The Amazon can be seen in Douai, in northern France (AP Photo / Michel Spingler, file)
Amazon Distribution Center workers on Staten Island, New York, gather outdoors to protest career situations at the company’s warehouse on March 30 (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews, file)
Amazon’s massive multi-tier warehouse, called a distribution center, in Kent, Washington (Alan Berner / Seattle Times / TNS)
Amazon. com Inc. has charged inflated costs for hand sanitist, disposable gloves and other parts months after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, a customer regulator said in a report accusing the world’s largest online store of overwhelming costs.
The report, published Thursday through Public Citizen, examines about two dozen products on Amazon’s website. Based on its own observations and knowledge of value tracking sites, the nonprofit public interest organization has documented value increases of up to 1000% of the pre-pandemic. grades or values in other major retailers.
The report demands situations in which Amazon’s public position that it is an unproachable transgressor of fraud perpetrated through some “bad actors” who sell products in its prominent online store. It also accuses Amazon of abusing the value of products that the online store sells directly.
The U. S. company has denied participating in such practices. “There’s no place for it to be worth exploiting on Amazon, and that includes products presented directly through Amazon,” said a corporate spokesman. “Our systems are designed to give consumers the most productive online value that can be achieved and, if we locate a bug, we temporarily fix it to correct it. “
One of the more than two dozen pieces traced in the report, a 7. 5-ounce bottle of Dial-branded hand soap, was to be obtained before this week for Amazon’s $6. 41 directly and for approximately the same value from an external merchant. Target Corp. indexed the product for $1. 49, while CVS Health Corp. charged $2. 29, none of which he got for home delivery. Walmart Inc. sells hand soap only at outlets and has not posted a value online (a distributor at Walmart’s third store). -party marketplace registered a higher value, $7. 98, than Amazon).
The pandemic coincided with waves of inflated cost court cases, as well as the asymmetrical availability of products on demand such as cleaning products and bakery ingredients. Germany’s cartel regulator also asked Amazon about the costs of the outbreak as a component of a cost crusade. inflated through resellers, 3M Co. filed a lawsuit and then reached an agreement with an Amazon merchant.
Alex Harman, public citizen’s festival policy advocate and editor of the report, called it “crazy” that Amazon was still dealing with inflated costs months later. the company learned about the stampede after the start of the pandemic, but that doesn’t mean those costs have to reach consumers,” he said.
“Increased demand and lack of sources are literally an explanation of why abusive pricing laws exist,” Harman said.
Many U. S. states have not been able to do so. But it’s not the first time They have laws that govern appropriate value increases in essential products, such as food and fuel, in an emergency, but are difficult to enforce. States also describe “abusive values” in other ways, and some set an express threshold of 10% above the same old values and other confusing descriptions as “unspicpable levels,” making it difficult to apply to online markets that correspond to buyers and distributors from other countries.
The report calls for a national ban on value fraud and recommends that Amazon publish list values and a value history for express articles. In May, Amazon’s director of public policy, Brian Huseman, asked Congress to identify a national law on abusive pricing for emergencies, saying the company had suspended 4,000 vendor accounts for violating its pricing policies and cooperating with regulators in Tennessee, Alaska, and Washington to combat the abuse of grief on its website.
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