You've got a stack of P-card statements from last quarter, a purchase order to sign, and no real way to know if the price on that order was fair. You assumed Amazon was the safe default. Lowest price, one-click ordering, nothing to explain to the board.
A new national report says that assumption is costing your agency real money, and it's not a small difference.
The Institute for Local Self-Reliance spent months pulling purchasing records from 128 cities, counties, and school districts, plus 122 state agencies, and comparing what Amazon Business actually charged them for the same products on the same day. The report, published in December 2025, found that nationwide, local governments spent an estimated $2.2 billion with Amazon in 2023. That's nearly four times what they spent in 2016. It also found that a lot of that spending was for a worse price than the agency down the road paid.
The Same Marker, Two Prices, One Afternoon
On May 30, 2023, an employee in Boulder, Colorado logged into the city's Amazon Business account and bought a 12-pack of Sharpie markers for $8.99. That same afternoon, an employee at Denver Public Schools, an hour away, bought the identical pack. Amazon charged the school district $28.63. Same product, same seller, same day. Triple the price.
That wasn't a fluke. Across the 2,500 most frequently purchased items in the report's dataset, the highest price Amazon charged was on average 136 percent higher than the lowest. That's because Amazon Business runs on dynamic, algorithm-driven pricing. It doesn't lock in a rate the way a standard public contract does. The price moves based on the buyer, the time of day, and data Amazon collects about shopping behavior. Nobody signs off on that shift. It just happens, order to order.
Run the math across a full year of purchasing and the number stops looking like a rounding error. The report found that one school district could have saved 17 percent, or about $1 million, in a single year had it consistently received Amazon's lowest available price for its most common purchases. That's not office supply money. That's a teaching position, a maintenance backlog, a line item nobody wants to explain away at budget time.
The “Support Local Business” Claim Doesn't Survive Contact With the Data
Amazon tells agencies they can shop the platform and still support small business, since local sellers can list their products there too. The report tested that claim against real purchasing records, and it falls apart fast.
In Berkeley County, West Virginia, the school district spent $1.3 million with Amazon Business in 2023. Of that, $142 went to sellers based in the state. In Denver, of $5.6 million in Amazon purchases, only $49,000 went to Colorado-based sellers, while $1.6 million went to sellers outside the U.S., mostly in China.
There's a reason so little of that money reaches local suppliers. Amazon charges sellers an average fee of 45 percent of every sale. A local dealer can't absorb that and still compete on price, which is a fact your current suppliers already know, even if they haven't said it out loud. It's also why the number of independent office, furniture, and janitorial suppliers nationwide has dropped from about 1,300 to 900 over the last decade. Every one of those closures is a supplier that used to answer your phone in three rings and now doesn't exist.
A Fixed-Price Contract Beats an Algorithm
Here's the part that matters most if you're the one comparing quotes. Researchers took 628 of the most frequently purchased school supply items, priced them through Amazon Business, and priced the identical list through an independent office products dealer working from a standard, competitively bid public-sector contract with fixed pricing.
The independent dealer beat Amazon on price on more than 68 percent of the items and came in about 4 percent lower overall, on a $22,164 order. No algorithm, no daily fluctuation. The same price this month as last month, because that's what a contract is for.
This is the difference between us and Amazon Business in practice, not in a sales pitch. At Office Solutions, your price is fixed for the life of the contract. Your order comes on one truck, on one invoice, delivered to the copy room, not dropped at a loading dock for someone to haul upstairs. And when something's wrong with an order, you call a person who already knows your account, not a support queue.
The “Vetted Contract” You Signed May Not Be One
If your agency buys through a group purchasing organization like OMNIA Partners, you likely assumed that meant the deal had already been competitively bid and checked for fair terms. That's what these contracts are supposed to guarantee.
The report found otherwise. Amazon's group purchasing agreements typically skip fixed prices, volume discounts, and delivery guarantees entirely, the exact protections competitive bidding exists to secure. Researchers concluded that buying under one of these contracts is functionally no different than logging into Amazon Business and paying whatever price happens to be on the screen that moment. And school districts that signed on to one of these agreements spent about twice as much per student with Amazon as districts that didn't.
Three Cities Already Fixed This
Tempe, Arizona cut its Amazon spending by 84 percent between 2017 and 2023 after the city council reviewed the numbers and put purchasing blocks on the city's Amazon dashboard for anything available locally. Phoenix has spent almost nothing with Amazon over the last decade, running purchases through competitively bid contracts with locally owned companies instead. Jackson, Mississippi does no business with Amazon at all and buys only from vendors with a presence in the city.
None of these are small, symbolic moves. They're budget decisions made by people who ran the comparison and acted on what they found.
Send Us Your Last Quarter's Amazon Order
You don't have to take our word on any of this, and you don't have to take the report's word either. Send us your last quarter of Amazon Business purchases, the same list you already have sitting in a P-card statement or an open checkbook export, and we'll price it against a fixed-rate contract quote. No obligation, no sales call required to get the numbers back.
If we're not lower, you've lost twenty minutes. If we are, you've got a number to bring into your next budget meeting instead of a guess.
