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Businesses The Almighty Buck

Amazon Slaps US Sellers With 5% Fuel, Inflation Surcharge (cnbc.com) 44

Posted by BeauHD from the higher-prices-incoming dept.
Amazon said Wednesday it plans to add a fuel and inflation surcharge of roughly 5% to existing fees it collects from U.S. third-party sellers who use the company's fulfillment services. CNBC reports: The fee will go into effect in about two weeks, and is "subject to change," the company said in a notice to sellers that was viewed by CNBC. "The surcharge will apply to all product types, such as non-apparel, apparel, dangerous goods, and Small and Light items," the notice stated. "The surcharge will apply to all units shipped from fulfillment centers starting April 28."

Some 89% of Amazon's 2 million-plus sellers used FBA in 2021, according to a report from Jungle Scout, which creates product research software for Amazon sellers. "In 2022, we expected a return to normalcy as COVID-19 restrictions around the world eased, but fuel and inflation have presented further challenges," an Amazon spokesperson said in an email to CNBC. "It is still unclear if these inflationary costs will go up or down, or for how long they will persist, so rather than a permanent fee change, we will be employing a fuel and inflation surcharge for the first time -- a mechanism broadly used across supply chain providers." Yesterday, the Labor Department said that its consumer price index jumped 8.5% in March from 12 months earlier, the sharpest year-over-year increase since 1981.
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Amazon Slaps US Sellers With 5% Fuel, Inflation Surcharge More

Amazon Slaps US Sellers With 5% Fuel, Inflation Surcharge

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  • Nope (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 13, 2022 @05:54PM (#62444378)

    Amazon said Wednesday it plans to add a fuel and inflation surcharge

    Which just causes more inflation.

    Price increases are not caused by inflation. That is exactly backward. Inflation is caused by price increases. Prices do not magically go up by themselves. Prices only go up when someone raises them. You raise prices, you cause more inflation. Which is then used as an excuse to raise prices even higher, which causes more inflation.

    You only break the cycle by not raising prices. But, God Forbid, the CEO doesn't get a new mansion and yacht this year.

    • read my sig.

    • Whatever Amazon does with their prices, it's not going to affect oil prices.

    • Re:Nope (Score:4)

      by Applehu Akbar ( 2968043 ) on Wednesday April 13, 2022 @10:46PM (#62444886)

      Price increases are not caused by inflation. That is exactly backward. Inflation is caused by price increases.

      This is like saying that a mysterious force called "gun violence" causes people to be shot, rather than criminals pulling triggers.

      Inflation occurs when, and only when, the supply of money grows faster than the growth in sum of all goods that money can be traded for.

    • Re:Nope (Score:4, Informative)

      by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Thursday April 14, 2022 @12:21AM (#62445010)
      You're halfway there. Price increases are caused by a change in the amount of money in the system, relative to the amount of stuff that's produced. When you do the math for standard of living, it's (how much stuff is produced) / (how many people get to use the stuff). Prices and wages cancel out of the equation. Productivity is what matters (and to a lesser extent, distribution). Not prices nor wages.
      • If you announced that everyone's bank account accounts and salaries would be doubled overnight, everyone wouldn't suddenly be able to buy twice as much stuff. Because there's been no change to productivity, all that would happen is prices would double to exactly cancel out the increase in money everyone receives. That's essentially what happened during the pandemic. We shut down global production, then gave away money to try to keep consumption going. That can work for the short-term, when you still have inventory to absorb the money being given away. Unfortunately, you can't buy what's not being produced. So once the inventory was gone, the extra money instead went into increasing prices - i.e. inflation.
      • OTOH if everyone works twice as hard to not waste as much time goofing off at work, and produce twice as much, then everyone is able to buy twice as much stuff. Because twice as much stuff is being made per capita, that means there's twice as much stuff available to consume per capita. This is how Germany gets away with extremely generous vacation time. They don't work as many hours in a year, but the hours they do work are much more productive.

      Disproportionate CEO pay is bad for a different reason. The economy functions most efficiently when everyone is paid close to how much they produce. If CEOs are siphoning off pay which should really be going to employees,

      • It decreases the economy's efficiency. Henry Ford stumbled upon this in reverse when he paid his workers double the prevailing wage. Because it was still less than how much his workers were producing, he still made a profit. But because it was closer to the productivity his workers were producing, it had a snowball effect. Suddenly these workers could afford to buy the cars they were producing, which increased sales, which created more work producing more cars, which created a need for more workers to make the cars, which allowed more people to buy the cars they were producing, and so on. i.e. Economic efficiency was improved. All of which made Ford more money, until he became one of the richest men on the planet. But if you do the reverse and underpay employees, it hurts efficiency and decreases productivity. Not because the workers aren't working hard enough, but because there's less work for the workers to do.
      • It increases the tendency for CEOs to waste money on stupid unproductive crap like gold toilet seats. Which also decreases economic efficiency.

    • Price increases are not caused by inflation. That is exactly backward. Inflation is caused by price increases.

      Huh? In a market oriented economy, prices are set by competition and what buyers can afford. Amazon can set prices to whatever they want, but if their competitors can do it for cheaper, or buyers can't afford it, then they will eventually go out of business.

      When general prices are able to keep rising without this happening, then something else is going on - everyone has more money but the underlying economy (actual output) is staying the same. That is inflation, and is caused solely by monetary supply growi

  • So they're full of shit. This is literally just a 1% raising prices because they can. A bunch of oil executives got dragged before Congress and admitted to it. Not that it matters it was hardly covered in the news and the Democrats are terrible at messaging. The wife of a Supreme Court justice was heavily involved in the January 6th attempt on the capitol and Will Smith slap in a dude got seven times as much coverage.

    This is a whole new kind of inflation. The 1% spent the last 30 years in a never-ending

    • So they're full of shit. This is literally just a 1% raising prices because they can. A bunch of oil executives got dragged before Congress and admitted to it.

      So blame the oil companies, not Amazon. I've had to pass along the increased cost of everything to my customers, too. Hope you don't live in a warm climate and need your air conditioner serviced, the cost of refrigerant has gone through the roof. Don't even get me started on how much it costs to fill up my work van with fuel.

      Not that I believe for one moment that it had anything to do with him, or that he was doing a better job, but under Trump (and pre-Covid) a 25lb cylinder of R-410a* was around $70-$1

      • 25lb cylinder of R-410a* was around $70-$100. Today, it's $430.00.

        Holy shit. I have three cylinders of frosty gold!

      • a 25lb cylinder of R-410a* was around $70-$100. Today, it's $430.00. I know what's going on and I still find the situation incredibly frustrating.

        I don't know what's going on. It's easy to blame Putin, but the fuel price increase happened before the war started.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by NFN_NLN ( 633283 )

          Bullshit Psaki said it only happened AFTER Putin invaded Ukraine.

          Are you saying Psaki is a liar?

          (Before that it was shipping containers being backed up, before that it was Trump -- Now it's Putin.)

        • It's easy to blame Putin, but the fuel price increase happened before the war started.

          I'm still not blaming Putin, but here in nocal the fuel prices have risen from around $4 to around $6.50 since the war started.

          California pays about $1.50/gal more than other states even though our fuel taxes account for less than half of that, and we have refineries in this state, so transportation is a poor excuse as well. Fuel doesn't even get trucked in up here for the most part, I've seen the little baby tanker they use unloading at the local storage facility. Which BTW is literally right on the water,

    • I was with you until you harked back to Reagan. "Reaganomics" was fine for its time (now we know it wasn't that bright an idea but they were doing similar things in the UK under Thatcher). The Democrats, going back to Truman (World War 2 was arguably a necessary war), started two of the biggest US wars (Korean and Vietnam wars), requring the intervention of a Republican president to bring to a close, if not a conclusive end (the two Koreas being still technically at war).

      The first Gulf War (Bush Sr) was arg

      • The first Gulf War (Bush Sr) was arguably a necessary war, since Saddam was directly threatening US strategic interests (oil).

        No it wasn't because no, he wasn't. How could he?
        Blaming wars on Democrats ignores the entirety of American history. War is a bipartisan issue.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by NFN_NLN ( 633283 )

          > Saddam was directly threatening US strategic interests (oil).

          The Iraq invasion was justified because he had weapons of mass destruction and Kuwait babies were thrown out of incubators (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6f2m4n1NVo)

          Same with the Bay of Pigs, Gulf of Tonkin and Putin invading Ukraine.

        • Blaming wars on Democrats ignores the entirety of American history. War is a bipartisan issue.

          You're correct. Sorry, if I misphrased my thoughts. All I was trying to say was that wars started under both Republican and Democratic administrations.

          Wars started under a Democratic administration appear to be elective, to achieve some ideological goal. This includes WW2 (stop the Nazis) and Vietnam (stop Communism). Wars started under Republican administrations appear to have shorter range goals (eg free shipping lanes, get rid of purported WMDs).

      • Because you have a lot of positive and happy memories associated with Reagan. I get that a lot. There's a pretty well known comic out there with a bunch of panels where people say how infectiously optimistic Reagan was followed by some horrific thing his administration did. You can find it with a little bit of googling and it's well worth it.

        My point on Reagan is that he did the exact opposite of what everyone says he did. He did left wing Keynesian economics to get our economy moving again while tellin

        • I'm not a Reagan, but the man was a product of his time, like Gorbachev and Thatcher. I'd say Reagan did better than Gorbachev, who actually presided over the collapse of the USSR. The poor did become poorer in the US, but that trend I think started under Nixon.

          However, I'm curious about your suggestion that "the parties changed political alignments in the 1950s". All I'm aware of is the exodus of the Southern Democrats to the Republican party because of the Civil Rights movement, etc, and that was the 1960

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by DarkOx ( 621550 )

        WWII was only possible and only necessary because of WWI.

        In the case of "The Great War" there was never a necessary requirement for US involvement. It was stupid war being fought over stupid reasons because of stupid agreements between European nations. It was NOT our fight and we should have damn well stayed out of it.

        There was no reason at all for American boys to die over there. Wilson a Democrat and basically cut from the cloth of the modern technocrats, lied about staying out of the war to get elected

    • Meanwhile we repealed or ignored all the zoning laws that prevented Rich assholes from buying up all the houses and apartments and renting them back to us at inflated rates.

      What zoning laws are those? I want more of them.

    • There's an election coming up. I want to remind everyone that 96% of jobs were created under the Democrats.

      LOL you actually believe that

      Democrats there are those calling to actively destroy jobs in order to cool off inflation. This is called modern monetary theory. You'll do literally anything to prevent inflation instead of following Keynesian economics.

      Dude...you know the Keynesian model said stagflation is impossible right? The whole thing fell apart in the late 70s along with the Philips Curve. Literally inflation AND increasing unemployment happened. You obviously haven't been paying attention.

    • No, Democrats are not bad at getting their message out, they're excellent at it. They just have a really bad message that most people can recognize as obvious BS.

      No, 96% of jobs were not created under Democrats. That's an absurd claim.

      No, oil companies don't set prices, markets do. Especially the futures market, which is why doing things like approving more leases and pipelines would have an immediate impact on prices despite how long it would take to actually drill or finish the pipelines. By enac

    • Oh, and "Modern Monetary Theory" is utter nonsense. I heard a professor advocating for it on NPR who literally described it as "numbers don't actually mean anything". It boils down to, "government can spend however much it wants and it won't matter because it's so big". An appealing assertion to those who just want to spend spend spend, but not so much to people who have a grip on reality.

  • Make sense (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Unpopular Opinions ( 6836218 ) on Wednesday April 13, 2022 @06:33PM (#62444472)

    Rocket fuels is costly, you know.

  • 1984 (Score:3)

    by Impy the Impiuos Imp ( 442658 ) on Thursday April 14, 2022 @02:15AM (#62445110) Journal

    Yesterday, the Labor Department said that its consumer price index jumped 8.5% in March from 12 months earlier, the sharpest year-over-year increase since 1981.

    Reagan, an economist, had begun wrenching on the economy to get inflation under control. It was a rough few years, but he said stay the course. And he got it under control, something neither Richard "Wage and Price Control" Nixon, Gerald "Whip Inflation Now" Ford, nor Jimmy "I don't understand why America has a malaise" Carter could do.

    He won 49 of 50 states in 1984.

    You all may be mollified by idiotic rhetoric of current politicians trying to save their own asses, but I assure you they themselves are well aware of the sitch.

    • Re:1984 (Score:4, Informative)

      by jbengt ( 874751 ) on Thursday April 14, 2022 @10:12AM (#62446228)

      Reagan, an economist, had begun wrenching on the economy to get inflation under control.

      Can't tell if you're trolling, but the economic squeeze was by the Fed under Paul Volcker, a Carter appointee, started during the Carter years, and continuing after Reagan got elected. The only thing Reagan had to do with it was let it ride for a couple of years and claim it was all because of his policies.

  • Now Ed Wasser can run for office on a platform of "What you want?". And when people feel themself to be truly desperate, he can win.

    "I want a rebirth of glory, a renaissance of power. I want to stop running through my life like a man late for an appointment, afraid to- to look back, or to look forward. I want us to be what we used to BE! I wantI want it all back, the way that it was!"

  • Amazon takes a percentage of the sale price, so if prices inflate then Amazon gets paid more even though the cut remains the same. Increasing its cut doesn't help anyone, it only hurts the sellers who are already being squeezed.

    Because there's a delivery service that now costs more because fuel costs more, that increase is fair and reasonable. The "inflation" charge is nauseatingly insane and I hope sellers scream their lungs out while refusing to pay it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jbengt ( 874751 )

      . . . there's a delivery service that now costs more because fuel costs more, that increase is fair and reasonable.

      What would be fair and reasonable would be for Amazon to increase the delivery charges the customer pays, not sticking it to third-party sellers.

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