I love Amazon. I really do. I’ve been a Prime customer since the service launched back in February 2005. I loved that I could rage-order a knockoff Rolex at 2:00 AM, and some nocturnal stranger would quietly place it on my porch before I had fully woken up to regret my financial decisions.
Come on, admit it. That’s magic. That’s pure convenience. It is the undeniable future.
But let’s get one thing straight: convenience is not the same thing as cheap. We’ve all been collectively pretending Amazon is the ultimate bargain bin for about fifteen years. Before you hit “Place Order” on that 100-inch flat panel sitting in your cart, there are a few very important things you need to know about the modern Amazon machine that nobody is talking about.
Amazon is not the same company we grew up with. The geniuses who built it cashed out and fled before the paint was even dry. Today, the machine runs on Gen-Z influencers, third-party sellers paying exorbitant rent, affiliates earning less than 1% on groceries, and a warehouse workforce that turns over so incredibly fast that the company is replacing them with robots—mostly because they are legitimately worried about running out of human beings to hire.
Let’s talk about where Amazon actually loses on price. Let’s look at the invisible tax you are paying on half the stuff you buy. Let’s see what it’s doing to your town. And let’s discuss why walking into an actual physical store might be the closest thing to a wellness retreat most of us can afford.
The “Average” Price Myth
Let’s start with the part that keeps Amazon’s lawyers relaxed. Yes, on average, Amazon is the cheapest. A firm called Profitero checks this every year. Their latest Price Wars study (November 2025) looked at over 10,000 identical products across 23 major retailers for twelve weeks.
Amazon won. Ninth year in a row. Fourteen percent cheaper, on average.
You know what else is true on average? The average human has slightly less than one testicle. Averages hide things, and here is exactly what Amazon’s averages are hiding from you.
A same-day, same-SKU comparison in May 2026 found Walmart to be significantly cheaper across the stuff you actually need to survive:
- Groceries, Household Basics, and Baby Products: Walmart is 8% to 15% cheaper.
- Pantry Items: Walmart won 11 out of 12 categories.
- Diapers: Walmart won 4 out of 5, clocking in about 9% cheaper.
That is not a rounding error. That is your actual household budget. Amazon wins the “average” because Amazon sells everything, and it dominates on the weird, obscure stuff—the specialty items, the long tail, the replacement hinge for a fondue set you received at a wedding in 2009. But Walmart wipes the floor with them on the things you buy every single week.
The Electronics Illusion
Electronics pricing is even funnier. The major retailers price-match each other so tightly it looks like an Olympic synchronized swimming routine. A 100-inch Samsung TV will run you $2,497.99 on Amazon and $2,499.99 at Best Buy. A whole two-dollar difference on a five-and-a-half-thousand-dollar television. Gentlemen, please.
Plus, Best Buy will happily price-match Amazon on request—provided the item is sold and shipped by Amazon itself. So, Best Buy’s real price is never higher than Amazon’s, but it comes with a return counter staffed by a living, breathing human being instead of a chatbot named Aiden who keeps misunderstanding your prompts.
But if we’re talking about TVs, none of these guys are playing the smartest game. The warehouse clubs are.
Costco completely ignores the sticker-price knife fight. They rig the total cost of ownership instead. Every TV at Costco comes with a second year of warranty coverage completely free. Automatically. They just extend the manufacturer’s warranty because they feel like it.
Amazon gives you the standard one-year warranty, then tries to upsell you an Asurion plan with a service fee every time you file a claim. Yes, a deductible on a warranty you already paid for. Furthermore, Asurion doesn’t usually repair your TV; they send you an Amazon e-gift card for the purchase price. Not real money. Amazon money.
Costco’s coverage resolves through repair, replacement, or an actual cash refund up to the purchase price.
| Retailer | 5-Year TV Coverage Cost (Sub-$1000 TV) | Payout Method |
| Costco (Allstate) | ~$65.00 | Repair, Replace, or Cash Refund |
| Best Buy (Geek Squad) | $129.99 | Repair or Replace |
| Amazon (Asurion) | Pay-per-claim | Amazon Store Credit |
Costco also gives you a 90-day return window on TVs. That might sound strict until you learn they only tightened it because people treated Costco like a free rental service for Super Bowl parties. The policy isn’t stingy; the customers were feral.
Sam’s Club runs the exact same play. They offer five-year Allstate protection starting at $34.99, and sometimes they just bundle it for free at checkout. Yes, there is a membership fee for warehouse clubs. But if one TV purchase saves you the Best Buy warranty gap, the membership just paid for itself. The $4.99 rotisserie chicken is just your signing bonus.
The Everyday-Fast-Copier King
My absolute favorite example of the price illusion happened this past June with the AirPods Pro 3. Who cut the price to an all-time low of $179? Walmart. Amazon matched it the exact same afternoon. Then Walmart dropped to $169. Amazon followed right behind them.
Amazon didn’t set that price. Walmart did. Amazon was just standing behind them whispering, “Yeah, us too.”
The 35% Invisible Tax
Now for the part nobody reads the fine print on. More than half of what is sold on Amazon isn’t actually sold by Amazon. It’s sold by third-party sellers. And Amazon charges them rent. A truly breathtaking amount of rent. More on that in a bit, but while we’re waiting, here is the typical fee stack for a seller:
- Referral fee: Usually 15% off the top.
- Fulfillment and Storage fees: Varies by size and weight.
- Fuel and logistics surcharge: A sneaky 3.5% added recently.
- Inventory penalties: Fees for having too little, too much, or too old inventory.
- Advertising: Technically optional, but practically mandatory if you want to appear on the first ten pages of search results.
Stack it all up, and Amazon’s total cut runs 25% to 30% as the baseline, often climbing to 35%, 40%, or even 50% of a seller’s total revenue. A small business doing a million dollars on Amazon is sending roughly $340,000 straight to Jeff Bezos’s legacy project. Before buying inventory. Before making payroll.
Who Are You Actually Buying From?
Here is a quick quiz: What percentage of Amazon’s active third-party sellers do you think are based in the United States?
As of last year, over half of Amazon’s active sellers globally are based in China. One in every two sellers. Think they are paying local income taxes or supporting your town’s economy?
I don’t inherently care where a seller lives. The same factories make all the same stuff with different brand stickers slapped on the box. But here is why you should care: When your chosen brand is a random string of capital letters (shoutout to XRZQDORK Home Essentials) operating twelve time zones away, what is your recourse when the product turns out to be junk? Who honors the warranty? Who is accountable if the thing catches fire?
Nobody. The seller can vanish tonight and relaunch tomorrow under a new keyboard smash. And since over half of these storefronts have been caught engaging in fake review manipulation, you can’t inspect the product, you can’t vet the seller, and you can’t trust the star rating.
Other than that, it’s a flawless system.
Amazon knows this. They even built “Haul“—their Temu competitor—where the sellers are 100% China-based. There is no “Made in America” portal on Amazon, but they built a dedicated Made-in-China section on purpose, complete with emojis.
So, when you buy from a third-party seller, who do you think is paying that 35% Amazon tax? You are. It is baked directly into the sticker price. That is why the exact same generic hardware item is often two or three times the Home Depot shelf price on Amazon. You aren’t just paying for the product; you are paying the landlord’s rent.
Full Disclosure (A Tragedy in Three Acts)
Ethics time. I am legally and morally obligated to tell you: I am an Amazon affiliate. There might even be Amazon links at the bottom of this page. If you click one and buy something, I earn a commission.
I would tell you this creates a conflict of interest, but Amazon graciously solved that problem for me by making the commissions so microscopic I had to get a day job.
Back in 2012, the average Amazon affiliate commission peaked at 9.25%. Then, in April 2020—while everyone was locked at home ordering their entire lives from Amazon—they took a chainsaw to the rates. Furniture dropped from 8% to 3%. Groceries went from 5% to 1%. The average plummeted to about 3.14%.
And this year? They did it again. Milestone bonuses were eliminated. Reporting tools were gutted. Premium rates dropped to 4%. And they didn’t even have the decency to announce it publicly. Publishers found out from their account managers. It’s like being ghosted and broken up with via a mass text message. What kind of sociopathic relationship is that?
So yes, there are affiliate links down there. Click them, don’t click them, I truly do not care anymore. At a 1% payout on most items, I need roughly forty thousand of you to buy a grill scraper before I can afford a six-pack of decent beer. The disclosure is legally required. The apathy is entirely complimentary.
The Body Count
Here is the part that isn’t funny.
American retailers closed 8,270 stores in 2025. Thousands more are projected to close this year, and financial analysts are celebrating because it’s “the lowest in three years.” That is exactly like cheering because a cruise ship is sinking slightly slower today than it was yesterday.
Every shuttered GameStop, liquidated Francesca’s, and closed Walgreens represents a dead anchor in a strip mall and a slew of jobs that were “disrupted” (Silicon Valley tech-speak for “taken”). One analysis suggests that for every single job e-commerce creates, traditional retail loses about four and a half.
And my absolute favorite detail of the year? Amazon recently announced it is closing all of its own Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go stores. The company that mercilessly killed brick-and-mortar tried to do brick-and-mortar… and couldn’t make it work.
Chef’s kiss. No notes.
The Endgame
Play the tape forward. What happens if Amazon just… wins completely?
Every competitor that dies makes the “everyday low price” less necessary. Prices do not stay low out of corporate benevolence. They stay low because Walmart exists. They stay low because Costco exists. Remove the competition, and you get whatever price Amazon feels like charging. We are already watching the preview with their third-party seller fees.
The Federal Trade Commission and seventeen state attorneys general are currently suing Amazon, arguing its fees and pricing policies function as a monopolist’s tax that inflates prices across the entire internet. When the referee has already thrown the flag, do not try to tell me the game is being played fairly.
A world with only one store isn’t a marketplace. It is a hostage negotiation with two-day delivery.
And when the local stores go, we lose the ability to interact with reality. We can no longer sit on a couch before buying it, or feel if a “premium” jacket is actually premium. Online, every purchase is a 4.3-star mystery box backed by aggressively enthusiastic reviews from users named “Happy Customer 2024.” We used to inspect things; now we gamble, and the return process is the casino comping our losses.
The Great Outdoors (Yes, Really)
This brings me to my most controversial recommendation of the year.
Go to a store.
Stay with me here. Walking into a store involves walking. It involves sunlight, which your body converts into Vitamin D—a nutrient most of us are severely lacking because we live our lives like elegant cave shrimp. You might get some steps in. You might even ask an employee a question and receive an answer from a human who isn’t actively hallucinating data.
I am not saying a trip to Best Buy replaces professional therapy. I am saying we engineered every basic errand out of our lives, called it “convenience,” and then started buying walking pads and light-therapy lamps (on Amazon) to artificially replace the walking and sunlight we optimized away.
We are paying a monthly subscription to undo the side effects of another subscription.
The No-Snark Playbook
- Weekly Staples, Groceries, and Baby Stuff: Go to Walmart or your local grocery store. It is genuinely 8% to 15% cheaper, and you get a walk out of it.
- TVs and Big-Ticket Electronics: Warehouse club first. Costco’s free second-year warranty and cheap five-year coverage math beats everyone. If you don’t have a membership, go to Best Buy and make them price-match.
- Third-Party Items: Spend thirty seconds checking the brand’s own website first. You might dodge the 35% Amazon tax entirely.
- Amazon: Save it for what it is actually best at—the weird stuff, the specialty items, and the 2:00 AM garlic press you simply must have.
Amazon is a tool. It’s a great tool. But it was never supposed to be the entire toolbox.
Affiliate links are in this article. Ignore them like the rest of my family does. At these commission rates, Amazon and I have reached an understanding: they keep almost everything, and I am going to Costco to grab a flat panel, get my steps in, and finally see the sun.
