It's not that Amazon is irreplaceable, but sometimes it's the best option by far depending on where you live and what you're looking for.

I'm in Austria (not Australia) and local retail prices are infamous for being 25% to 100% higher than in neighboring Germany for the same stuff because of cartel behavior of local retail industry.

Buying from amazon Germany means I can get the same prices as Germans (with +1% extra for higher Austrian VAT) for the same goods.

I'd love to give up Amazon in favor of local stores but local cartels are just as bad or even worse.

So to fix the Amazon problem you need to fix the competition problem first, which is caused by players other than Amazon too.

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rvnx 3 days ago | parent [-]

This. 100%. Local shops are taking huge margins, have limited selection and are slow because they need to order from… central warehouse

	▲	account42 18 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Worse is that local shops also often have a bad customer experience when things go wrong - but now it's a new different flow for every store instead of a known quantity.