"it's about the scale that Amazon does it at"
"it's just they do it on a massive scale"
"This is something that Amazon is great at"
"Target is doing the same...but they just don't have the massive scale"
"As a consumer I love what Amazon is doing"
"Lots of respect to those guys"
"the most important advantage Amazon has: it has data...with this data, it enters markets and undercuts its competition at the perfect price point"
At some point I feel like I'm being astroturfed.
People are amazed Amazon sells pasta and batteries under their own brand? Sounds like Ikea to me.
Amazon has several problems they haven't corrected in years - generally not great prices, fake products being co-mingled with genuine items, fake reviews, flaky or slow shipping (esp. with their own delivery people). I've even had a few brand new books arrive with binding or cover damage. Ugh.
> People are amazed Amazon sells pasta and batteries under their own brand? Sounds like Ikea to me.
There's absolutely nothing interesting about Amazon doing this, it merely makes for a story because it's Amazon. Walmart has been doing it for 25 years as - by far - the world's largest retailer. They have four times the retail scale of Amazon. The Great Value brand is all over their stores, they also have numerous others such as Sam's Choice (since 1991).
Amazon's traditional online retail sales are close to growing at single digits now, they've seen a persistent slowdown quarter after quarter. Walmart's comps are the best they've been in a decade and their online sales growth has been accelerating again, climbing 40% in Q2 and 43% in Q3 (this is after rolling past the Jet.com numbers year over year as well; contrasted to eg 8% type online growth in 2016). If Amazon isn't careful, they're about to get their ass kicked in online retail. Unthinkable just a few years ago.
The difference between Walmart and Amazon is that Walmart is a major employer in small towns across America whereas Amazon is present only in a few large metro areas. When Walmart gets pressured because of some real or perceived issue, each congress person representing those districts goes to bat for Walmart. Maybe not publicly, but real politics is done informally and out of the public eye. Defense contractors learned this lesson long ago as well.
I agree that it helps Walmart more than it hurts them at this point. That's a large shift from ~20 years ago when the fear was very widespread that Walmart would destroy all the small towns and wipe out local employers. Now that Walmart is entrenched nearly everywhere locally, politicians want to keep those local jobs.
Amazon has a lot of warehouses and call centers in small towns. Not nearly as many in walmart obviously, but definitely more than a few large metro areas.
A bigger difference is that Amazons brands are stealth brands. In every big shopping store, I know which brands are the store brands. Not so with amazon.
I'd recommend taking a look at Walmart's clothing section. It's full of stealth brands. (edit: Forgot about Walmart's electronics section. I'm typing this on a really good mechanical keyboard sold under Walmart's "Blackweb" brand.)
> Amazon's traditional online retail sales are close to growing at single digits now
Amazon reported a 35% YOY growth in the US 3rd quarter, and 15% overseas growth and you call that "close to single digits"? What you didn't mention is Walmarts "crazy" 40%/43% growth in online sales puts it squarely in 4th with a whopping 3.7% of online sales, compared to Amazon sitting at, what 49%?
There's a lot of interesting things to discuss about Amazon's market dominance without misleading numbers used to imply Amazon's outlook is poor. Amazon currently holds almost 50% of the online retail market, while the next 9 companies share 20% and you're talking doom and gloom.
They really need verified vendors that Amazon can vouch for. These vendors would need to be tested without knowing by Amazon to make sure third party ones are not being sneaky. Especially if customers complain.
I'm wondering if the presence of fakes on Amazon (and the many complaints of them) are in fact helping Amazon's own branded items? Personally when I'm shopping for basics on Amazon I often just go for the AmazonBasics version because I can at least put a little faith in it. Whereas who knows where the other stuff comes from. Perhaps it's a feature, not a bug?
I have a similar take on the incentive misalignment with fakes + store brands.
Two counterfactuals to consider:
1. For this to be true, consumers will have to know Amazon is behind the brands. Works for AmazonBasics, but the ones in this story I'm not so sure since their providence is a bit buried.
2. Fakes appear more often in higher-end products. Store brands (like AmazonBasics, Kirkland, etc) are typically geared at low/med end of market.
Both of these hinge on brand perception. If Amazon can improve brand perception of their store brands, they're going to be more willing to say 'these are Amazon brands' on their listings. And the more they can do that, the more incentive misalignment exists on fakes. I don't think 'these aren't fake' is enough to improve brand perception alone as quality matters a lot, but it probably does contribute.
Of course, every retail category is different. I imagine there are some categories today where the intersection between fake problem + Amazon brand means the incentives are aligned to soft-pedal any real progress on fakes.
Can someone explain the fakes problem? I think J have literally never run into this on Amazon despite actively buying thousands of dollars of various items for years.
AmazonBasics also seems to be really solid stuff every time. I was assuming it was just a recommendation but the manufacturer and brand is someone else.
>Can someone explain the fakes problem? I think J have literally never run into this on Amazon despite actively buying thousands of dollars of various items for years.
There are several things that could be described by the 'amazon fakes' problem.
First, i want to say that when I do "shipped and sold by amazon" I almost never have problems sometimes they pack inadequately. But usually not, and more than once, they've sent me a case/box of something when I bought a single something, so I'm going to say the "shipped and sold by amazon" products are usually pretty good, if often more expensive than usual.
The problems usually start with the "shipped by X, fulfilled by amazon" though they can be reliably returned. The problems get worse when it's "shipped and sold by X" - often it is a pain to return those, too.
1. it is often that the reviews for several "similar" items will be consolidated somehow, so you'll get these really great reviews for... a thing that this is not. (this was intended, I think, for different sizes of the same item, for example, but it is sometimes abused)
This, in my experience, is pretty common. It's less common that it's flagrantly abused; usually it's just three related things where all the reviews are crunched up. But sometimes, there's a real stinker in there. Again, I think that the 'fulfilled by amazon' makes the cost of fraud higher, just 'cause it's so returnable. (on the other hand, I'm lazy and I'm paying for convenience. returning garbage is a pain in the butt)
When it is done, it's like, you get your new digital camera or whatever, it's generic as advertised, but it got a bunch of credible, good reviews, and the unit you got is essentially garbage.
This might be the most common scam I've seen?
2. there are a lot of shady sellers that claim to sell you brand X thing and then you get it and it's a "brand X" thing.
This doesn't happen as often, and it happens more when it's shipped direct than when it's fulfilled by amazon, but it happens, and has happened to me. Someone was selling pretty okay "Apple" chargers... I mean, they worked mostly okay? but they certainly weren't genuine as they were advertised and priced.
it might help amazonbasics, but it hurts everything else;
I am generally okay paying extra for the convenience of amazon, so I think I'm their target customer? but I have been burned a few times by fake products sold as the real thing. I mean, not so often that it's still less convenient, for me, at least, (and I'm usually able to return the thing) but it does vastly diminish the power of an 'everything store' if sometimes I buy a brand name thing and get a knock-off instead.
The whole point here is that you are paying extra for convenience. If I wanted to deal with sometimes getting the knock off version, I'd use ebay or aliexpress or whatever and save a few bucks.
Twice I've got 12 mouse traps from Amazon. Each time it's been a different vendor (not Amazon.) Literally 20 minutes ago I just checked the mailbox, and there was a padded envelope in it - my latest (third) order of mouse traps, from a third vendor. Inside the envelope? ONE mouse trap.
Sorry, anecdote and vent. But yes, we need verified vendors that actually ship you what you order.
(I'll be a good boy and pick up mouse traps from Home Depot. I've learned my lesson the hard way.)
Former Amazon seller - A quantity issue like that is most likely from a listing page being changed at some point. Certain sellers somehow earn the ability to change product details, and Amazon doesn't bother to inform everyone else that sells that product. So, that listing for a dozen mouse traps could've originally been for a single one, or vice versa.
What compounds this is that complaining about other sellers misdeeds typically goes nowhere. The only way to avoid such things on the seller side is to have your own brand in the brand registry so you have complete control over product details.
Well the first order was at my old house. The next was last winter when we got the fall/winter influx. That repeated, even worse, this fall. The Victor Snap traps work great. But we need a bunch of them (and we'll probably need to find entry points and try to reduce that if we can.)
I don't care whether Amazon does QA; Consumer Reports is good at that. I care about fraud, does Amazon know their wholesalers or can some scammer ship crap to the warehouse with someone else's brand on it?
This feels like grounds for a class action lawsuit. Amazon is clearly turning a blind eye and in many cases this is favoring Chinese knock-offs over American brands—-politically Amazon is on shaker ground.
This was actually a fairly interesting article, except for the strange tone - amazon isn't hiding that these are their brands, they seem to be flagged as "our brand" all over the place. so what's with the mspaint red circles pointing out incredibly obvious associations? Is this supposed to be satire, or does the author really believe they've discovered some sort of conspiracy here?
As the article points out, the practice is nothing new, it's about the scale that Amazon does it at.
And that's basically the point for everything Amazon does. They aren't doing anything other companies don't, it's just they do it on a massive scale.
With "store brand" specifically, the idea is that Equate or other store brands were well known to be comparable, if slightly less good versions of name brands. In economics terms they were "substitute goods" from brand names, but depending on quality they may not be "perfect substitutes."
In the case of Amazon, if they have brands that are at first glance not Amazon brands, but actually are amazon brands, then they are kind of doing an end run around what was an implicit agreement between consumers and retailers. Namely that a retailer will make it explicitly clear, with obvious branding, what is a "store brand" and what is not. Simply stating "our brands" isn't obvious enough to make that connection if you are only spending 30 seconds on a product description page.
This is something that Amazon is great at actually.
> Namely that a retailer will make it explicitly clear, with obvious branding, what is a "store brand" and what is not.
how are brandings such as Kirkland Signature(Costco), Simple Truth(Kroger) or 365(Wholefoods) any more obvious than what Amazon is doing with "our brands"?
The comparable to Signature/Truth/365 would be Amazon Basics. The branding is consistent and minimal.
As the article points out, Amazon has dozens of other house brands that are not associated with Amazon. Amazon's argument would be that they are perfect substitutes, so branding them consistently with Amazon Basics would make people think they are lesser quality. So they just give them a new house brand.
Target is doing the same thing by the way [1] but they just don't have the massive scale.
Many of those brands are not obviously private label. Whole Foods and Costco are the exception in that they have only 1 store brand that everything is labeled under. This is probably because they are high-value brands unto themselves and it's advantageous to put their own stamp on it.
For the most part grocery store brands don't tend to mention that they are store brands. people figure them out with information found online but its a crap shoot if there is any labeling that the item you are looking at is a store brand. You have to separate out generic brands as well, like the bagged but not boxed cereals that are not the store brand at all but people think they are because of packaging.
some cross boundaries as I have found Kirkland brands outside of Costco.
It is not more obvious in absolute terms but it is easier to spot in big retail stores.
The biggest clue is usually that it is the only brand that isn't a big name, and yet, there is plenty of it. On Amazon, there is a huge variety of lesser known brands, so you can't assume that just because you didn't hear about it, it must be the store brand.
The pricing is another clue. Store brands usually have a well defined spot, with no competition in that spot. Typically between the no-name stuff and the name brand. Amazon has a lot of brands in every price range.
I am of course assuming that it is not obvious. If a brand bear the name of the shop, or is used for every product category in the shop, it is obvious.
Harbor Freight does this, and they even try to associate with real brands. For example their house brand air tools are "Central Pneumatic," obviously similar to the much higher quality brand "Chicago Pneumatic." HF also call their house brand welders "Chicago Electric." A casual shopper might think they had simply misremembered which brand used the term "Chicago," and think they are buying a better quality air tool than they're really getting.
It’s actually a good test to see if you’ll actually need a tool for long. If it works for the one job and you never touch it again, lots saved. If you use it a lot buy the better brand when it dies.
How is this any different from the scale of the likes of Johnson & Johnson? Most people don't read the fine print on the back of their packaged home goods.
J&J is a conglomerate brand, but only that. Amazon is increasingly not only the place where you buy everything, but also the conglomerate that owns everything you buy.
Well it's bigger for one, but J&J has been constantly sued for anti-trust.
The question is, should people need to read the fine print to know what they are getting? Said another way, what level of generalized a-priori knowledge is reasonable for a consumer to have in order to know what additional information the manufacturer/retailer needs to provide for the consumer to make an informed decision?
Red circles and arrows are a fairly reliable attention magnet. See how the pictures with circles and arrows are interspersed through the article? The idea is that the user is drawn to scroll further when they're about to give up. You can clearly see this tactic in action in Youtube thumbnails, for example:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=captain%20marve...
The idea is that over time AMZN will push their products even more, to the point of hurting consumers and other sellers. Don't see the (potential--at least) bias? Amazon instead of showing you the best product, will show you the most profitable-to-them product. Yeah, same category and good enough but still, it stinks...
The thing is - everybody already knows this. Jeff Bezos has been open about this being the plan since the IPO in 1997, and that's why investors continued to give him money despite Amazon barely turning a profit for 15 years. Most customers knew this too - folks I know are like "Yeah, I know that once he gets a monopoly he's just going to raise prices and we'll be the ones hurting, but in the meantime I'm going to enjoy my low prices, free delivery, and convenient one-click ordering."
Tragedy of the commons is a remarkably powerful business model. Everyone knows that collectively they're going to be fucked over by Bezos in a generation or so, but since everybody knows it, they're powerless to avoid it, because individually each person is just screwing themselves over by not buying from Amazon.
> individually each person is just screwing themselves over by not buying from Amazon
How so? I haven't noticed Amazon UK being particularly competitive on price for many years.
I just randomly checked a camera backpack, £219 on Amazon and Wex both with free delivery.
Canon 6D2, £40 cheaper than Amazon on Wex and Currys.
Amazon are like Ryanair these days, coasting on a low-price reputation that is long gone. They each do occasional headline sales of things people don't want for pennies but the overall trend is up.
Sorry to say, but I really doubt that more than a small proportion of Amazon customers really think any further than what they want.
Something I've noticed is that many of the Amazon deals in the UK are really just price matches to other retailers, they know they can still likely make a profit due to their favourable tax arrangements.
>>Do you think that supermarkets selling house brands hurts consumers?
Don't dismiss it.
If a $10 store brand shirt lasts you 5 washes, then you were hurt by not buying a $20 brand one that lasts you years. (granted that you may not have $20 at the same time you need a T-shirt)
Same for food items: store brands might be xx cents cheaper but lesser taste, quality and nutrition might put you in red.
If I search for Coca Cola and Amazon shows me "Amazon-Cola" and I ultimately scroll down and see Coca Cola -- no big deal. If Amazon decides to not sell Coca Cola at all, I'm still not buying "Amazon Cola." If you're shopping for name brands already, there really isn't much discovery necessary. If you aren't, then the competing brands should do something to differentiate themselves -- lower prices, higher quality, better advertising perhaps. If I'm buying a generic product to begin with, I don't particularly care what "store brand" it happens to be. And, if we want to talk manufacturing -- the "brands" are all that could be "hurt" -- the actual manufacturing of the product still happens, regardless of who sticks their label on it. A wheat farmer doesn't particularly care what brand the distributor sticks on the final package. He's still getting paid the prevailing price of wheat.
The most telling paragraph in the article is the last one:
> "As is often the case with Amazon, what seem like strange or inexplicable new behaviors are often old retail strategies unfolding on the internet, quickly, and in plainer view. Brooke Mille is no more a lie than any other brand: It’s just newer and faster and more online. And it has a lot more company."
In other words, nothing new here, Amazon is doing what retailers have always done, just on Internet scale. As someone who worked in retail for a long time, I kept waiting for the punchline but I should have read that last paragraph first.
It's hard for me to figure out why this is newsworthy. I wish the New York Times would stop publishing stuff like this. Amazon does a lot that is interesting, evil, novel, etc. to report on. This article just adds noise.
Up until now, when i read stories about the market share of Amazon private brands(and i'm quite curious about that subject), i never heard about those kind of hidden brands mentioned in the story. And of course, they we're mentioned in market share calculations.
Taking that into account, it's possible that Amazon has or will have:
1. A large/dominating market share in many categories.
2. It would be a secret, preventing questions about a monopoly to rise.
The Times has somewhat recently decided that they are going to demonstrate that they understand the tech industry by reporting on anything and everything that happens, although this often gives the opposite impression.
As they say, man bites dog is a story. Dog bites man is not. But if you're new to the dog bite beat, you may not know what's news and what's not.
It's not only the nytimes but readers on hackernews and other general social networks. It's attracted a discussion from their users. This article makes the top 10% of most active posts in the past 24 hours. Readers see Amazon and assume something sinister is going on that they need to pay attention to, when it's probably not the case. I blame the readers as much as the publishers. After all, journalism today is all about chasing the readers and clicks.
On the extreme end of "brand value you've got Kanye West selling a 100% cotton t-shirt for $120. (1)
On the other end you've got Amazon not even bothering with a logo and selling a 100% cotton t-shirt for $14.99. (2)
And the Amazon shirt is rated 4.5+ stars.
As a consumer I love what Amazon is doing,
Retail "brands" are the most notorious of all of the middle men.
And they had to be - how do you deliver a product to a physical retail location that needs at least a 2 - 3x on each product sold to pay the rent, the front of house employees, etc?
As a result these "brands" were never product innovators, mostly they're perfunctory with giant marketing budgets to build their "brand value".
Remember Nike's "pumps" innovation back in the day? Was that a product innovation or was that a marketing innovation?
And this reality in retail brands has led to all sorts of notorious abuses - on the subject of Nike they famously figured out how to arbitrage child labor - relying on shit hold labor conditions for ~30 years until they got caught truly well and good with their pants down w/a famous LIFE Magazine story.(3)
Amazon's supply chain innovations flattened the market, and now we see cases as laid out here where the overseas factory owner is building the brands, or building the brands in collaboration with Amazon. It's not going to be perfect, but at least it's a step in the right direction.
Amazon is clearly in the middle of calibrating their own own morale compass, but as a consumer I delight in seeing the mid-market retail kings getting stomped on.
And the way this operates, Amazon is just a middleman somone else manufactures the shirts they just don’t provide the brand. Which means the actual manufacturer has little reasons to care about quality.
Standard Oil had a large number of small subsidiary oil companies under different names, many of which weren’t clearly understood to be owned by Standard. It was one of their ways of preventing anti-trust accusations against them.
Amazon Prime is effectively a postal commerce version of Standard’s rail rebate system.
Lots of respect to those guys, whether you agree with their actions on a moral basis or not. They’ve been reading up on their history.
Amazon as a retailer doesn't make much money. Margins are thin, and even thinner with their free shipping. Creating their own private brands of consumer products are not going to make them much money, but it'd make sure they control not just the sale but the production of the item itself.
Bezos recently talked about how Amazon would eventually fail, it seems inevitable when you commandeer your vendors' profits and claw back any disposable income your workers have and demand massive tax breaks to complement massive tax manipulations. Vacuum up all the money and what will people spend on Amazon?
Apple seems to do the same under Cook too, focusing obsessively on making sure their suppliers don't have any undue profit whilst they themselves demand $100s in profit per telephone, to toss on $100s of billions they desperately avoid taxes on.
The only profit these organizations want to pursue anymore comes at someone else's expense, rather than creating more value.
Down 12% in the last month though. I guess you could say everything is down, but that's kind of the point when billionaires and corporations hoard all of the money.
As the article points out, Costco just sells their own stuff under the Kirkland brand. Much Kirkland stuff is made by major US brands, and is often identical to the branded product, but cheaper. They don't bother hiding that it's their own brand.[1]
Amusingly, Costco sells their Kirkland items on Amazon. Or, rather, somebody called "ShippedFast" does. Now who's ShippedFast? They seem to be in Florida and the phone number maps to a residence. But Amazon doesn't disclose the identity of the seller.
The article doesn't go into the most important advantage Amazon has: it has data on what sells well and what markets it should enter using existing brands on its marketplace. With this data, it enters markets and undercuts its competition at the perfect price point.
Then consumers win. The competitors can lower their prices/increase their quality/improve efficiency and consumers get to buy better products for less.
Amazon often has higher prices than Walmart & Target, but people still don't shop Walmart online because Amazon is convenient. Amazon knows the perfect price point to stop people from shopping around to other online outlets, that doesn't mean it is giving the lowest price to consumers.
People will, in person, buy something from Walmart instead of Kroger over $2, but Amazon has somehow figured out how to keep people on their site by properly measuring demand elasticity.
Not to mention most listings on Amazon now are ads for products on Amazon. Tide, etc pay for top placements in the stores. So Amazon gets fulfillment cut and money from ad revenue. It's pretty impressive.
They're pulling a Google...they've started to eat their tail. Google, for those that don't know, started with the goal of sending you to the best site. Today, oh well, it's virtually all ads /google products. They're trying to make you click their most profitable ads
Indeed but the cognitive load of scrolling through those ads, especially on mobile, is part of why everything is perceived as sucking these days IMO.
It's like there's a late-stage capitalism barrier to entry to get to the good stuff on every platform these days. I mean who out there actually wants autoplay videos and unending push notifications?
No, that really threw me off too, not because it's objectively bad, but because I know and have seen how NYT is capable of some really impressive feats creating visualizations and visual aides for their stories; it's objectively bad considering the source.
They aren't paying the same people. If I sell my own brand, and they make their own brand and pay someone else to make it, they're competing with me on a platform they control and they give themselves advantages - such as showing up ahead of me in search (Google got fined a lot of money for this exact practice), putting links to their products on my product page saying "buy our brands instead" (yes, they really do this, see https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/02/amazon-is-testing-a-new-feat...), giving themselves exemptions from policies they apply to third party sellers like review manipulation bans (see Vine program), etc
So Amazon offering more and more business services, or in other words doing more tasks that other businesses used to do.
And the interesting thing is, that they found almost a risk free way(for them), to do those tasks. Which fits Bezos's experience as an investor, always dealing with profit vs risk.
For example, for small/medium companies, creating efficient supply chains for varying demand was risky. But for Amazon, with it's size and great demand control and forecasting, it's probably not that risky.
The same with creating a new private brand - Amazon has a lot of knowledge of what sells, They control free ad inventory, and they control their customer, via search.
So it would be interesting to ask: what things businesses do are still risky - and would be left to external companies to do ? And what risky things can Amazon de-risk and take in-house ?
Amazon is useless for high end outdoor gear. Not just gear even, but clothing. If something is available, it is often past years models, odd colors, sizes and the prices are non-competitive.
I don't read the gray lady on account of the paywall, but this is something I have noticed somewhat in recent days.
For the usual reasons of distrust of excessive economic power, I have not bought from Amazon for a few years. However, as part of that, I have bought from Abebooks until the last month, when I learned that it was owned by Amazon. I had previously run some quick searches trying to learn who owned Abebooks, and did not find anything. It is also not evident on the Abebooks website. Looking for another source for books, I found an on-line vendor that looks similar to Abebooks, listing used and new books for sale from various booksellers in diverse places. I checked it out and could not link it to any overly large enterprises. That was good, and the other site prices are not obviously higher than Abebooks, but the new site adds $4 shipping on each book, so my cost for used books is now up about 25%. Not good, but I'll pay it to not feed the monster.
So, as both Abebooks and the new site list used books for sale by various bookstores, many of the same books are listed on both sites, and my new vendor might even present a better selection of what I look for. That's good. But some of the vendors that offer the lowest prices deal only through abebooks.com, ie Amazon/Bezos, and they list very many books on the Amazon/Bezos site. Coincidentally, one of them, the Book Depository, shown as being located in England, is owned by Amazon, ships free to the US, but when the packages arrive, they appear to have been shipped from the US.
All of that is business as usual for a megacorp, but another bookshop that sells beaucoups of books through Amazon's abebooks is Seattle Goodwill, a non-profit. This raises my eyebrows because I live in a state near Seattle in which Goodwill's non-profit status has been in question because of high compensation given to its executives. I suspect that the relationship between Amazon and Goodwill may be somewhat complex. Amazon gives its customers free shipping to donate items to tax-exempt Goodwill, Goodwill then sells the items through an Amazon subsidiary, Amazon gets a commission on the sale, what's going on? Goodwill is a non-profit that does 'job-training'. Are 'trainees' not earning Seattle's high minimum wage part of this business? What does this operation look like? Anyone know?
I wonder: if I sell something on Amazon and make it an Amazon-exclusive brand, will I find it easier to keep counterfeit knockoffs out of their inventory?
Amazon's been well known for relentless A/B testing of every last pixel in their checkout UI. This is simply an extension of that A/B testing mentality to individual products. Flood the user's search results with a litany of similar and confusingly-branded products and see what sticks.
At some point I feel like I'm being astroturfed.
People are amazed Amazon sells pasta and batteries under their own brand? Sounds like Ikea to me.
Amazon has several problems they haven't corrected in years - generally not great prices, fake products being co-mingled with genuine items, fake reviews, flaky or slow shipping (esp. with their own delivery people). I've even had a few brand new books arrive with binding or cover damage. Ugh.