So I flicked on Amazon last night, basically said "If you hate ads like we know you do, pay us $2.99 per month and they'll disappear"
And all I can think about is "How f****** greedy is this country?" We know who owns Amazon. We know he is the richest person on Earth. And still, no matter what, the money is just never enough. Probably going to cause me to cancel b/c honestly, Amazon Prime is not that great anyway, and with football season over, this s*** and f*** the f*** off for all I care. Reacher sucks! The format they have is not great. I'm just wondering how quickly others are going to follow suit.
Very annoyed.
You realize Amazon is also a publicly traded company that has a duty to its stockholders? I mean I don't like what's happening in the streaming field either, but it's not necessarily individual greed here. The BoD/CEO etc. of any company can't just sit stagnant and say "we have enough money."
Companies exist for one purpose only - to make profit.
Under capitalism, they take their cues from the market. If this $2.99 increase is a bad idea, it's up to the consumer market to tell them so by saying "no" to the increase as well as "no" to the ads.
So somewhere along the line that changed, right? It wasn't always "Profit over everything" Companies can make a profit while still ya know, not being a greed machine hell bent on capturing every single cent, right?
That is kind of where I'm coming from.
People have touched on this, but this is how the system is set up, and it's been that way ever since there's been a stock market.
AMZN has a p/e ratio of 83. That means shareholders are buying/holding the stock because they expect enormous growth. If Amazon decided it was happy with its current profit and just wanted to repeat that same profit every quarter going forward, the stock would fall by 80%. Meanwhile they are legally obligated to act in the best interest of their shareholders, which that clearly would not be doing.
I agree that the system SHOULD be set up where if you're making $10B every quarter that's enough and you can just be happy making that much every quarter. But it's not set up that way.
We do have a normal check and balance for this. It's called recession. The way capitalism and the stock market works especially for tech companies is a company comes out of the gates and focuses first on user growth, providing a great user experience at good value such that people want the product. Shareholders see a growing userbase and pile in, anticipating that will eventually translate to big profit. Eventually it's time to pay the piper and extract that big profit, and that means cutting costs (making the user experience worse) and raising prices. Then you hit a point of diminishing returns where you can't really grow any more (everyone that is going to sign up for Netflix has already done it, there aren't many people left that don't already have it to acquire) so you have to REALLY start squeezing the customer.
Eventually, we hit tough times (a recession) and people start scaling back their spending. Now, with users declining, trying to retain and re-grow customers is back on the table and the company has to get back to that user growth/retention phase where they are making the user experience better and making the product cheaper. Investors reset their expectations back to user growth, and the company can then get away with focusing on user acquisition/retention again.
The problem is we skipped our last recession. It started looking like it might be on the horizon in 2018 and we slashed interest rates to dodge it. And it's been a never ending stream of stimulus ever since (and even before, as well) to keep dodging that recession even longer. That's why if you look at almost any product, it's simultaneously gotten both worse and more expensive. Companies have been in the "squeeze the customer" phase for far too long. Until we get another recession, it won't change. Prices will keep going up, while the user experience goes down.
