181–190 of 221 posts
I wish our local postage carrier was more efficient. Amazon provides next day delivery, whilst other online stores dispatch your purchase within 2-3 days and the package arrives is a further 2-5 days.
Your local postage carrier doesn’t build massive warehouses filled with items that people who have to pee in bottle grab off of shelves.
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How much of your spending requires instant gratification?
Presumably nothing they buy from Amazon. If they wanted instant gratification, they'd buy it from a local store and get it immediately rather than having to wait a couple days.
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So for another example, I wanted to get a stainless steel pasta strainer. I checked four different kitchen/cooking stores and the ones that had them them only had ones that were too deep, and they were all priced as ridiculously luxurious items, over $90. Then I checked a local hardware store and they had exactly what I wanted and it was only $12. I only thought of that place because I passed it on the way home and w…
Sure, sometimes things take a bit of work and might not be instantaneous or easy. It all boils down to whether or not one values immense convenience over not supporting Amazon.
A real reason to avoid Amazon is fake merchandise. I'd been buying a vitamin supplement from them for years. Then they sent me a notice that it was being recalled as a fake.[1] (Archive [2]) They paid a refund for the last purchase. But that's all. Amazon won't respond to questions about what was in it or who the real seller is. I no longer buy anything from Amazon that could be faked. [1] https://www.amazon.com/ask/…
It’s all fake. Every bit of it.
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I've been hoping someone would build the same thing. Even without delivery, I'd love to be able to search for products across multiple stores through a web interface and see their availability in a map view, with price and in-stock status. I would be happy to go to the store and buy it, as long as I only need to make one trip and I know it will be in stock and at a certain price.
I worked on this, it was called Milo.com. we had crazy scraping and xml/csv feed ingestion. It was a terribly difficult business because most retailers hated us. ebay bought it and eventually killed it.
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For a lot of random things, like... say, a suction cup thingy that mounts my smartphone to a car dashboard, I have no idea which stores are likely to sell such things, and they could have a wide discrepancy in prices. I can type into Amazon and see a list of products and prices, but if I want to buy one at a local retailer I might have to call three or four stores before finding someone who carries the thing I'm look…
>... a suction cup thingy that mounts my smartphone to a car dashboard. Try your local phone store. Most carriers have brick and mortar locations.
Am I missing something, the article randomly says: "For context, the US federal government spent $53 million on public education in 2022." and links to: https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti... which says K-12 schools spend $857.2 billion.
It's also cited as evidence that Amazon is now more powerful than the US Government which is just factually fucking false. It really is a different breed of person that thinks some millions of dollars > sovereign power. It's like, yeah, they lobby, but they also have people lobbying against them, including near-competitors. The dynamic is not as simple as spend some $X millions of dollars and get some amount of equivalent benefit. You lobby because an entity with sovereign power can trivially destroy your business.
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Humans survived up until about 20 years ago without free 2-day shipping. You'll be fine. Or you could compromise your morals for convenience, I guess.
It's not free. It's baked into the price.