31–40 of 68 posts
For me, Amazon is the way to go. I live an hour from the nearest Walmart or department store. The FedEx and UPS delivery people know me really well.
Where do you live? I didn't realize places that remote still existed! (Only partially joking)
"There's always parking at Sears."[1] (Yes, Sears is that desperate.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"I shopped for Christmas on Amazon, it was kind of a pain. I had to ship it all to myself, wrap it, put on gift notes and then pack it all up and ship it all to my family across the country." I'm struggling to understand how that is any more of a pain than trawling around town to find appropriate gifts, then completing those very same steps. And with Amazon, you at least have the option of their (admittedly overprice…
> (overpriced and ugly) My parents bought my daughter a present and got the gift wrapping option and it was this amazing blue velvet gift sack. We saved it so we can use it again it was so nice. In fact, for the $6 my parents paid, we couldn't get a bag that nice ourselves. I guess my point is, YMMV.
I went with BestBuy this year, and was pleasantly surprised. I've noticed Amazon is slowly raising prices. I'm not knocking it; just like the competition. Plus--I've always liked Bestbuy. I bought a iPad mini ($under 350.00) at 12:59 p.m. Pacific time, on the 23rd of December. For $12.00 it was delivered to my door at 11 a.m. the next day.
Their return policy is really great during the holidays, which might contribute to it. As a (late) holiday shopper and Prime member, their shipping guarantees are top notch though. No praying that it arrives in time. (Whereas Amazon says, order within x hours for delivery tomorrow, a lot of other shops here just feel like "Usually shipped within 1-2 days, if your hair is green, Tom is working in the office and your o…
Unfortunately I had several things in my Amazon cart which said “order within 8 hours and it arrives December 24” (or whatever), that when I looked back at 3 hours later had lost the guarantee, and now could only promise to arrive by the 26th/27th. Didn’t turn out to be a big deal, but folks shouldn’t take those guarantees for granted.
If a few hours pass and in the meantime that warehouse sells out, you might be past the cutoff for the next warehouse that has it in stock.
(Not an Amazon employee, just an extremely frequent customer...)
Except for the USPS last-mile shipments, I've rarely (< 5%) had Amazon miss a guaranteed delivery date. On USPS last-mile shipments, they only seem to make about 2 in 3 on-time, which means I get a free month of Prime everytime they miss. I'm almost to the point of trying to figure out the pattern that gets last mile USPS to pickup free months instead of doing the "no rush" which only nets me $1 or $2 towards e-books and video rentals.
Our family also discovered something great this year: Wishlists. By creating and sharing Wishlists we were all able to get a much better picture of the specific items and areas of gifts that each family member was interested in. It results in much more lucid shopping than blind guesses and/or plain text communication.
My point isn't a story about a particular product, but to say that I'm not as surprised as I once was. During the holidays I had two boxes of food etc delivered (one Prime Pantry, one regular purchase) that were busted open or otherwise required my cleanup.
Amazon is truly becoming the online Walmart: cheap, compelling, but you expect the worst.
Amazon's product search is amazingly bad and the user reviews are getting faker over time. To me it's amazingly hard to shop on there. Feels like the engineering team is focused on their many other businesses and ignoring their retail stores.
Amazon's product search is amazingly bad and the user reviews are getting faker over time. To me it's amazingly hard to shop on there. Feels like the engineering team is focused on their many other businesses and ignoring their retail stores.
http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating....