Commission’s lawsuit.
“We’re bringing this case because Amazon’s illegal conduct has stifled competition across a huge swath of the online economy. Amazon is a monopolist that uses its power to hike prices on American shoppers and charge sky-high fees on hundreds of thousands of online sellers,” said John Newman, Deputy Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition. “Seldom in the history of U.S. antitrust law has one case had the potential to do so much good for so many people.”
Amazon came to Oklahoma City and opened its fulfillment center in August of 2019. Another fulfillment center is located in Tulsa and was opened in March of this year.
Average Amazon.com hourly pay ranges from approximately $15.00 per hour for Scanner to $54.11 per hour for Route Driver. The average Amazon.com salary ranges from approximately $29,586 per year for Order Filler to $153,900 per year for General Manager.
The FTC and states allege Amazon’s anticompetitive conduct occurs in two markets—the online superstore market that serves shoppers and the market for online marketplace services purchased by sellers. These tactics include:
- Anti-discounting measures that punish sellers and deter other online retailers from offering prices lower than Amazon, keeping prices higher for products across the internet. For example, if Amazon discovers that a seller is offering lower-priced goods elsewhere, Amazon can bury discounting sellers so far down in Amazon’s search results that they become effectively invisible.
- Conditioning sellers’ ability to obtain “Prime” eligibility for their products—a virtual necessity for doing business on Amazon—on sellers using Amazon’s costly fulfillment service, which has made it substantially more expensive for sellers on Amazon to also offer their products on other platforms. This unlawful coercion has in turn limited competitors’ ability to effectively compete against Amazon.
The FTC claimed Amazon’s illegal, exclusionary conduct makes it impossible for competitors to gain a foothold. With its amassed power across both the online superstore market and online marketplace services market, it charged that Amazon extracts enormous monopoly rents from everyone within its reach.
