I sell locks at my work. We get our stuff through a distributor at a set price discounted from MSRP. We are not large enough to buy direct from manufacturer for these locks. Amazon and home depot are selling the same locks cheaper than we buy them from the distributor because they can buy direct and buy more volume than even our distributor. You would need to buy in volume higher than Amazon which would be difficult because it would require a ton of up front capital which you would not really have a way to make back because you are making no profit. This isn’t the case for everything but it’s particularly bad with residential smart locks.

Anyway to answer the question no it would not drive Amazon’s prices down because at cost we would still be selling them for more than Amazon.

Selling stuff at cost is already selling stuff at a loss if you factor in labor and overhead. How long can you go losing money? Probably not as long as Walmart or Target or Amazon. That’s what they’re betting in.

Employing your exact strategy is how Amazon became one of the largest corporations on the planet. In fact, they still sell their entire Amazon Basics line at a loss for this reason.

That’s basically what Amazon did. They did it even worse: they sold many things below cost. They ran their entire business burning cash for a long time (surviving off money raised from investors and later from going public and selling stock), driving other book stores out of business. Once they had enough market share and less competition, they negotiated tougher deals with punishers for lower costs and raised their prices to be at least a little profitable (they still sell some things loss-leader and many things at cost).

And now you know the story of Amazon.

Large companies can do / have done that (dumping) to drive out smaller competition.

Small companies usually cannot afford this.

Unless you can pitch this as a disruptive idea to gullible investors (looking at all tech startups that burn trillions without making profits)

Long story short, logistics benefits from scale. The cost to ship a pallet of poptarts to a store is roughly the same as shipping half a pallet. Smaller stores can’t really undercut larger corporations because they don’t have the scale.

Also when your mom and pop store doesn’t make a profit for 3 months, they go under. When a Walmart doesn’t make a profit for 3 months, they stay open because they have those loses spread across hundreds of other Walmarts.

In Australia, Woolworths got reprimanded for selling fuel at a loss. They had a deal where you could buy groceries to earn points which could get you cheaper fuel at their fuel stations. Other companies couldn’t compete, and Woolworths was only able to sustain it because the extra profit they made from selling groceries covered the loss on the fuel.

Many companies have done similar. Uber operated at a loss for years to force taxi companies into bankruptcy, then put their prices up to higher than the taxis had been after the competition was gone.
Comcast had very cheap internet prices in any area where Google was offering Google Fibre, but exceedingly high prices (and worse service) in areas with no competition. Google couldn’t compete on price because Comcast could afford to operate at a loss in a few areas, and Google couldn’t afford to start offering internet across the entire country during it’s startup phase.

It could be done, but big businesses don’t play fairly. They have lots of money to spend on driving you our of business, and lots of future profits as incentive to do so.

As others have said that is a business strategy that has been employed many times.

It is all about who can outlast the competition.

Adding to what everyone else said, stores commonly sell loss leaders as a way to get people into the store to sell goods with higher margins. Part of the reason why there are so many food deserts in the USA is because stores like Dollar General will sell higher margin stable goods at a lower cost. This means grocery stores who rely on those profits to sell fresh produce and meat can’t compete, going out of business.

Maybe, but why would somebody do that in the first place? Put effort, money, time and resources into a loss net gain?

You would need lots of those stores to justify others to lower prices like one or more on every town and place…

Maybe a state run enterprise at that point… But that woul be… Communism I guess.

How would this store afford to pay its employees, rent and utilities if it only sold things at cost? One store alone would also make no difference, you’d need a chain of many stores.