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Amazon Home Services

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Re: Amazon Home Services

#231

Post by VLM »

bentcorner wrote: post #168
MichaelApproved wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that so crazy? Depending on the service cost, my time could be worth more than having to deal with the headaches of finding and dealing with a trustworthy vender. Consider we're talking about $150 installation for something in my house, like a TV. That could mean knocking holes in the wall. Searching Yelp reviews and interviewing contractors can be time consuming. Then, if something goes wrong, my wall could b…

Even Geek Squad's rate is too high. Mounting a TV onto your wall is not a hard thing to do. Find studs, attach mount to wall, attach mount to TV, put on wall. I've done it several times. Granted, it's not fun, but it's not I'd-rather-pay-$150-to-not-do-this non-fun. Even if you're a high-paid professional it's likely cheaper to do it yourself (assuming opportunity cost for this time was work, and not, you know, enjoy…

"Compared to tire installation that takes more time, tooling, and personal risk,"

Don't forget liability, most failure modes involving tires cascade into personal injury auto accident. I would guess the most likely epic fail of similar likelihood for a TV installation would be dropping the TV while installing it. Or maybe drilling into a water pipe while installing it, either way death is quite possible with cars and highly unlikely with a TV.

Two things always "get" me about hiring a pro even though I can afford it. The first is I do it exactly the way I want it. Not possible to install my TV 3 inches too far to the right or some idiot company policy to minimize liability or whatever. The second is the opportunity cost of hiring a pro is astounding. A pro is going to have a 4 hour window 9-1 next Tuesday so I need to take time off work and cancel my life for four continuous weekday hours, but I have a SSD awaiting installation on my desk at home and if I get a half hour wednesday night around 8:14pm I'm fine, my window for me to do it is dynamic and hyperflexible and much narrower than a pro and if I'm interrupted its simply not an issue. Its just more convenient to do it myself than to deal with someone else. I could afford to hire someone to take the trash bag from my kitchen to the trash can by the garage, but the hassle of contracting with another person exceeds the minimal hassle of walking it out there myself.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#232

Post by res0nat0r »

sp332 wrote: post #225
res0nat0r wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would they want to break or redirect thousands (millions?) of existing links and confuse many non tech people who get redirected to a .us site? Sure it might make us on HN feel good that .com does not equal USA and we are the center of the world, but it would make little sense otherwise.

Well, it would stop confusing the other 2 billion people on the internet that aren't in the USA.

I think the crowd here over estimates how tech savvy everyone else is, or whom actually are aware of the .us domain, and also care enough to think it should redirect there.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#233

Post by giarc »

MCRed wrote: post #2

Remember Amazon Menus? (Scanned menus of local restaurants) Remember Amazon Movie Listings? Remember the "drone delivery"? (It makes no sense on the face of it, and will never happen. But it was a big press release.) Remember Amazon scanned catalogs (eg: Mail order catalogs selling things in competition with Amazon, that you could search) Remember A9? (Amazon's answer to google, biggest mainstream mention was being u…

Look up GOOG-411 which was a service they used to collect speech and language data in addition to providing services to the public. I'm sure people had a similar opinion to yours about GOOG-411, but it was incredibly valuable them. Sometimes companies disguise data collection as a service.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#235

Post by maratd »

brudgers wrote: post #221
maratd wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I no-shit-know someone who had no problem taking back fresh from the ground annual flowers to Home Depot at the end of the season for a refund. And when he did, they asked him for his driver's license. There's an annual limit to how much you can return without a receipt. Home Depot doesn't care so much, because if you're returning things that way ... they're just giving you store credit. You're going to have to buy…

The person kept the receipts. It was systematic behavior.

Well, with receipts you have a 90 day window ... so if he's returning them within that window, then he's really not doing anything sketchy because that's really Home Depot's policy and intent. They tend to be pretty lax with returns. He may have brought the receipts, been outside of that window, and the cashier simply told him to take away the receipts because it was too long ago, scanned his driver's license, and gave him store credit anyway.

Lowes, Ikea, Bed Bath and Beyond, they all operate the same way. They'd much rather you buy lots of stuff and return some of it, then buy a few things.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#236

Post by sp332 »

res0nat0r wrote: post #232
sp332 wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it would stop confusing the other 2 billion people on the internet that aren't in the USA.

I think the crowd here over estimates how tech savvy everyone else is, or whom actually are aware of the .us domain, and also care enough to think it should redirect there.

But we already see that non-tech-savvy people go to Amazon.com from the UK and expect to be able to buy things that they can't buy. Having a .us domain would be less confusing, for most of the people on the internet.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#237

Post by dman »

xur17 wrote: post #130
rplnt wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The economics are definitely not there yet. The insurance alone would make it prohibitively expensive. Then you need a lot of infrastructure due to low range. Light drones also can't fly when it's too windy, too rainy, too cold. And they can only carry a very small subset of usual shipments (limited size and weight). Automated cars on the other hand...

I see the drones as a last mile delivery solution. Rather than flying the drones all the way from the distribution centers to peoples' houses, they could drive their trucks out to your neighborhood, and then release a set of drones to deliver packages the 'last mile'. This would allow them to deliver a bunch of packages at once without the driver getting out of the truck, and larger packages could still be hand deliv…

Howre they going to solve the pet problem? I can see curious cats / dogs trying to have a go at the drones.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#238

Post by brudgers »

maratd wrote: post #235
brudgers wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The person kept the receipts. It was systematic behavior.

Well, with receipts you have a 90 day window ... so if he's returning them within that window, then he's really not doing anything sketchy because that's really Home Depot's policy and intent. They tend to be pretty lax with returns. He may have brought the receipts, been outside of that window, and the cashier simply told him to take away the receipts because it was too long ago, scanned his driver's license, and ga…

Improvements to real property [e.g. waste pipes] on the other hand, can't be returned. That's why mechanic's liens exist.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#239

Post by kyllo »

robotnoises wrote: post #216
MCRed wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not true, if you are in the lower %20 you will get fired. That's the pressure to "get rid". Of course they will let you "resign" instead of get fired, and if you refuse they will give you a financial incentive to resign. This keeps the "stats" better, and probably where boredoso gets his nonsense. But here's the real kicker that makes the company so stupid- if you're on the lower half of the rank, you're blocked from…

Can you imagine what they (Amazon) are trying to achieve with the "can't transfer if you're in the bottom 50%" policy? I can understand your frustration but at its core there has to be some sort of quasi-reasonable objective for the policy.

I'd assume it's literally because their management philosophy holds that half of all employees are not good enough to deserve being rewarded with a transfer. Or perhaps they're trying to protect managers running poorer-performing teams from getting hit with so many outgoing transfer requests.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#240

Post by unreal37 »

monocasa wrote: post #162
unreal37 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The security concern (for the drone and the contents) is a bit overblown to me. What about all those ATM bank machines in all sorts of "insecure" places? We've somehow figured out how to keep money inside a machine that is unattended. The amount of theft that occurs on those things is minuscule and banks put the cost of such theft into their profit calculations. The Amazon drone won't take off unless you confirm in a…

We solved that by making ATMs unmanageably heavy. Not the best option for a drone.

Yeah maybe it's not the same solution. But it's a solvable problem, I believe. I trust that the Amazon team had this conversation 2 years ago, and came to some conclusion that the risk was manageable. Would they send their lawyer to congress fighting FAA regulations if an 8-year-old kid with a pellet gun could knock one out of the sky?
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