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The war to sell you a mattress

fastcompany.com

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Re: The war to sell you a mattress

#141

Post by msla »

Retric wrote: post #123
msla wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact diamonds can't be tracked means they're all, effectively, blood diamonds, given that everyone in the chain has a huge incentive for people to believe they're not and absolutely nobody has any incentive to tell the truth about them if they are. Lying about whether a diamonds is a blood diamond is the only move which makes sense, so everyone must assume every diamond is a blood diamond, as it is impossible to…

Owners of non conflict diamonds have an incentive to demonstrate otherwise. However, the massive diamond glut means DeBeers has an incentive to buy up conflict diamond using proceeds from regular diamond sales. Which arguably makes all natural diamonds blood diamonds more directly.

> Owners of non conflict diamonds have an incentive to demonstrate otherwise.

Right, but because diamonds can't be tracked, they're indistinguishable from the good liars who want to pass off blood diamonds as good ones.

> However, the massive diamond glut means DeBeers has an incentive to buy up conflict diamond using proceeds from regular diamond sales. Which arguably makes all natural diamonds blood diamonds more directly.

This is also a very good point.

Re: The war to sell you a mattress

#143

Post by BenoitEssiambre »

zdkl wrote: post #49
thedaniel wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's literally the etymology of the word "entrepreneur", if you go back to the latin roots it's basically "go between and take"

While I'm sure you're right about the root of the word, this notion of entrepreneur itself comes from the french verb "entreprendre", which means something similar to undertake or enter a task/business.

Ah so 'entrepreneur' literally translates to 'undertaker'.

Re: The war to sell you a mattress

#144

Post by markbnj »

I really knew very little about the whole affiliate marketing economy before reading this. My primary reaction after reading it is just to SMH at the fundamentally greedy acquisitive dishonesty of the whole mess. I realize it's nothing new, but still.

Re: The war to sell you a mattress

#145

Post by skewart »

ghostbrainalpha wrote: post #138
mwexler wrote: post #82

The business models for pricing aggregators and reviews sites are completely absent. Even Consumer Reports struggles to meet the costs of testing and staffing. The BBB is a mess. The "Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval" hasn't meant anything for decades. It's a sad state of affairs: We all want unbiased reviews, but we won't pay for them. We all want to know the spread of prices so we can balance service/trust with c…

The problem goes deep. I recently decided to get a Consumer Reports subscription after not having one for 10 years. I used it to find the absolute BEST dishwasher. But because their rating system is a little strange, and they don't exactly tell you BUY THIS, DONT BUY THAT, I ended up with a Dishwasher I hate. It was the most expensive, and best according to CR, but I cannot express how miserable this piece of junk ma…

> they don't exactly tell you BUY THIS, DONT BUY THAT

> but for what I care about it sucks, its hard to use, and it doesn't dry dishes AT ALL.

I'm confused, it sounds like you wish CR had just told you which dishwasher to buy without going into more detail, but you also wish they had gone into more detail about specific strengths and weaknesses so you could make a decision based on what's most important to you.

Did CR just not talk about the things you hate about your dishwasher, or did they talk about it, but only as part of a complicated, confusing review?

I've generally found CR to be a million times more informative than any of the crappy, sleazy affiliate marketing sites peddling "reviews" that clog up the first few pages of Google search results. That said, I haven't really looked at them for a few years, so maybe they've gone downhill. Their business model does seem harder to sustain in the internet-era.

Re: The war to sell you a mattress

#146

Post by s73ver_ »

amelius wrote: post #68
orcdork wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there is a comparison that is unfair, it's the one you just made between physical and mental work.

The people benefiting from this scam are not the ones doing the actual physical work.

I could say the same thing about webapps and mental work.

Re: The war to sell you a mattress

#147

Post by othersideofcoin »

patrickk wrote: post #38
b3lvedere wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't affiliation a sort of a pyramid scheme? Oh sorry .. multi level marketing .. ?

It's more like a salesman making a commission for recommending or selling someone else's product.

Specifically, if sales = Sales Dev Rep + Closer, then affiliate sites (leadgen) is like outsourcing the SDR and them getting a commission or referral fee.

Re: The war to sell you a mattress

#148

Post by sjg007 »

ghostbrainalpha wrote: post #138
mwexler wrote: post #82

The business models for pricing aggregators and reviews sites are completely absent. Even Consumer Reports struggles to meet the costs of testing and staffing. The BBB is a mess. The "Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval" hasn't meant anything for decades. It's a sad state of affairs: We all want unbiased reviews, but we won't pay for them. We all want to know the spread of prices so we can balance service/trust with c…

The problem goes deep. I recently decided to get a Consumer Reports subscription after not having one for 10 years. I used it to find the absolute BEST dishwasher. But because their rating system is a little strange, and they don't exactly tell you BUY THIS, DONT BUY THAT, I ended up with a Dishwasher I hate. It was the most expensive, and best according to CR, but I cannot express how miserable this piece of junk ma…

I think one issue with any consumer product is that it is hard to find their issues when searching by generic terms (e.g. bran X problems) vs specific terms (brand X error Y). So it is only once you have the device installed and run into problems do you know which keywords to search.

Modern dishwashers basically suck except for looks, rack capacity/configurations and quietness. They are now all low water use and you can't get phosphate based dishwasher detergent. God help you if you have hard water or some other issues. I have a kitchenaid top of the line that has multiple cleaning sessions including a fancy auto-detect-dirty dishes pro wash feature that never cleans satisfactorily. I have to run on "tough" mode with extra rinse at high temperature to get anything "clean". And I say "clean" because if the water softener hasn't recharged or it's rained or I don't have cascade platinum, rinse aid, and vinegar then the dishes come out cloudy at best or still dirty. And then you have to run dishwasher cleaner every 2 weeks or so... Wine glasses are basically impossible to clean without streaks or residue. And then like you, drying dishes even on the dry cycle depends on relative humidity.. :) That being said I can't run a dry cycle by itself.. it has to run after a wash no matter what.

Re: The war to sell you a mattress

#149

Post by skewart »

hutzlibu wrote: post #36

Now this made me thinking of other online review sites. Are they all like that? I couldn't give an honest review, if I get more money from B than A. So if they state otherwise, I call it fraud And I know that's what people call marketing in general and there might be some truth in it - but that's why you go to these review site to get a neutral view. So normally the customer should pay the reviewer, he is doing work…

Yes. Any online review should be taken with a huge grain of salt. The vast majority are influenced by affiliate payments.

Some, like credit cards and other financial products, are especially bad since the payments per conversion (i.e. person who looks at the review site and then signs up for the credit card) can be massive. But even seemingly innocent niche markets, like light-weight backpacking equipment, can be full of affiliate marketing.

That said, just because a blog or website is influenced by affiliate marketing doesn't mean they don't have useful information in their reviews. They usually are accurate when describing a product's basic attributes. Where they typically bend the truth is when they're comparing products against each other (the one with higher affiliate payments is almost always better), or they simply won't talk about genuinely better products that don't pay for conversions.

Re: The war to sell you a mattress

#150

Post by r00fus »

smileysteve wrote: post #77
r00fus wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I question visco-elastic foam. Sure, it's cheap and may be ok for a lot of people, but I personally sleep better on an standard spring bed. Foam mattresses don't breathe, they stink (some mattress I've seen are 1+ yr old and continue to stink) and aren't firm enough for me. Do any online retailers sell standard beds? Or am I a dinosaur?

I sleep on firm mattresses and was able to find a "firm" rated cooling gel memory foam mattress. There are levels ~$300 where they have at least one layers of breathable egg crate foam.

Maybe things have improved in the past 10 years, but honestly any foam to me isn't comfortable - the bed needs to be firm enough to let my body breathe on it's own.
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