Looks like I’m spoiled for choice. Temu has exactly the same for 11.29. Not that I’d be purchasing from either place; it’s just another example of Amazon’s enshittification.
I will not defend Amazon. But the lack of local retail/price gouging which is shipping in Canada keeps pushing me to Amazon.
I need a role of 3D printable filament or an SD Card. The nearest store is 1-2 hours away and costs twice as much for the convenience, buying from the manufacturer may not possible and if it is shipping cost just as much as the product.
I would love it if there was competition, but there isn’t and Amazon knows it. So for the most part I just buy from brands I know are safe.
I have a few local electronic shops.
It’s just that they dont have what I need or are way more expensive.It is almost impossible to buy RAM or a CPU in person outside of specialty shops.
SSDs or HDDs are only available in low capacity (<2TB) and/or low spec (M.2 Gen3).Nothing of use for an enthusiast.
The only worth they have to me are as a appliance seller (e.g. TVs, household appliance, general use audio equipment)I see you too have a waste of retail space known as Best Buy/Best Buy Mobile in your community.
MediaMarkt and Saturn (our largest electronics retailers) first merged then were bought up by JD.com (chinese retailer)
Any other shop is a small chain/one-man-army type of shop which usually don’t have what I need :/Recently discovered a decent camera shop by coincidence while traveling :) That was cool.
They are both physical and online. And they werent pushy about their products. Which is great!
This is what people aren’t talking about enough. It may make people feel all good inside to not have Amazon and everything - until they are commuting for long periods, having to spend more than they budgeted for and shipping to not be available. Also, who loves it when you have to store-hop multiple places and still not find what you need?
It’s like I can’t rely on Walmart or even Best Buy to have what I’m looking for. They have their limits. I can’t rely on small businesses either because they probably won’t have whatever it is I need.
So, sorry, I’m going to keep shopping Amazon as sparingly as possible. Do I hear anyone who is Anti-Amazon prop up any stores for reasonable commute and pricing and available shipping for people and communities? No? Then shut up about your lectures that people don’t need Amazon and how they’re sheeple for continuing to buy from it. It is all about self-pride and virtue signaling.
But you know that capitalism is so good because the free market ensures that there’s so much variety and choice in quality and innovation.
It used to work. When something no longer sold, manufacturers would diversify. Now they force you to still buy the same product with the help of politicians and bribes.
What we have isn’t even capitalism. The supposed free market doesn’t exist when the big players pocket the regulators to use as a weapon against smaller businesses and secure their own market positioning.
Incidentally, this is typically the end result of capitalism if you don’t reign in and break up these companies.
They don’t need to pocket the regulators.
They just need to buy up or out-price the competition into oblivion.
These practices are exactly the kinds of behaviors that regulators should prevent.
When a business gets huge it shouldn’t be allowed to buy up all of its competition. Regulatory authorities should block these acquisitions. For example, Sprint should never have been sold because it concentrated power even further and gives customers less choice.
It’s not simple price competition either. A company like Walmart can afford to sell products at a loss to drive other businesses out on purpose and then jack up the prices when they’re the only game in town. Dollar General has been accused of strategically placing stores to block businesses from making a profit.
Sprint is an interesting example because I believe regulators did block previous merger attempts on exactly those grounds.
It’s yet another case subject to the whims of whatever administration is in charge, and we’re stuck with the fallout
What we have is exactly capitalism. A “winner-takes-it-all” system breeds oligopoly, and oligopoly breeds corruption.
the big players pocket the regulators
That’s the entire point of capitalism, it’s how it’s always been, and it’s how it will always be. It’s class analysis: the capital owners have the media, the political power, and the repressive force of the state apparatus behind them.
There are two factors necessary for a truly free market that prevent any capitalist system from actually being a free market. They are:
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Consumers need to have perfect information about the products and the companies that make and/or sell them - in other words, companies must not be able to hide their sins.
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There needs to be zero friction for new entrants into the marketplace, whether that is from costs to start up a business, or anti-competitive behavior from other companies with money to throw around.
It is impossible to achieve either of these in the real world.
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I know. It’s how what China and the Soviets had wasn’t communism. A relatively small group of people climb up top and ruin everything, as they always have.
It’s like we have a centrally planned economy but dumber.
I don’t know what the solution is.
The first thing I would do if I had a magic wand and could just change reality to see what happens, would be to get rid of Citizens United and whatever they called that decision that said money=speech. That’s the kind of thing that could actually happen without requiring wholesale societal change. Add in some strong campaign finance laws and maybe you could get some politicians who aren’t putting themselves up for auction to the highest bidder.
Honestly, my strategy for buying goods online is to look up the relevant wikipedia article, read the list of manufacturers, look at their own wikipedia pages or read customer reviews, then finally go directly to the company site and ordering directly.
For used items or niche items not widely produced, ebay or craigslist.
Amazon always had funky shit with how they recommended things - now people just know how to game it more, so winning move is not to play there.
Check out an app called Karrot. It’s basically craigslist but you periodically have to confirm your location, so you know all items are local. It also has a shockingly accurate photo identification and pricing feature.
I usually start with a google image search, find ones that look good and then try to track down where I can get them from.
Ah, I degoogled my life, so I use Wikipedia instead. Although considering that google images may be flooded with AI slop now that strategy might not work for much longer. Creative tho!
Try https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ – it really cuts down on the slop, even for images.
I do use noai ddg, but I never tried the images function. Guess it’s worth a shot.
Well yes to be honest it’s DDG image search usually
I’m not going into such depth (unless it’s technology I don’t understand), but I usually shop on Amazon after I figured out what exactly I wanted, and what price below other stores I was willing to pay. I found that only two categories I still overwhelmingly purchase from Amazon are books and branded art supplies.
I don’t know where you are located so this may not apply to you, but in the US for branded art supplies I always go with DickBlick or Jerry’s Artorama, because in addition to the usual “stick it in a bubble bag and see how damaged we can make it before it arrives” Amazon shipping policy, branded art supplies are now being counterfeited on Amazon, like so many other things.
I already could not safely buy liquids (Gamsol, OMS, etc) or soft supplies (paper or canvas pads, single watercolors) because of careless shipping, but now I won’t even try because of counterfeits. If you want the branded version of something that already has budget knockoffs, say an item like Holbein or Caran d’Ache colored pencils where the real thing is vastly more expensive than others in its category, you’re taking your chances on Amazon. Amazon has been selling counterfeit fountain pens for years, even low end pens like Lamy Safaris which always blew my mind, but now it’s a lot of things in the art supply world.
So now I only get cheap knockoffs there, anything under $50. Anything over that, or anything liquid or bendable/breakable, I go with a real art supply store. It’s absolutely worth it, they pack it all very carefully, excellent return service when I’ve needed it, and I can still pick up deals better than Amazon without ever having to worry about the possibility it’s a counterfeit and I just wasted hundreds on a scam.
If you’re not in the US you may be having a markedly better experience, so disregard. But in the US, Amazon for branded art supplies is a big NO for me.
I’m in Ireland, shopping mainly in the UK Amazon. I buy there mainly mid-range supplies, and I have a few physical stores in continental Europe where I get the more expensive stuff. But flying with anything liquid or large paper pads is almost as risky as having them shipped from Amazon, with the added bonus of my wife complaining that I take up too much weight in the suitcase with my “useless toys”.
Yeah, you’re definitely getting a better experience in Ireland with both Amazon and Temu/AliExpress, so I don’t blame you. Kinda have to cross your fingers and hope for the best, or have it shipped with all the added shipping costs: no truly good options. But people who don’t do a lot of art will never understand why you have to have so many different supplies, or why one paint is not the same as another, or why paper isn’t just paper, and “But you already have fifteen blues!” Yeah, and now I’m about to have sixteen, lol. Just the way it is.
Just get a used Filson off eBay. I’m not even sure why you would consider anything else
I looked them up now, and they look very good, but for my purposes I’d like a bag that costs less than the contents.
It turns out that I was looking at the wrong type of bags. What I really needed (and got) was a thin, lightweight laptop bag, which holds my notebook (of paper variety), a few pens, and some odds and ends. For anything that’s capable of carrying significant bulk and weight, I prefer a backpack.
Just a guess but, I wouldn’t consider anything that was an order of magnitude more expensive than what I was looking to spend.
I always love the nonsensical order of letters that these companies use.
My favourite one so far is “Hoement”
“CTIRCHIU” sounds like an eldritch god
What you mean? HAFSBEVCZ is a totally established, reputable brand.
Looks more like a randomly generated password.
There’s a reason for them! I can’t find the original video I saw about it, but this one explains it pretty well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UrqlMfwUC4&t=192
I also like how sarcastic this person sounds (at least to me) during their sponsor segment.
You’re probably thinking of the HAI video.
That seems very likely. I guess my YouTube search skills aren’t what I thought they were. Thank you.
deleted by creator
I’m pretty sure CTIRCHIU is a Lovecraftian monster.
It’s because of the US patent and trademark office. Not many people are competing with those who slam their heads on the keyboard for their brand names.
Amazon required a US trademarked brand name after the first bout of “el cheapo boot leg” products hit the news cycle (the pajamas on fire and hair curlers that would kill you), so we had these alphabet soup brand names ever since.
Amazon does not require a brand but having a brand allows the seller better access into amazing seller’s tools.
Amazing incentivizes this shit and does not give a fuck about it. They could be easily detecting this using LLMs but they don’t because they only care so it profits.
I read that it’s to avoid internal competition.
A Chinese company manufactures a product (or parts of it) for a Western brand with high quality control standards.
Half the production output meets the standard and is sold under the Western brand name for a higher price.
The other half is sold much cheaper, with a brand name that sounds unappealing to Western customers but can still be sold to Asian markets or people who don’t care and only look at the price.
So the name sounds bad on purpose to steer buyers who care about the name towards the more expensive brand with a higher profit margin.
Hoement sounds like a word, at least. A… Hoe moment?
I was thinking it was a movement for sex worker rights, or something
I don’t care what the Hoe meant, she’s still a hoe.
She’s having a hoement, letter.
„went to the bar last night with my girls and met this guy. a few hours later i was having a hoement with him in the bathroom.“
My favourite of these company names is still BOIFUN who obviously sell DVD players, baby monitors and door bells.
The one that really stuck with me was COCKFAIS
FOCMKEAS (19mm reamer) SCHNITPWR (12V power supply)
People need to realize that Amazon has them locked in.
I needed a tall mini fridge for a garage. Cheapest I could find was fucking $700.
I went into a nearby home appliance store and got the same one for fucking ~$200. Granted I had to pay for an $80 delivery, but it still beats the shit out of every option for a 7 cu ft fridge on Amazon.
Every dipshit with a freshly minted MBA thinks they’re going to go and disrupt the appliance industry by putting it online and snatching it out from under all those antiquated local dealerships run by out of touch old men who can barely operate a computer. They think they’re going to go from zero to nationwide tomorrow, and they’re so smart because nobody’s thought of it before.
It turns out that dealing with the final mile with appliances is killer, and extremely difficult logistically. That makes the entire operation much more expensive than anyone thinks at first glance. Not just in terms of raw dollars and cents paid to disinterested common carriers to move your product from A to B (who also won’t install the stuff or even bring it inside your customer’s house) but also in damaged and returned products and angry screaming customers who will be initiating credit card chargebacks all the time whenever anything goes wrong.
All of those little local dealerships have had decades to figure out how to move a refrigerator from their warehouse to your kitchen and how to remediate the situation if it all goes pear shaped on delivery day, and all of them only service their local territory for a reason. The further you stretch without some physical presence in where you’re stretching to, the more impossible it becomes to control the logistics.
So yeah, that’s probably in no small part why your fridge would have been so expensive. Amazon is among the latest figuring this out the hard way, and you can’t just slap a refrigerator or a stove in a bubble mailer and dump it on somebody’s front porch.
Tangentially, this reminds me of some advice I read on whole home water filters. Get this one or get that one. but get it from a local business who’s been in your area for years and years. You will have a problem with it. You are going to need someone to call. And they say, just plan for that from the start.
Local appliance dealers likely also have a dude who in a pinch can just carry most appliances where they need to go.
Everyone is free to set their own priorities, but for me, I’ll just not purchase a thing at all, rather than buy it off Amazon. Most people buy too much crap they don’t actually need anyway.
Some stuff is more, most is less, at least in my town.
Not to be that guy but there’s no way in hell that $700 is true. There are pages of fridges for less than $400 that are 7 cu ft.
I mean, fuck Amazon and all that jazz, don’t get me wrong - I just feel like it’s worth noting the hyperbole. It’s not that bad, at least from an end consumer perspective.
Amazon is admittedly powered by greed and the tears of the proletariat but they do a good job keeping the customer happy.
my 2 cents… not everybody sees the same prices at Amazon… that is part of their dynamic gouging
Just to add an anecdote… My friend is beyond millionaire as her father started a retail giant. Anyways, she has money coming out her ass and the prices Amazon shows her are almost consistently 30%-50% more than what they show me. Because they know she’s rich AF and they know I’m fairly poor.
e: grammar
Yep. Amazon knew my gf and I were moving in together.
I don’t know what kind of setup my GF’s phone had going, but she loved hands-free features like “hi Google” or whatever it was.
I specifically remember having a chit chat verbal conversation with her on her patio while her phone was laying there… and the next day products started getting recommended to me on my phone based on that convo.
My phone at the time was turned off and in my backpack in the house. Somehow the back end logic sewed everything together.
I was studying classical guitar. I was practicing piece and literally YouTube video results on my PC for learning the piece before searching for it.
Only network traffic to indicate was downloading a .PDF on my chrome browser on my phone. This was in like 2012.
Lol dummies this isn’t enshitification. Amazon used to not list this stuff, but they realized that they were losing sales because people would go to temu and AliExpress and buy the cheap goods there.
It’s not that hard to tell which products are cheap products from China being sold by distributors. Y’all are just bad at shopping.
Yeah this thread is beyond sad. People want to think they’re savvy consumers; also think every AA battery with a different outer wrapping is made in a dedicated battery factory.
To a certain extent, isn’t it still enshitification? They lowered their standards (making the product/marketplace worse) to capture marketshare/increase profits.
Also, blaming consumers for being “bad at shopping” is certainly a take. What about the gold plated HDMI cables sold at a huge markup? More expensive doesn’t mean better and we can’t expect everyone to have the knowledge or ability or time to know about every single thing they purchase. Shitty companies are charging more for less and consumers are being squeezed. Photos are all manipulated and there’s no real way to know the quality from a picture. People are trying their best to get good products for their money without being scammed.
Amazon is a service. That service is becoming materially worse (I have a harder time finding what I’m looking for because of the flood of substandard products and Amazon’s preferential search treatment practices, and even when I do find what I’m looking for, there’s a sizable risk that it’s a fake). This is very much enshittification; they captured the market share, and now they’re squeezing it. Anything that makes them more money but is worse for the consumer, they do. Anything that is better for the consumer but costs them money, they don’t do.
Apologies for the YouTube link but Cory Doctorow explains this phenomenon really well: https://youtube.com/shorts/vrgtV_yxxn4
this is the exact reason I try to avoid buy off amazon. You pay 5% more elsewhere, but the seller probably gets 50% more
I have seen some sellers figure out workarounds. If you have a different SKU, it doesn’t get considered. So for example, Poppi soda sells a 12 can variety pack on Amazon. They sell a 15 can variety pack for the same price at Costco. Different SKU, lower price per unit.
Depending on where in the world you are:
There is a resale store called Buffalo Exchange with a bunch of locations who always has the best messenger bags IMO. I’ve purchased several vintage messengers from them for carrying art supplies.
My favorite is a rigid leather satchel the size of a briefcase. Its new enough to have a laptop pocket, but old enough where the laptop would be expected to be gigantic. I use that slot for canvasses. Then it leaves the main pocket open for my mini-easel and brushes. External pockets act to replace my purse on days I carry it. All genes covered with a giant leather flap which locks closed. V protec.
Thanks! That’s actually what I’d be looking for. I’ll check whether they deliver hassle-free to Ireland. Relatively few speciality stores do.
Honestly, I stopped buying on Amazon 3 years ago. Apart from an enshittified experience I don’t want to pay for Jeff Bezos next Helicopter. I go to the store or buy on alternative web sites which are 10€ more expensive, but fuck Jeff.
Their b2c stuff isn’t what’s making bezos rich. It’s AWS, which is difficult to avoid as it runs over half of the internet. But I get the sentiment.
ebay. You get pretty much the same offerings but at least on ebay the people selling actually care about looking good since negative reviews really tank your scores and those actually matter.
Just a week ago I got victim of Amazon dropshipping on eBay. The product was delivered by and from Amazon, but the ebay seller used a weird tracking service so it isn’t too obvious. He put the 5€ difference directly into his pocket. I complained to eBay, but they decided “based on automation and the use of artificial intelligence”, that no rules were broken. So be careful with using eBay as an alternative. Negative reviews can be more or less easily removed on eBay, better give a neutral review in these cases.
Good call.
I will say, I do go out of my way to buy from local spots. I’ve thought about trying to negotiate with some Local Game Store types about prices. I want to buy from LGS but if the price is twice that of Amazon I do find it challenging, if it was like 50% up from Amazon I’d do it, but double is a bit too big of a difference to me in some cases.
Especially if it’s just one extra trader in between who drives the price. Jeff Bezos is evil, but let’s not act like local electronic stores are charity. In the end it’s all produced in China…
Negative reviews are not easily removed on eBay. My husband has been a seller for years now. People will complain about the wildest shit that was clearly addressed in the listing, then you spend 2 hours on the phone with eBay, and likely they will keep the review.
On Amazon, on the other hand, vendors will personally reach out to you if you give anything less than 5 stars and basically “work” with you u til you change your rating (giving you free shit). A lot of people end up changing their review.
vendors will personally reach out to you if you give anything less than 5 stars and basically “work” with you u til you change your rating (giving you free shit)
Not the one I had a problem with. They sold me a bunch of reman hard drives that were listed as new. When I returned them and gave them a shitty review about how they lied they tried to bribe me with 1 used drive to take it down. I was like, “no, give me what I actually ordered or fuck off” They fucked off. Amazon also didn’t do shit to them for there fraudulent listings as far as I can tell.
Why in the world would you be using Amazon
This kinda seems like your fault. In fact, it fully is
Sometimes I check Amazon to get ideas of options, then look for independent companies that sell products with the features I want.
Once again capitalism has bred all sorts of innovation in the space!
I just assume they’re all scammers, the real challenge is finding one outside of that scope.
Because I’ve bought products when I’ve faced similar situations like this. Bought it, then that merchant mysteriously disappeared, never to come up again.
I really don’t it’s a scam, just a bunch of different vendor selling the same cheap bag from China. It’s exactly what it appears to be.
Amazon is just a drop shipping marketplace where everything comes direct from the exact same warehouse in China.
Exactly. Once you know about “white box” goods and the robust Chinese manufacturing chains that support it, you can’t unsee it.
What blows my mind is that Amazon is just accelerating this, and at times, embracing it with their own brand. They’ve gone from being a whole-ass shopping mall to end-of-days-K-Mart in just a few years.
How do they drop ship from China in 2 days?
One of the many reasons I canceled my prime subscription is a lot of stuff was not coming in 2 days.
Easy, they don’t.
Because Amazon pushes sellers to use Amazon warehouses and shipping their product in advance
…so they’re not drop shipping the product to the customers.
Not everything on Amazon ships in two days. In the picture, the dates vary quite a bit.
Hey now. China’s been churning out much higher quality merch of late. And the American Tech Giants have been increasingly wrapped up in US trade war politics. So a lot of this shit now comes from the Philippines, India, and Bangladesh.
literally slop 🤣
