Tea at Trianon: Problems in the Marketplace

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, October 9, 2020

Problems in the Marketplace

I love Amazon Basics. From Ars Technica:

Multiple deep-diving investigations in recent years have found unsafe, mislabeled, counterfeit, or fraudulent goods for sale in Amazon's third-party marketplace, which is increasingly compared to an unsupervised flea market.
The Wall Street Journal in 2019 found that not only is some of the junk for sale in the Marketplace trash in a very literal sense but also that listings for unsafe items persist even after those goods are recalled or banned from the site.

About 60 percent of Amazon's retail sales take place through the third-party marketplace, with millions of vendors placing tens of millions of listings. At that scale, it can undoubtedly be difficult to keep up, and perhaps some errors are expected.

Amazon's own sales, however—the other 40 percent of its retail empire—increasingly rely on and promote Amazon's hundreds of private-label brands. AmazonBasics is one of the most successful of those brands. It sells the kind of product lines you'd expect to find store brands of in a Target, Walmart, or other big-box store: home goods, bed and bath products, kitchen accessories, luggage, lightbulbs, charging cables, and so on.

You might think that bringing all of those products and brands in-house and listing, selling, and shipping them as a first-party merchant would allow Amazon to exercise much tighter quality control over those goods than it does in the Marketplace. According to a new CNN report, however, you'd be wrong. (Read more.)