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Amazon Ruined Online Shopping

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Re: Amazon Ruined Online Shopping

#81
post #24
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of the products which I have ordered frequently and with which I didn't expect any problems. Almost all the reviews are good, the price is good and I've been subscribing and saving for years. So I'm genuinely curious why you thought Amazon wasn't good for this item. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000XEV9YE

This is my 1st time trying it. I want the authentic Yorkshire Gold, made for UK flavor standards, not one re-formulated for American taste buds (as some of the reviews allege).

You could skip the teabags entirely and buy in bulk. Not this particular blend, but tea in general.

Re: Amazon Ruined Online Shopping

#82
I increasingly find myself using eBay as a storefront. You can easily filter by “Buy it Now” and “New”, and then it works basically like Amazon marketplace, except that I trust the feedback system a lot more. There’s a lot of small and independent sellers on eBay - plus you can get a lot of stuff shipped directly from China and cut out the middleman, if that’s what you prefer.

Re: Amazon Ruined Online Shopping

#83
post #10

> But there’s a reason that we used to have shoe stores, hardware stores, grocery stores, bookstores, and all the rest: Those specialized retail spaces allow products, and the people with knowledge about them, to engage in specialized ways of finding, choosing, and purchasing them. There's a reason why so much commerce has moved online in general and to Amazon in particular: We often value price and convenience and o…

It's a matter of trust as well. My parents generation, now in the 70's, has this implicit trust in salespeople. They know "in principle" that there are "bad apples", but if a salesperson shakes their hand, looks them in the eye, and says "Of course Mr. , we'll take care of you", they buy it wholesale. Which is how my dad bought $600 tires for $1800 at a dealership, a $1200 "DSLR camera" which was actually a superzoom…

In the small business dominated world of 40 years ago trust was a fundamental economic asset. A bad seller would immediately get a bad reputation and it would be known around the community. People trusted each other because that's how society has worked for millennia, to the point of tribalism, we are never allowed to scam "our" people for we might be ostracized and literally be in mortal peril outside the tribe. A handshake and a look in the eye says: "I'm staking my family's livelihood on this".

Then the tech revolution happened and took the corporatist economic model to massive new levels. Large capital owners could more effectively circumvent the lack of social capital (trust) by investing in technology. Communication tools allowed them to better manage sprawling business empires and reach the consumer directly. The mom&pop gave way to the franchise and the retail chain, it's social capital was undercut by media-induced branding and billion dollar advertising campaigns.

For the national chain, it's largely irrelevant if some old guy got suckered into buying crap by an underpaid employee looking to make a commission. He might complain to his neighbors but unless the media takes an interest, it's not an existential threat to the corporation with national level PR and advertising. The chain has other things to worry about, like expanding faster than the competition and hiring even more cheap & sleazy guys capable of producing income.

The end game of this brave new world is precisely the "everything store" against which no mom&pop can compete. Our generation instinctively mistrusts the corporate drone regardless of it's physical or online incarnation. Your father is the product of a different social arrangement.

Re: Amazon Ruined Online Shopping

#84
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? There are 1,400 reviews on that page.

There are 1400 reviews but the "initial selection" of ~8 Top Reviews has almost 50% negative commentary. I'm trying to learn more and more to look at the bars on the left; in this case, 92% are 4 and 5 star, and factor in that most people with no issues don't write reviews at all. So my very random modifier would make that something like 95% positive and take a chance on it. This assumes you don't get the dice rolled…

I guess people act in that information differently. When I saw 3 of the 8 ‘most helpful reviews’ complain about quality, my next step was to look elsewhere. It turns out that a specialty tea shop—and the grocery store around the corner-both sell it, so that’s where I’d go.

For me, the $15 isn’t itself a big risk, but since my spouse is so reluctant to throw out food that I’d be stuck with lousy tea for months.

Re: Amazon Ruined Online Shopping

#85

Amazon made online shopping feel safe and comfortable, at least mechanically, where once the risk of being scammed by bad actors felt huge Maybe this was true once, but now Amazon has brought back that fear and confusion of getting scammed. You used to be able to count on reviews for some idea of the quality of the product, but now you need to do research at someplace like www.fakespot.com to see if the reviews are f…

Also no sales tax at B&H for a lot of people. Of course, in some states, you're still supposed to pay the state sales tax directly when you do your income tax. I used to do this with amazon before they collected sales tax in my state. They allow you to download your purchase history (csv format) and see which items you didn't pay tax on so it's easy to calculate that line item on state taxes.

As a non-American this seems like a ridiculously complicated tax system.

Re: Amazon Ruined Online Shopping

#86
post #44

I've had a pretty terrible experience trying to buy non stick skillets over the years on Amazon with most of even the top rated items coming with huge issues like warping on the first use, not being very non stick, flaking etc. I almost wonder if its counterfeit or if manufacturers just cutting corners on what used to be a good product? Either way reviews become almost useless when you don't know which version you wi…

I bought this non-stick pan on Amazon and it was one of my best purchases of last year. The trick with non-sticks is to buy cheap enough cookware to affordably replace regularly as they wear out. My previous non-stick pan cost four times as much, wore out, and is now just hanging from a rack, looking fabulous. With the new one, I plan to toss it in another year and buy another. https://www.amazon.com/Tramontina-80114…

Kind of wasteful, no? I prefer to buy stuff that lasts, even if it costs more.

Re: Amazon Ruined Online Shopping

#87

Amazon made online shopping feel safe and comfortable, at least mechanically, where once the risk of being scammed by bad actors felt huge Maybe this was true once, but now Amazon has brought back that fear and confusion of getting scammed. You used to be able to count on reviews for some idea of the quality of the product, but now you need to do research at someplace like www.fakespot.com to see if the reviews are f…

> I used to go to newegg, but have had a few issues with their third party sellers (product never shipped after ordering) so stopped going there.

I have zero interest in shopping a platform. I didn’t like ebay one bit. I’d be perfectly happy to buy from amazon or newegg but if they insist on making it difficult to do that I’ll go elsewhere.

I’m not even saying they can’t be a platform, just make it easy for me to turn that part off.

Re: Amazon Ruined Online Shopping

#88

Amazon made online shopping feel safe and comfortable, at least mechanically, where once the risk of being scammed by bad actors felt huge Maybe this was true once, but now Amazon has brought back that fear and confusion of getting scammed. You used to be able to count on reviews for some idea of the quality of the product, but now you need to do research at someplace like www.fakespot.com to see if the reviews are f…

Previously you were risking getting your card stolen by a shady seller. Now you're risking of getting your payment stolen. Bad product/no product delivered could be seen as equivalent to stole payment. It's an improvement, isn't it?

PayPal solved that problem already though, right?

Re: Amazon Ruined Online Shopping

#89
post #12

I recently went down the rabbit hole of trying to buy Yorkshire Gold tea on Amazon (I am in the US). I encountered so many bad reviews of users complaining about the quality, and the flavor being weakened, or not the authentic YG flavor, that I gave up. It was impossible to tell to which seller each bad review was attributable. I went on Ebay, found decent UK sellers in less than 5 minutes, and ordered my tea. Downsi…

>at least I know what I'm getting Lorddddd I am holding back laughter right now. Ebay is the original defintion of online scamming and counterfeiting. The real way to do this would be for someone to buy a bulk order from the manufacturer, import it, and then sell it piecemeal with a social media profile that demonstrates legitness and quality of product. Ebay's fees and lack of quality control add negative value to t…

Amazon is also very reactive. They eventually take things down, but they rely on user feedback to notice that something is going wrong. And that can be gamed as well.

Re: Amazon Ruined Online Shopping

#90
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> until we have a federal government that is no longer slavish prostituted to business interests If you lend an ear to some contemporary ideas about how technology changes our societies, there might be a chance we will see this happening in our life times. Current government models, democratic and authoritarian alike, seem to grow ever less capable of coping with technology and how it reshapes society. Yuval Noah Har…

> democratic and authoritarian alike Those aren't opposites, they are entirely different concepts. Any law that mandates behavior is authoritarian, which is not inherently good or bad. Are democracies incapable of producing such laws? Criminalizing murder is authoritarian, for example, but unobjectionably desirable. Freedom of speech is actively anti-authoritarian, as an alternative, as it is a restriction placed on…

Democracy and authoritarianism are both forms of government, and that is the sense of the words being used in the sentence ("Current government models, democratic and authoritarian alike, …"). You've chosen to reinterpret one of them as an adjective unconnected to the thing it describes (government models) and then criticized the parent for a category error.
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