An investigation into the supply chain of AmazonBasics batteries shows how Amazon masks its private label operations through a discreet network of outsourcing
One of Amazon's smallest and most popular products has a surprisingly large footprint — heard the “pop!” from my living room … Tweets: @sarahnemerson , @joshelman , @ozm , and @anrao Tweets: Slime Puppy / @sarahnemerson : I went down a supply chain rabbit hole to figure out how Amazon's wildly popular private label product — the deceptively simple battery — is made. More than anything, this was an exercise in HOW HARD it is to know where our most ubiquitous items come from! https://onezero.medium.com/... Josh Elman / @joshelman : Fascinating research into what may be the leading battery supplier out there https://twitter.com/... OneZero / @ozm : In addition, a 2015 paper published in the @JIndEcol estimated that “it takes more than 100 times the energy to manufacture an alkaline battery than is available during its use phase.” https://onezero.medium.com/... https://twitter.com/... Ankita Rao / @anrao : Amazon batteries are cheap because they're made 1) out of sight 2) in places with little environmental regulation 3) probably from abusive labor practices. They're also badly made. Via @SarahNEmerson https://onezero.medium.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The OneZero investigation follows a single AmazonBasics battery backward through a deliberately obscured chain of contract manufacturers — the same playbook behind the roughly 100 private-label brands and $25B in projected revenue that drew antitrust scrutiny back in 2018. What makes the battery case sharper is the opacity itself: even a dedicated researcher could only partially reconstruct who actually makes one of Amazon's best-selling products.
First-order effects
- Amazon's private-label operation is exposed as structurally dependent on outsourced factories in low-regulation locations where the investigation alleges abusive labor practices and poor quality control — reputational risk Amazon currently offloads onto suppliers it never names.
Second-order effects
- The findings sharpen the liability question already raised by lithium-ion battery hazards on Amazon Marketplace: if Amazon masks who manufactures its own house-brand batteries, blame for injuries becomes harder to assign than even third-party listings.
Third-order effects
- As Amazon's profitable third-party seller services keep filling the Marketplace with untraceable goods (per New York Magazine's coverage), the pattern points toward regulators targeting not just marketplace listings but the deliberate anonymity of house-brand sourcing — supply-chain disclosure rules becoming the next front in the platform-antitrust fight.
The trend: Platform-owned private labels are scaling through opaque outsourced manufacturing faster than liability and disclosure rules can reach them.