This is very bad math on the part of the article. You can’t just take total revenue/number of households. I mean have they not heard of a little side business Amazon has called AWS?

Amazon is not just a US company either.

They also have an ad business. You could rightfully argue that ad spend gets passed on to the consumer.

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twoodfin 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The number Matt’s quoting doesn’t include AWS, AFAICT. It’s “North American segment” revenue in AMZN accounting. AWS is accounted separately as a global unit.

Though now that I write that, I wonder if Matt divided by the total number of North American households or the number of US ones.

EDIT: Amazon North American segment revenue divided by aggregate North American household count is roughly $2,300. But I’m guessing the real number is closer to Matt’s estimate as US households are wealthier and likely represent a disproportionate fraction of that revenue.

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throwaway5465 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is sadly typical arrogant HN commentary jumping off to sound clever, cynically playing on the 'engineer mentality' fallacy, having put no effort to discredit the argumen as witnessed by the now clearly stupid argument presented, yet selfishly putting the onus on others to correct. It's quite sociopathic.

	▲	raw_anon_1111 10 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Would you rather I suffer from Gellman Amnesia? https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2021/01/18/gell-mann-amnesia/ If you can’t trust someone’s analysis about something you know about, why trust him about something you don’t?
	▲	twoodfin 11 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I dunno, going in with the starting assumption that Matt Stoller is innumerate and/or will twist statistics to support his otherwise specious arguments is not a terrible approach. On the particulars of this number, he seems to be close enough, but it’s not nearly as shocking with any context: The average American household Walmart spend is comparable, Apple captures almost half that with a handful of devices and services.

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kgwgk 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Have you not heard of a little organ called brain that can be used to understand what you read? There is even a link to the latest quarterly report there (have you heard of links and financial reports?).

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raw_anon_1111 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Well considering over the course of four years I got around a quarter million of AMZN (and sold it as soon as it vested)…

And if you actually read the report you would see where he is still wrong.

Hint: there is more to “North America” than just the US.

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kgwgk 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> Well considering

That makes your comment even worse!

> if you actually read the report you would see where he is still wrong

“about $3000 for every household in America.”

Please let us know what alternative number did you get after your careful reading of the report.

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raw_anon_1111 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Well since the lawsuit only considers the US and the revenue reported is for “North America”. I’ll let you figure that out.

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kgwgk 2 hours ago | parent [-]

No, please tell me how do you get a result which is not about $3000 per US household. I’m really curious!

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raw_anon_1111 2 hours ago | parent [-]

North American revenue includes US, Mexico and Canada. The lawsuit is only about US households.

Also, while technically correct that what is included in “how much people in North America spend at Amazon”. The lawsuit is about online sales. Whole Foods by itself made $150 billion in revenue which comes under North American sales.

	▲	kgwgk 34 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> The lawsuit is only about US households. Still waiting for the estimate of dollars per US household which is not about $3000. Come on, you can at least try to get to $2800 and claim victory! > Whole Foods by itself made $150 billion in revenue. That seems wrong by an order of magnitude. Or maybe you mean in a decade?