#amazon warehouse logistics

[fbasourcingchina]

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[flostream]

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[fr-logistics]

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[mostlysignssomeportents]

Amazon's bestselling "bitter lemon" energy drink was bottled delivery driver piss

Today (Oct 20), I'm in Charleston, WV at Charleston's Taylor Books from 12h-14h.

For a brief time this year, the bestselling "bitter lemon drink" on Amazon was "Release Energy," which consisted of the harvested urine of Amazon delivery drivers, rebottled for sale by Catfish UK prankster Oobah Butler in a stunt for a new Channel 4 doc, "The Great Amazon Heist":

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-great-amazon-heist

Collecting driver piss is surprisingly easy. Amazon, you see, puts its drivers on a quota that makes it impossible for them to drive safely, park conscientiously, or, indeed, fulfill their basic human biological needs. Amazon has long waged war on its employees' kidneys, marking down warehouse workers for "time off task" when they visit the toilets.

As tales of drivers pissing – and shitting! – in their vans multiplied, Amazon took decisive action. The company enacted a strict zero tolerance policy for drivers returning to the depot with bottles of piss in their vans.

That's where Butler comes in: the roads leading to Amazon delivery depots are lined with bottles of piss thrown out of delivery vans by drivers who don't want to lose their jobs, which made harvesting the raw material for "Release Energy" a straightforward matter.

Butler was worried that he wouldn't be able to list his product on Amazon because he didn't have the requisite "food and drinks licensing" certificates, so he listed his drink in Amazon's refillable pump dispenser category. But Amazon's systems detected the mismatch and automatically shifted the product into the drinks section.

Butler enlisted some confederates to place orders for his drink, and it quickly rocketed to the top of Amazon's listings for the category, which led to Amazon's recommendation engine pushing the item on people who weren't in on the gag. When these orders came in, Butler pulled the plug, but not before an Amazon rep telephoned him to pitch him turning packaging, shipping and fulfillment over to Amazon:

https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-let-its-drivers-urine-be-sold-as-an-energy-drink/

The Release Energy prank was just one stunt Butler pulled for his doc; he also went undercover at an Amazon warehouse, during a period when Amazon hired an extra 1,000 workers for its warehouses in Coventry, UK, in a successful bid to dilute pro-union sentiment in his workforce in advance of a key union vote:

https://jacobin.com/2023/10/the-great-amazon-heist-oobah-butler-review

Butler's stint as an Amazon warehouse worker only lasted a couple of days, ending when Amazon recognized him and fired him.

The contrast between Amazon's ability to detect an undercover reporter and its inability to spot bottles of piss being marketed as bitter lemon energy drink says it all, really. Corporations like Amazon hire vast armies of "threat intelligence" creeps who LARP at being CIA superspies, subjecting employees and activists to intense and often illegal surveillance.

But while Amazon's defensive might is laser-focused on the threat of labor organizers and documentarians, the company can't figure out that one of its bestselling products is bottles of its tormented drivers' own urine.

In the USA, the FTC is suing Amazon for its monopolistic tactics, arguing that the company has found ways to raise prices and reduce quality by trapping manufacturers and sellers with its logistics operation, taking $0.45-$0.51 out of every dollar they earn and forcing them to raise prices at all retailers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/25/greedflation/#commissar-bezos

The Release Energy stunt shows where Amazon's priorities are. Not only did Release Energy get listed on Amazon without any quality checks, the company actually nudged it into a category where it was more likely to be consumed by a person. The only notice the company took of Release Energy was in its logistics and manufacturing department – the part of the business that extracts the monopoly rents at issue in the FTC case – which tracked Butler down in order to sell him these services.

The drivers whose piss Butler collected don't work directly for Amazon, they work for a Delivery Service Partner. These DSPs are victims of a pyramid scheme that Amazon set up. DSP operators lease vans and pay to have them skinned in Amazon livery and studded with Amazon sensors. They take out long-term leases on depots, and hire drivers who dress in Amazon uniforms. Their drivers are minutely monitored by Amazon, down to the movements of their eyeballs.

But none of this is "Amazon" – it's all run by an "entrepreneur," whom Amazon can cut loose without notice, leaving them with unfairly terminated employees, outstanding workers' comp claims, a fleet of Amazon-skinned vehicles and unbreakable facilities leases:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/

Speaking to Wired, Amazon denied that it forces its drivers to piss in bottles, but Butler clearly catches a DSP dispatcher telling drivers "If you pee in a bottle and leave it [in the vehicle], you will get a point for that" – that is, the part you get punished for isn't the peeing, it's the leaving.

Amazon's defense against the FTC is that it spares no effort to keep its marketplace safe. As Amazon spokesperson James Drummond says, they use "industry-leading tools to prevent genuinely unsafe products being listed." But the only industry-leading tools in evidence are tools to bust unions and screw suppliers.

In her landmark Yale Law Review paper, "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox," FTC Chair Lina Khan makes a brilliant argument that Amazon's alleged benefits to "consumers" are temporary at best, illusory at worst:

https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-paradox

In Butler's documentary, Khan's hypothesis is thoroughly validated: here's a company extracting hundreds of billions from merchants who raise prices to compensate, and those monopoly rents are "invested" in union-busting and countermeasures against investigative journalists, while the tools to keep you from accidentally getting a bottle of piss in the mail are laughably primitive.

Truly, Amazon is the apex predator of the platform era:

https://pluralistic.net/ApexPredator

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/20/release-energy/#the-bitterest-lemon

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

[scarefox]

When they tell you at your first day that you are totally allowed to use the fire extinguisher when needed and the emergency defibrillator as well 👀

Why... how .... often do they need this??? They said they had to use the defibrillator 4 times in this company and one person even died. wtf????

This is just a warehouse collaborating for a big ass car brand to ship their car parts into other countries.........

You know where the highest fire danger is in that warehouse? The area where they destroy defect or flawed parts with a buzzsaw.

[collapsedsquid]

Getting fake components into the supply chain is easier than you might think. As a manufacturer of hardware, I have to deal with fake components all the time. This is especially true for batteries – most popular consumer electronic devices already have a healthy gray market for replacement batteries. These are batteries that look the same as OEM batteries and fetch an OEM price, but are made with sub-par components. Aside from taking advantage of gray and secondary markets, there are multiple opportunities along the route from the factory to you to tamper with goods – from the customs inspector, to the courier. But you don’t even have to go so far as offering anyone a bribe or being a state-level agency to get tampered batteries into a supply chain. Anyone can buy a bunch of items from Amazon, swap out the batteries, restore the packaging and seals, and return the goods to the warehouse (and yes, there is already a whole industry devoted to copying packaging and security seals for the purpose of warranty fraud). The perpetrator will be long-gone by the time the device is resold. Depending on the objective of the campaign, no further targeting may be necessary – just reports of dozens of devices simultaneously detonating in your home town may be sufficient to achieve a nefarious objective. Note that such a “reverse-logistics injection attack” works even if you on-shore all your factories, and tariff the hell out of everyone else. Any “tourist” with a suitcase is all it takes.

[probablyasocialecologist]

The worker as engine for machine learning is not such an absurd proposition when considering the idiosyncrasies of a company like Amazon’s wider business model. In many respects, much of what Amazon does differs little from the model of Victorian capitalism. Precarious labourers are still marshalled into warehouses and compelled to endure long hours to package goods and churn out surplus capital. But Amazon is less the ‘everything store’, more a universal logistics system. As Malcolm Harris drolly notes, ‘more than a profit-seeking corporation, Amazon is behaving like a planned economy.’ The vast warehouses, the delivery vans, the Amazon stores are all physical expressions of a computerized logistical system which distributes labour, goods and information. Every aspect of Amazon’s business model is geared toward enhancing its computational power. Amazon Prime, for instance, loses money on each order, and only exists to attract customers onto the platform who leave the data required to power its logistics and cloud services.

Phil Jones, Work Without the Worker: Labour in the Age of Platform Capitalism

[macmanx]

With the support of Teamsters Locals 63 and 1932, other local unions such as CWA, more than a dozen IE DSA members, political candidates, and community organizations, the large two building Sort Center covering a sprawling 600,000 sq. ft. was for all intents and purposes non-operational. In the matter of 2 days, through the support of the Teamsters, 84 unionized drivers and dispatchers for a DSP contracted with Amazon shut down a giant warehouse for hours, completely disrupting the logistics company’s business, hitting where it hurts them most - their bottomline.

This extraordinary display of solidarity from 84 dedicated workers and the unwavering support of the community serves as a testament to the power of working-class unity. It highlights the potential for collective action to achieve meaningful victories for the working class. As this strike continues to grow it will set precedent for future labor struggles and pave the way for broader organizing.

These workers fought back against one of the biggest corporate bullies on the planet. And their fight is our fight and it’s just getting started! The whole country is watching!

[argyrocratie]

"A great deal of the offshored industrial production at the other end of the extended supply chains celebrated in People’s Republic of Walmart is actually carried out in comparatively small job shops that would be more efficiently collocated with local market areas. The technology at the actual point of production, in such cases, is modest in scale and best suited for local or regional production. But it’s enclosed within a corporate institutional framework of extended logistic chains through the framework of copyright, patent, and trademark law which gives corporations a legal monopoly on disposal of an outsourced product. The only reason the facilities in China aren’t all producing identical goods directly for the local market, and selling at a price without the trademark and patent markups, is the enclosure of decentralized production technology within a centralized corporate legal framework. And the only reason the production facilities making goods for people in Iowa are sited in China instead of in Iowa is that the labor there is cheaper.

(...)

Lean production guru James Womack observed that “oceans and lean production are not compatible.” Simply shifting inventories from giant warehouses of finished product or intermediate goods to warehouses disguised as trucks and container ships isn’t really reducing overall inventory stocks at all. It’s just sweeping the batch and-queue bloat of Sloanism under the rug. The outsourced component manufacturers “are located on the wrong side of the world from both their engineering operations and their customers… [in order] to reduce the cost per hour of labor.” To properly apply lean principles it is necessary “to locate both design and physical production in the appropriate place to serve the customer.”49

In his Foreword to Waddell’s and Bodek’s The Rebirth of American Industry (something of a bible for American devotees of the Toyota Production System), H. Thomas Johnson (an expert in lean accounting) writes:

Some people see lean as a pathway to restoring the large manufacturing giants the United States economy has been famous for in the past half century…. The cheap fossil fuel sources that have always supported such production operations cannot be taken for granted any longer. One proposal that has great merit is that of rebuilding our economy around smaller scale, locally-focused organizations that provide just as high a standard living [sic] as people now enjoy, but with far less energy and resource consumption. Helping to create the sustainable local living economy may be the most exciting frontier yet for architects of lean operations.

So except in a few cases like geographically situated mineral resources, microprocessor production, and the like that require long-distance shipping for genuine technical reasons, most of what goes on in the logistic chains Phillips loves so much is just waste production. And that’s a lot of waste production. To put it simply, Walmart’s and Amazon’s increasingly automated inventory systems and just-in-time global logistic chains achieve “efficiency” only in a relative sense. To borrow a phrase from Peter Drucker, they’re the most efficient way of doing a very inefficient thing that ought not to be done at all.

(...)

Capitalism is not in crisis because, as per the orthodox Marxist model, its productivity so great that it undermines capitalist relations of production. It is in crisis because it has chosen models of technological development and organizing production that are unproductive in terms of how efficiently they use inputs. Capitalism is a system founded on extensive growth — that is, on the addition of ever larger quantities of resource inputs, inputs which are artificially cheap and abundant because of the enclosure of land and natural resources. Now that we are in the age of Peak Oil, and approaching the age of Peak Coal, Peak Gas, and analogous limits to a wide range of other material inputs, capitalism is experiencing a crisis of extensive development.

Post-capitalist transition is not simply a matter of celebrating mass production factories and global logistic chains as the “colossal forces of production” Marx wrote of, and saying “Thank you, capitalists, but we’ll take over from here.” Those mass production factories and global logistic chains are the prime examples of the kinds of inefficiency created by a system that treated material inputs as artificially cheap and abundant and pursued growth by throwing more of them on the pile instead of using existing inputs more efficiently."

-Kevin Carson, “We Are All Degrowthers. We Are All Ecomodernists. Analysis of a Debate” (2019)

[fbasourcingchina]

FBA prep in china

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[notwiselybuttoowell]

When Ana Carlos looks past the horse stables behind her home, over the back fence and out across the wide open field and scrub-covered hill that blooms bright orange in the springtime, she feels dread.

Soon it will be paved over, transformed into a 213-acre industrial complex with three vast warehouses. Nearly 100 of Carlos’s neighbors’ homes in the tiny, once rural town of Bloomington, California, will be razed to make way for the development, as will the local elementary school.

“That’s like a slow death, huh? Just seeing one block go down at a time,” she said. “Until everything I see here would be just a wall of warehouses.”

Over the past decade, warehouses for online retailers as well as logistics and distribution companies such as Amazon, UPS and FedEx have reshaped southern California’s landscape. To satiate a growing hunger for one-click, doorstep delivery, colossal structures to store and sort our online orders have risen across the region.

About 1,100 warehouses have been constructed since 2010, encompassing more than 12,500 acres, according to a data tool developed by researchers at the Robert Redford Conservancy for Southern California Sustainability at Pitzer College and Radical Research. The data, shared exclusively with the Guardian, for the first time maps this sprawl of warehouses across the region and estimates their impact on the local environment.

It reveals that:

Overall, there are about 9,500 warehouses in the region with a footprint above one acre.

Each day, more than 1m truck trips out of these warehouses cloud the air with 1,450lbs of toxic diesel particulate pollution and 164,000lbs of nitrogen oxide pollution, which are linked to health problems including respiratory conditions.

The trucks also emit just under 100m lbs of carbon dioxide each day.

Across the region, about 340 school campuses are located within 1,000ft of a warehouse property line.

[hasufin]

Robots

Not to be too much of a downer, but I’m a little worried about what our economy will look like post-recession.

Okay, let’s start with an ugly fact: we’re going to have a recession. They’ve been talking about one for a couple years now. And it’s like we’ve been slowly sliding into it. We’ve got the ongoing Retailpocalypse - which I’m still not sure if there’s some hidden issue that I don’t understand or if it’s mostly just most traditional retailers utterly failing to adapt to the Internet (I have ZERO sympathy, you fuckers have had thirty years) and leaving the market open for one or two players. But “economists” have been warning of a recession for a while.

And honestly, it almost feels like many big companies are trying to make one happen. Lots of needless layoffs, reduction in spending, not to mention the Fed basically saying “Oh my! Inflation is out of hand, let’s do something to reduce how much money consumers have instead of trying to get prices down!”

I don’t understand the forces which lead to recession. This feels... forced. But I’m pretty confident that it will happen. Unemployment is going to go up, homelessness will rise, etc.

Now, for those who have been through recessions - which, sadly, means most of the people reading this - this means unemployment, uncertainty, and poor job prospects. If you’re fortunate enough to keep your job, it’s still not great.

What happens, in my experience, is that companies reduce headcount even though the work doesn’t reduce nearly as much. You end up with one person doing the jobs of three or four. The company has an “open req” to get more people, but there’s a “hiring freeze” so it won’t happen until much later. I don’t know what companies gain by claiming open positions which they have no intention of filling, but this happens often enough I assume there’s an advantage.

Yet, through heroic effort, those who remain employed (and glad they dodged that bullet) will keep things running. The employer will then conclude “Aha! You weren’t giving your 100% before! In fact, we’re sure you still aren’t! No help for you!” and the remaining workers slog on, just glad to be employed. Headcount never rises again, the positions remain quietly unfilled. Workers burn out, but there are always more people - skilled, capable, but desperate people - who will take those jobs.

This is grim enough. But I am seeing many companies investing very, very heavily in machine learning. Amazon already uses automated forklifts for their warehouses. I think many places with large scale logistics are trying to hold on until self-driving vehicles become a thing - Amazon, I suspect, hopes to jump driectly from repurposed UPS trucks to purpose-built robotic delivery. Uber and GrubHub almost certainly want to replace “independent” drivers with a fleet of self-driving cars.

But more importantly is the behind-the-scenes machine learning algorithms. There are more and more tools which companies are using to handle the traditionally very headcount-intensive customer service component; other tools to perform large-scale data integration and automate a variety of other tasks.

What I am worried about now is, companies will lay off large numbers of people, and using these new technologies they will simply... not hire people for those roles anymore. There are reasons why this is Not Great - it removes a major feedback component to decision-making (e.g., you no longer have someone to say “Hey, our customer requests are shifting, we need to rethink our supply chain”) but companies are always happy to let someone else do the innovation and simply profit off others’ work.

But from an employee perspective, I just worry about the scale of the unemployment event we’re looking at, and our response to this. What we should be doing is having serious questions about the nature of our economic system and how we can make it work for the existing population.

What I know we will do is cast it as a moral issue, blaming the people who are hurt by these shifts, without addressing the underlying issues, while maybe doing a few minor stopgap fixes to prevent outright rioting.

[stevecarell600]

Drone Package Delivery Market Are Estimated To Increase During Period 2029 USD 31,188.7 Million At Exhibiting a CAGR of 53.94%

The global drone package delivery market size is projected to reach USD 7,388.2 million by 2028, exhibiting a CAGR of 41.8% during the forecast period. Widespread deployment of drones to deliver medical and food supplies amid the COVID-19 pandemic is expected to aid the market make substantial gains, observes Fortune Business Insights™ in its report, titled “Drone Package Delivery Market Size, Share & Industry Analysis, By Type (Fixed Wing and Rotary Wing), By Package Size (Less Than 2 Kg, 2-5 Kg, and above 5 Kg), By End Use (Restaurant & Food Supply, E-commerce, Healthcare, Retail Logistics & Transportation and others), and Regional Forecast, 2020-2028”.

Get Sample PDF Brochure:

The report states that the market value stood at USD 642.4 million in 2019 and shares the following information:

Comprehensive depiction of the industry outlook and trends;

Detailed insights into the upcoming opportunities in the market;

Tangible analysis of the market drivers, restrains, and all possible segments; and

In-depth assessment of the regional and competitive dynamics impacting the market.

Driving Factor

Emergence of Drone Startups in Logistics to Augment Market Potential

The growing demand for enhancing the efficiency of logistics operations has triggered a sudden emergence of startups specializing in drone technologies to cater to these needs. For example, DroneScan, a South Africa-based startup, designs drones that transmits live data of scanned items in warehouses, making inventory management more efficient and upping the productivity quotient of workers. An Italy-based startup, Archon, provides autonomous robotic drone services to facilitate supervised as well as unsupervised inspection of warehousing and logistics operations. The drone startup culture is gathering momentum in developing countries as well. For example, in India, several startups have spawned in the past few years that are providing next-gen drone services. Aarav Unmanned Systems, for instance, was started in 2013 and is India’s first drone company to develop drone solutions for commercial applications in the public and private sectors. These developments are expected to power the drone package delivery market growth in the forthcoming years.

Regional Insights

North America to Top Other Regions Backed by Rising Preference for Drone Deliveries by Shoppers

North America is set to dominate the drone package delivery market share during the forecast period owing to the increasing inclination of online shoppers towards delivery of goods through unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). With a market size of USD 237.7 million in 2019, the region is likely to retain its leading position, which will be supported by the strong financial support to drone startups in the US and Canada.

In Europe, the market is anticipated to be driven by the growing presence of tech companies that are expanding their operations in the region through collaborations and partnerships. Asia Pacific is expected to create exciting opportunities for market players on account of the emerging trend of online purchasing of groceries in the large cities of India, China, and Indonesia.

Competitive Landscape

Supportive Regulations to Novel Ideas to Feed Competitive Ardor of Key Players

With the scope for innovation widening, key players in the market drone package deliveries are engaged in coming up with novel drone solutions, especially during the current coronavirus crisis. Supporting their efforts are regulatory bodies that are easing flying norms and rules to ensure timely delivery of essential supplies to people.

List of Key Companies Profiled in the Drone Package Delivery Market Report:

DroneScan (South Africa)

Cheetah Logistics Technology (US)

Flytrex (Israel)

Flirtey (US)

Matternet, Inc. (US)

Boeing (US)

Amazon Inc. (US)

Wing Aviation LLC (US)

Workhorse Group Inc. (US)

Drone Delivery Canada Corp. (Canada)

Zipline (US)

DHL International GmbH (Germany)

United Parcel Service of America, Inc. (US)

FedEx (US)

Industry Developments:

August 2020: Amazon secured clearance from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to deploy its Prime Air delivery drone fleet to efficiently and securely deliver packages to customers. Amazon is now the third company to receive FAA approval to operate drones on a commercial scale after UPS and the Alphabet-owned company, Wing.

May 2020: Wing, a subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet, announced that it has made thousands of drone deliveries in Australia during the pandemic. Launched in Canberra in 2019, the demand for Wing’s services rose by 500% between February and April 2020.

[scarefox]

Hate how boomers are so brainwashed into willingly working through breaks or at least going back to 100% the second the break is over.

Like I work in this really shitty logistics company. It's monotone af, sometimes involving heavy lifting, doing the same tasks over and over for 8-9 hours.

BUT they 'grand' us besides the regular 1x 30 mins break, 2x 5 min 'smoker' breaks after 2h. It's the only times you can sit down and chill for a moment. And of course 5 minutes are practically nothing BUT still better than nothing. And of course you try to stretch it a bit. Like I use min 5 to slowly get back at my place. At min 6 I put my gloves back on etc. But some of the older ones just continue doing some small clean up tasks or whatever. Or are back full into work mode when the clock hit's min 5...

TAKE YOUR FUCKING BREAK MAN.

Also the same for people who desperately try to always level up the productivity numbers to get praise. To accomplish more and more, getting faster day by day. What is the point??? Why??? It's the most unimportant company and job. We just ship fucking BMW parts from A to B. It's not worth to ruin your health over this??

Also the work place is one big heath hazard, dirty, old af tools, and desks (recently one just fell over luckily NOT onto a person), broken & rusty tools, they don't even give us proper air conditioning in this freaking heat or don't allow us to take off the warning wests when we stand secure at our desks because "we have to ask the managers above and that's so complicated to get an ok". Also they force you into overtime (overtime: late shift = 1h longer each day of the whole week, early shift = normal time BUT working on Saturday). And if you have some urgent appointment on Saturday, they expect you to tell them 4 weeks in advance !! Even though the overtime always comes random only few days in advance.

And the little spite wars between the different departments and teams. Also between fulltime worker and temporary worker. As temp worker you are always trash (and potential job rival), regardless where you are. The fulltime employees always think they are better and smarter than the other groups. It's such an artificial rivalry microcosm just for capitalism sake. The way some of the longterm employees literally don't have anything else to talk and complain about than other coworker, other departments and work in general.

I never want to be on that level. Literally the worst job I ever worked in besides amazon warehouse (amazon air was oke). I am so glad that I am just student temp worker with "free choice" on when I sign in for work days in there. My brother is fully emplyed (over temp as well) but he has to do the Saturday overtime shit.

[theshipmaestro]

An FBA prep centre is a specialized service handling product preparation, packaging, and labeling for Amazon sellers, ensuring compliance with Amazon's guidelines. A 3PL warehouse for Amazon sellers assists in inventory management, storage, and shipment services, providing an end-to-end solution for logistics.

[bilbobagginsomebabez]

Amazon made $1 billion through secret price raising algorithm -US FTC

WASHINGTON, Nov 2 (Reuters) - Amazon.com (AMZN.O) used a series of illegal strategies to boost profits at its online retail empire, including an algorithm that pushed up prices U.S. households paid by more than $1 billion, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission detailed in a new court filing on Thursday.

The FTC lawsuit was filed in September but many details were withheld until Thursday when a version of the lawsuit with fewer redactions was made public in U.S. District Court in Seattle.

Amazon, which has 1 billion items in its online superstore, created a "secret algorithm internally code named 'Project Nessie' to identify specific products for which it predicts other online stores will follow Amazon's price increases. ... Amazon used Project Nessie to extract more than a billion dollars directly from Americans' pocketbooks," the FTC said.

Amazon spokesperson Tim Doyle said the FTC "grossly mischaracterizes" the pricing tool and the company stopped using it several years ago.

"Nessie was used to try to stop our price matching from resulting in unusual outcomes where prices became so low that they were unsustainable," Doyle said.

Amazon began testing the pricing algorithm in 2010 to see whether other online retailers tracked its prices and to raise prices for products that were likely to be tracked by competitors, the complaint said.

After outside retailers began matching or increasing their own prices, Amazon would continue to sell the product at an inflated price, the FTC alleged, which resulted in $1 billion in excess profit.

Amazon paused the algorithm during its Prime Day sales events and the holiday shopping season when there was more media and customer attention on the online retailer, the FTC said.

"After the public's focus turned elsewhere, Amazon turned Project Nessie back on and ran it more widely to make up for the pause," the lawsuit said.

Amazon in April 2018 used it to set prices for more than 8 million items purchased by customers that collectively cost almost $194 million, the complaint said, before pausing it in 2019.

Amazon retail executive Doug Herrington in January 2022 asked about using “old friend Nessie, perhaps with some new targeting logic" to boost profits for Amazon’s retail arm, the complaint said.

The FTC called Nessie's algorithm an "unfair method of competition" because it manipulates other online stores into raising prices, allowing Amazon to do the same.

The FTC complaint also accuses Amazon of seeking to hide information about operations from antitrust enforcers by using the Signal messaging app's disappearing message feature and said the company destroyed communications from June 2019 to early 2022.

TARGETING SELLERS

Amazon also required sellers under the company's Prime feature to use its logistics and delivery services even though many would prefer to use a cheaper service or one that would also service customers from other platforms where they sell, the FTC said.

The FTC alleged that an unnamed Amazon executive who headed global fulfillment had what he called an "oh crap" moment when he realized that letting sellers be on Prime without using Fulfillment by Amazon was "fundamentally weakening (Amazon’s) competitive advantage" by encouraging sellers "to run their own warehouses."

Amazon average fees for sellers who used its fulfillment services increased from 27% in 2014 to 39.5% in 2018, the FTC said.

TARGETING WALMART

In the complaint, the FTC noted that Amazon does not allow other big online stores such as Walmart.com to sell on its platform. When asked why Amazon treats Walmart.com differently than smaller sellers, Mr. Bezos testified, "It’s just different because of the scale and (be)cause of the competitive situation and so on."

In a section of the lawsuit which remains heavily redacted, Amazon allegedly deterred Walmart in 2017 from offering discounts to online shoppers who picked up their purchases from Walmart stores. Walmart declined comment for this story.

The complaint cites one Amazon seller who adopted a policy of making "absolutely sure that our products are not priced lower on Walmart than they are on Amazon" because of pressure from Amazon.

Reporting by Diane Bartz, David Shepardson and Arriana McLymore; Editing by Mark Porter, David Gregorio and Daniel Wallis

Amazon is being sued by the FTC and 17 states for being an illegal monopoly