If you're hands are free, if you're not behind the wheel of a car right now, go ahead

and Google the words hot sauce.

Here I'll do it myself.

I'm looking at the results and more than half of them that pop up on the first page I

see are from Amazon.

So I'll click on one of the Amazon links.

You've got free one day shipping, there's a prime label and it's kind of cheap.

Done, click hot sauce on the way to my house.

So many products are sold to us like this these days, but that is exactly what worries

Nicholas Parks who runs snob foods in Birmingham, Alabama.

Once Amazon starts selling it, I'm just closed out of the market.

Parks started selling sauces through Amazon back in 2002 when he was a law school student

with very little income.

So Amazon was a great marketplace for maybe the first 10 or 12 years.

The fees were low.

We shipped everything from actually what was at the time was fair bedroom.

But things started changing a few years before the pandemic.

The fees sellers paid to Amazon slowly doubled.

Many sellers started raising prices just to make a profit.

So what was a $10 bottle of hot sauce four or five years ago is like a $13 or $14 bottle

of hot sauce now.

And then Amazon starts selling that exact same hot sauce itself, but cheaper.

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