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Faceplams: 
Glad you asked! Amazon as a company has a net worth of $1.7 billion, with distribution centers and infrastructure all around the country - all around the world. They have their own warehouses, planes, own trucks, and ecommerce infrastructure. In fact, they've been able to spin off and sell the technology behind this infrastructure, which helps them to offset the cost of running such a gigantic organization, giving them the ability to undercut not only their competition, but the very vendors who sell on Amazon. For example, in the late 90s, Danelectro released a line of guitar pedals that were mostly repackaged circuits from classic guitar pedals, but with new names and highly stylized cases. The classic pedals might fetch hundreds of dollars, but the retail price of a Danelectro FabTone in 1999 was typically around $65. In the 2000s, the Chinese factories where these sorts of things are made became more open to even smaller businesses than Danelectro, and at first this resulted in a flood of boring looking low-budget pedals selling for low prices, but eventually they got better at branding, or working with as subcontractors for existing companies, so you saw things like Nux Fx, and even Monoprice started a 'pro audio' line of goods. Last year, Amazon started selling Amazon Basics Guitar Pedals, fully removing any middleman out of the operation. (These seem to have disappeared from the market in the last couple of months though).Why is it so simple to order something from Amazon, get it fast, in MINT condition, and yet NIN.com, who is expensive, can't seem to get an order out on time, or in good condition, or can't get the order out at all!
Amazon does this by abusing its workers, whether that's through offering low pay rates, terrible working conditions, or directly supporting factory working conditions that are unacceptable here. This happens across the entire organization. You're able to get something from Amazon fast, in mint condition, because if the warehouse worker who's working terrible hours makes any mistakes, there are a dozen applicants waiting to take their place. Amazon is also really lax with returns - if you say it's damaged, ship it back for a full refund. If you bought it from a retail partner who's using Amazon's warehousing and infrastructure to sell online, they'll take the entire hit. The tradeoff may be worth it, because they might be getting more exposure in Amazon's product browse pages than they're getting on their own website. Often times a perfectly serviceable items end up in landfills rather than Amazon Warehouse.
The unfathomable scale of Amazon's operations allow them to cut corners on cost while still soaking up equally unfathomable profits. You place an order on Amazon software, the order goes to an Amazon warehouse stocked with merchandise manufactured in Amazon factories alongside merchandise that pays rent to sit on a shelf, and it gets shipped to your door via Amazon. They own the entire process, and rent space to businesses that want to use some of it, and if those businesses get big enough, they either acquire them or undercut them.
If we look, by comparison, at shopping on nin.com: Trent's not going to have his own ecommerce division. As ubiquitous as the NIN logo can seem, even at its peak, NIN's merchandising was relegated to a separate entity, J Artist Management (later renamed Object Merch). The scale of something like a NIN store is still too large for your local print shop to handle effectively, but consolidation in the industry leaves few options on the table for designing, ordering, manufacturing, warehousing, and shipping merchandise. It turns out that it's actually really complicated, and over the decades that I've been paying attention, nearly every company that enters the space either fails, or is acquired by a larger entity (because they've failed to stay solvent themselves.) Now factor in the massive disruption of print-on-demand shops, absolutely cannibalizing the meat-and-potatoes of the merch world. The average person will go online looking for a band shirt, and see a few options: An official product, silkscreened on an industry-standard go-to for tshirts, selling at $25+shipping, or.... some dude's Shopify page that's hooked up to Teespring over APIs, which will inkjet any design onto cut-rate shirts and ship it to you for $20 because if they sell a ton at that price, they'll make more than a more involved business that does manufacturing and warehousing.
Just for shits, let's throw a pandemic into the mix, which not only causes staffing issues at home, but completely scrambles the supply chain. More people are buying online than ever, but raw supplies are harder to come by. Print-on-demand customers can buy in massive quantities because they don't care what gets printed on them, and they get priority (and better pricing) on the raw materials. Now, the former giants of the merch world are paying more for their goods, getting less of them, but are working with the same kinds of budgets they had before to run this kind of organization. You can't stop making the things you sell, so the only cuts you can make are in personnel. Support staff get axed, resources across the board, from buyers working the supply chain to warehouse workers picking, packing, and shipping goods, all either get fired or have massive increases in workloads that are often accompanied by cuts in pay. See, part of the reason LiveNation can acquire people and resources in the merch world is because they had a massive cash cow: venues and ticketing. In addition to buying no doubt countless houses and yachts for the executive creeps that run these conglomerates, the profits from running all-the-concerts helped absorb the costs of operating a well-oiled merchandising business.
So, that's out of the picture now too.
Oh, and then the postal service decides to fuck itself in an attempt to disenfranchise mail-in voters, so even if you are getting things out to the truck with a decent turnaround time, no one actually knows how long anything takes to ship anymore.
But you can't cut prices because you're already suffering. So you hope that people understand, and you put new products up on Shopify using mock-up images, cross your fingers that they arrive in the warehouse on time, cross your fingers that the postal service doesn't drop the ball on shipping, and push forward.
tldr: Livenation isn't as diverse as Amazon, capitalism is fucked up.
Disclaimer: I have no insight into how Livenation actually works. The above is speculation coupled with fourteen years of experience in the ecommerce industry, independent of Amazon or LN.
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Originally Posted by atomobile
