You are missing something else: you followed the race to the bottom. You knew exactly what you wanted and nothing else can substitute (correct me if I'm wrong, but I doubt anyone else who makes a TPM that will fit your motherboard). Your only consideration is price and fast shipping - there isn't much for anyone to compete on and so only the largest will.

In the more typical case these is. I recently needed a compass (my son is in scouts), what do I know about a compass: not much. Amazon will give me hundreds of options, some good, some really bad: I'd have to buy the one expensive name brand I know (and hope they are still as good as they were when I was a kid), or risk buying junk - worse junk in a way I wouldn't recognize in time to return it. However I found a small niche orienteering suppler that knows their product and so was able to direct me to a brand I've never heard of that while not as good as the name bring, was both a lot cheaper and good enough. They beat the race to the bottom because for a slightly higher price than amazon they could deliver me the exact thing I need for a still reasonable price.

> That was me.

Sure. I wasn't going to name you because I had no idea exactly why you'd deleted that comment, so I wasn't gonna be rude and attach the challenge to your name.

> $29 for overnight shipping is more than the cost of one month of Prime by approximately double...

What I've told you is that there are other retailers who will next-day ship you all sorts of "specialty" items like that one. So, Challenge Completed.

Whereas what you've told me is that overnight shipping for this one part is a little less than 1/6h the cost of a year of Amazon Prime. Given that I've only gotten things next-day shipped two or three times in my mumble decades of life, it sounds like not using Amazon saves me a notable chunk of money.

Also, I've heard from a ton of people out in the boonies that Prime ships very few -and sometimes no- items to them same day or overnight. The Prime Promise seems to be extremely location-dependent.

Amazon shipping and logistics are heavily subsidised by the social contract in Western Countries - it's not remotely a fair comparison even if these were removed based on Amazon's effective corporate income tax rates coming in as low as 1.4%.

In the US alone Amazon has received over $11 billion in cumulative taxpayer subsidies, and governments spend an average of nearly $43,000 per fulfillment center job created.

This is ramping up exponentially with regard to their data center rollout. In a single instance in rural Oregon, five AWS data centers will avoid $1 billion in property taxes.

This is completely aside from the qualitative damage done to traditional retail, shopping districts as a whole, SME innovation on consumer products, and distorting market competition beyond all recognition.

https://goodjobsfirst.org/amazon-tracker/

https://cictar.org/all-research/amazon

How do I start a fulfillment business that can get a roll of toilet paper delivered to the doorstep of consumers nationwide inside of 24 hours and have that transaction be profitable?

How much investment money and customer volume do I need to make that business viable?

They’re saying that starting a competitor to Amazon is now impossible regardless of capital investment.