California Attorney General Rob Bonta released unredacted court evidence on Monday showing that Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) coordinated with vendors and competing retailers — including Walmart (Nasdaq: WMT), Target (NYSE: TGT), Chewy (NYSE: CHWY), Best Buy (NYSE: BBY), and Home Depot (NYSE: HD) — to raise prices across their platforms at consumers’ expense.
“The evidence we’ve uncovered is clear as day: Amazon is working to make your life more unaffordable,” Bonta said.
Bonta’s office filed the original lawsuit in San Francisco Superior Court in 2022 and sought a preliminary injunction in February 2026 to halt the alleged conduct while the case proceeds. Monday’s release exposes a largely unredacted version of that filing. A hearing on the injunction is set for July 23, and a trial for January.
The filing describes three schemes. In the first, Amazon identified products selling cheaper on rival platforms and pressured vendors to push those retailers into raising prices.
Sponsored · Antimony Resources
Amazon flagged two Levi’s khaki styles selling for $25.47–$26.99 at Walmart — below Amazon’s preferred $29.99 — and contacted Levi’s to close the gap. Levi’s got Walmart to raise the price. A Levi’s employee then emailed Amazon: “I’m really hoping we can show this as a proof case so we can resolve issues going forward.” Amazon confirmed the updated $29.99 was “now showing up on [Amazon].”
A second vendor told a parallel story: once it pushed Walmart to move a table lamp from $45.83 to $59.99, Amazon’s response was two words — “good now.”
In the second scheme, Amazon used vendors as go-betweens to coordinate price increases with direct competitors. Pet food supplier GlobalOne relayed Amazon’s instructions to Chewy to raise prices on Canine Naturals treats. When the increases went through, GlobalOne emailed Amazon: “the ones that went up on Amazon immediately went up on Chewy 😊 … Overall this looks like it’s working!” More than ten Canine Naturals products rose in price across both platforms.
Fertilizer brand Agrothrive reported back to Amazon after coordinating with a Home Depot buyer: “Yes, just got out of a meeting with the buyer and she has agreed to raise the prices this time.” When Skullcandy earbuds sold more cheaply at Walmart, Amazon pushed the brand to pull the item from Walmart.com entirely.
The third scheme involves evidence concealment. Amazon trained employees to avoid written records of pricing discussions — internal training instructed staff to “do not use email” when negotiating competitive price adjustments. A separate internal email warned that even with “legally approved talking points” available, “it is often better to have these conversations over the phone.”
Amazon called the motion “a transparent attempt to distract from the weakness of its case, coming more than three years after filing its complaint and based on supposedly ‘new’ evidence it has had for years,” and said it is “consistently identified as America’s lowest-priced online retailer.”
At a March hearing, Judge Ethan P. Schulman pressed Bonta’s office on why the allegations were surfacing so late, noting the price-fixing examples date to 2019–2021. The California case runs parallel to a 2023 federal FTC lawsuit making broadly similar allegations, also yet to go to trial.
Information for this story was found via the sources and companies mentioned. The author has no securities or affiliations related to the organizations discussed. Not a recommendation to buy or sell. Always do additional research and consult a professional before purchasing a security. The author holds no licenses.
