I wanted to get printer photo paper for my printer, a Canon. I went to Walmart, They had nothing. Went to Target, they had one pack of photo paper and it was crazy expensive, so I went to micro center. That one was just as expensive. So finally I went back to Amazon, which I was trying to avoid, and saw the price 25 to 40% lower than anywhere I had been. Literally everything that I was looking for, I could find within seconds. Not even Best buy has even close to the amount of inventory or variety, even when you’re shopping online…
Therefore, I think Amazon has a literal monopoly in the tech industry right now, you’re literally forced to buy from them, because unless you have the money and financial fortitude to protest with your wallet, you’re going to be buying from them. There’s no other choice. They have so aggressively and dominantly taken over the supply chain market that no other tech company can currently compete with them in any aspect at all. You will be paying 40 to 50% more on everything by cutting out Amazon, and no one has the money for that anymore unless you’re upper middle class or above
Amazon’s pricing I not deterministic. You were likely tracked and information collected to know this was a key item for you. Amazon will market loss leaders to you in an attempt to get you to default to buying on Amazon.
As a former Buyer for a chain of retail stores, the loss leader is effective marketing. I sell you a popular item at or below my typical cost because statistically, a large percentage of customers are making a special trip to my store to buy that product and will make additional purchases at margin. On the wholesale Buying side, these are tools to get past bulk buying tier discounts for seasonal ordering with smaller scale retail.
Amazon is using a convoluted front end system of overlapping product categories and a supposed multi seller listings (despite collectivized logistics and warehousing) on the website you see. This is how they perform price fixing where you do not see honest or straight forward determinism. When you repurchase that same item later without making comparisons, the seller will shuffle so that a higher price is presented.
If you have a well isolated network where device history for social media and internet browsing is totally partitioned from e-commerce you’ll likely see even more of the scam. If you see anyone online show the search results and pricing on Amazon, then try to replicate those search results and product price on a device that is totally partitioned from your viewing of the item/price elsewhere, you’re likely to find it is not possible. If you then go back to the original device and do the same, you’ll magically find the same product and lower price. It is a scam market. This is why they are collecting and paying for all that data about you. We are in an age when automated individual targeting and manipulation is possible and happening. This is why data mining stalkerware is insidious. Scam markets are only the tip of the iceberg and what can be uncovered if you go looking for it. Anyone that has done database or logistics management should have major red flags flying when looking at how Amazon’s website is setup. The front end is absolutely untenable garbage for effective logistics. The only reason it is convoluted and search results are terrible is because it is a price fixing scam. The logistical efficiency proves that there is no connection between the front and back end of the site.
If you see anyone online show the search results and pricing on Amazon, then try to replicate those search results and product price on a device that is totally partitioned from your viewing of the item/price elsewhere, you’re likely to find it is not possible. If you then go back to the original device and do the same, you’ll magically find the same product and lower price.
I noticed this on Walmarts website when asking chat GPT to find items for me. I was wondering why it was happening. Some of the price differences were extreme too.
Thanks for this. I’ve only used Amazon a few times and was always baffled at the train wreck of its chaotic layout / ux. I had to buy something there once and it was such a process it was like being asked to leave the store before paying. Thought at the time it must be down to legacy and new features being showhorned around ancient web1.0 history, its success being its burden with customers having to learn how to use the thing. Price fixing scam is what I will think of it now, while continuing to avoid it.
chaotic layout / ux
Maybe it’s stockholm syndrome or something, but I find it absolutely fine. My general rule of thumb is to look past the first page of results, since that’s where a lot of the sponsored listings are, and then look at several listings before deciding. As long as you’re aware that the first page or so of results are generally sponsored (i.e. ads), it’s not too hard to find a decent product. And since it’s online, it’s pretty easy to compare w/ other retailers (I’ll often look at eBay, Newegg, and a couple others depending on the type of product before pulling the trigger).
That said, I’m definitely not your typical consumer (I rarely buy things on impulse), so it’s hard for me to understand the impact of their “price fixing” nonsense.
Yeh people learn and it becomes normal which is fine. Ebay is as bizarre to me. Not hate, more a morbid fascination that things so maze-like to navigate can also be successful. Could be semi cultural as well. I’ve noticed this being the way in other US platforms with a similar legacy. I’ve also being (attempting to) subvert tracking for quite a while so maybe that’s working and its less useful as a result lol. I’m lucky in a sense that their corporation isn’t so strong where I live so theres more choice (ironically I may actually have less choice). Its annoying when they have the monopoly on a given product, but it’s also possible just to go without the shiny thing.
Ebay
Yeah, it’s a bit odd, but again, once you get used to it, it’s fine. My general rules of thumb:
- narrow by category - avoids the worst of the spam
- only include “buy it now” listings (unless you really want auctions)
- sort by price (including shipping)
- skip the cheapest listing and look for the first “cluster” of listings
- be careful with sellers with a small number of reviews; low reviews aren’t a deal-breaker, they just have a higher chance of BS
I do that each time, and I haven’t had any problems so far.
Maybe it’s stockholm syndrome or something, but I find it absolutely fine.
no it’s absolutely horrid. HOWEVER in your defense, so are like 95% of all websites, ever made, it’s not a unique problem.
Yup, the modern web kinda sucks. But once you learn to navigate it, it’s usable. Mostly.
Nah, the layout is absolutely horrible. Especially when you check a box in the filters and other options disappear because Jeff forbid you want to look for motherboards by Asus, Gigabyte, and Asrock but ignore other brands.
Are you talking about the immediate refresh thing? Because yes, that is frustrating.
I don’t know if it happens in browser but sometimes on their app other options disappear if you choose one from the filter.
If I start looking for shoes, and check Adidas under brands filter then the page refreshes and I don’t see any other brands’ names.
Great post. Thank you for this insight!
How much does it say these beans cost?
How does CamelCamelCamel display a price history if the price is different for everyone? Perhaps it’s inaccurate for some (Just hasn’t been for me the handful of times I’ve “had“ to use Amazon.)
And Amazon doesn’t price discriminate if they put something on a nationwide sale? So the bloggers can advertise that AirPods are at their lowest price ever?
reporting on their bad biz practices
They definitely get accused of other unsavory stuff:
Amazon “tricks” customers into buying Fire TVs with false sales prices: Lawsuit
Did 39 people really believe this enough to upvote this? This is easily proven false. Amazon is convoluted because it’s old as heck and they hire subpar engineers. Like me. I used to work on the team that made the search page. It sucks because most of us were fresh out of college and had never made a website in our lives.
you mean it gives huge discounts to random people because of an error? i would think amazon would want to fix that ASAP
You’ve never done ecommerce logistics. You do not get Amazon’s efficiency from such a garbage system, or the worlds richest man. I have no doubt there are dubious practices to give plausible deniability. The thing is too large and too successful for this to be the big picture. The collectivized warehousing invalidates the front end system and mechanics entirely.
You’ve never done ecommerce logistics
I literally have. Go climb up a tree.
oh so basically the entire shitpost about walmart or whatever it was having “dynamic pricing” is literally already real…
ok.
It sounds like you went to several physical stores and when their stock on hand was not sufficient you concluded your only option was Amazon. What about the rest of the internet?
I’ve been deeply hooked on Amazon for a long time and trying to wean myself off of it for a variety of reasons. The most helpful thing in this, I’ve found, is Apple Pay.
I happen to use an iPhone and Apple Pay is easy. It is increasingly accepted everywhere, making any online store a one-click purchase. Maybe for you it would be PayPal or Google Pay but whatever your preference is, these payment services have come a long way.
For years I was stuck on Amazon because of the convenience. I am not ashamed - convenience is a real benefit when life is busy. And I had everything set up on Amazon, and they had most things available in their search.
But Google Shopping also has almost everything in the world available and most or all the retailers there accept Apple Pay. So now I just do that. It works just as easily.
You can even search on Amazon and then take note of the name of the seller and search the internet for them and then buy direct. Most have websites because Amazon fees eat into their profits. They would rather sell direct. And easy payment services plus ecommerce platforms like Shopify and Square make it easier than ever.
Amazon is becoming a cesspool of Chinese scams these days. I am tempted to say that I still prefer Amazon because the returns are easy but the fact is that I have HAD to return a lot of things to Amazon because they were not what I thought I was buying or they were just absolute shit quality or arrived broken.
So the point remains: you have alternatives. Use them. If you want physical stores, that’s another matter entirely and I agree those are getting fewer and worse. But Amazon doesn’t always beat them on price. You should check every time and you might be surprised. I was in my local CVS and I saw they had the exact LED bulbs I needed to buy but I thought they’d be too expensive there so I checked Amazon on the spot. CVS beat them by a couple of dollars. So check every time!
If it’s sold and shipped by amazon, you should be able to price match it at bestbuy or target. I don’t know why walmart stopped price matching anybody.
Bought a RX 6400 for a little windoze game box, and shelled out around 30€ /35€ more at a conventional well inown shop here, materiel dot net. Bought most of my stuff there over the years, nice people, etc.
But I couldn’t just go get it, it “had to” be delivered, so I paid for that too (I guess you do the same on Amazon), high class delivery or so I thought. Ordered thursday, scheduled delivery “wednesday 8h-19h” so okay I WFH but man better ve there every minute right?
Got a confirmation SMS/Text around 12, we’re delivering your package today! (No more info).
Surprise, they didnt.
Suddenly it’s scheduled “Thursday 8h-19h”.
Grrr
I bet I would have gotten my card on saturday if I had used amazon (+30€ too…).
I mean are brick & mortar stores dead now for real maybe?
Services quality is down across all segments of economy tho this ain’t retail specific.
We pay more, we get less. Entire life is being rapidly enshitified
I am fortunate to live in a country where amazon is not strong and we have aggregated search engines that over all the small shops, compete against Amazon on selection and cost, often beating it. I hope it stays this way.
That’s cool. EU?
Yes, Czechia. We can order from Amazon.de, but it’s not usually much better than the other options, and returns and support are much worse.
Amazon has a healthcare company now too…
…and they own twitch.
Wait til you find out about AWS and how half the internet runs on it.
I tried blocking anything Amazon in my adguard home instance…holy shit that broke a lot of sites, I had to unblock it to have functional internet.
Wait, your Canon printer needs a specific type of photo paper, not just generic photo paper that’s been around for inkjet printers for a very long time now? Have printers really become that enshittified?
I believe they are sublimation printers, which require specific inks and papers. I seem to remeber that they produce very long lasting prints, which ordinary inkjets (even pigment) can’t achieve.
Canon printers specifically are designed to take Canon specific photo paper. Even the drivers on your Windows PC are programmed to understand what those photo papers are, and you have to match up to them. If you use some generic paper, the prints will never come out right.
Canon printers specifically are designed to take Canon specific photo paper.
OP, this is what you should be complaining about.
I put some of the blame on retailers as well. Retail stores just don’t want to carry inventory anymore, especially tech-focused ones with many of those just turning into glorified showrooms. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard some version of: “Sorry, we don’t have that in stock but we can bring it in for you.”
We needed a short length of garden hose here for the house so I went to two hardware stores and one garden centre looking for one. Nothing. Not even in their dedicated gardening sections. I had to order it off Amazon. A goddamn garden hose.
Amazon has done a lot of damage for sure but retail is suffering from several self-inflicted wounds too. Home Depot, for example, is a multi-billion dollar corporation and even they have a weaker retail presence now. That’s not Amazon’s fault.
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The problem with this “econ101” thinking is that it insists that the whole system runs on the choices of actors in a deterministic system.
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Yes, the system isn’t perfectly deterministic, but on average and over a long-enough time period, it pretty much is. People are going to act irrationally, but generally people will be irrational roughly equally on either side of “rational.”
In this case, the market is probably big enough that if a big retailer doesn’t stock something, it’s because the average person has decided that buying it elsewhere (i.e. Amazon) or not buying it at all (i.e. longer is fine) is preferable to buying it at the local store. It’s not the local retailer’s fault that it’s unprofitable to stock that item, it’s a mix of consumers and online competition making that product unprofitable to stock.
That said, you’ll probably have a better shot if you go to specialized stores. In this case, look at farming and plumbing supply stores, since they’re more likely to service those customers who really need that short hose today to complete a project. Your regular home improvement stores (e.g. Lowe’s and Home Depot) cater to homeowners more than contractors (so having a little of everything is better than lots of something), whereas the specialist stores cater to contractors and small business owners.
That’s not Amazon’s fault.
That’s mostly the fault of consumers who buy from Amazon (and other e-tailors).
There’s quite a few retail stores that don’t keep inventory, even for common things. Staples comes to mind, where it feels like half their damn office items aren’t in stock, so you need to wait for them to have it brought in.
The problem is that those same retail stores can’t compete with Amazon’s shipping speed. It becomes a case of:
- I want to buy a thing, I need it fast, so I guess I’ll check my local retails stores
- My local retail stores don’t have it in stock, but I can order it and it’ll be there in 4-5 days
- I can just buy it off of Amazon at a comparable price, and have it tomorrow
It’s alright if they don’t want to carry inventory, but they need to have the shipping speeds to compete, otherwise there’s no reason for the consumer not to just buy it off of Amazon directly.
Check your local mom and pop hardware store if you have one! I had to get a feeder hose this summer as well, and the only place I found it was a local family owned hardware store.
Go on Facebook and ask your local buy nothing group. Check thrift stores line the habitat for humanity restore. Farm and home store like fleet farm/ farm and fleet. Plenty of ways to get ahold of something like that without buying new.
That requires Facebook
I’ll stick to not buying things instead
I feel you. Fortunately, in my area there’s a very popular classifieds section at one of the local newspapers, so I can stick to my guns avoiding Facebook.
So check local newspaper classifieds, Craigslist, and maybe your local library (you never know if they organize swaps).
I wonder how much investment it drives in Facebook to be a user who registered under an assumed name on a VPN with an ad blocker enabled.
Unfortunately, probably some.
There’s always dumpster diving
He said he didn’t want to use Facebook.
Totally agree!
Looks like you’ve been hard at work blocking since people actually agree with you now
Harbor Freight.
When you absolutely need something to work presicely once between the day you buy it and the day you’re late for jury duty.
I’ve gotten some surprisingly long lasting gems there, but you can never be sure. Like you said, I’ve also gotten a number “single use” tools from Harbor Freight. Overall though, it’s almost always been worth it.
Most homeowners don’t need better than HF. If you start getting into more sophisticated equipment their quality can be really problematic but for all the basic stuff a homeowner needs: hammer and pliers, HF is one-stop.
From there you have to be careful, but gems can be found. I’ve been using their 120V 2HP dust collector in my wood shop for years now and it is an insane value for a decent machine.
They don’t want to carry inventory because Amazon doesn’t. The prices are higher because vendors are contractually obligated to sell on Amazon at their lowest price. So retailers, with a need to have a physical presence and having to buy at more or less the same price a product is available for on Amazon, get fucked. Their only hope is vendors who make a “different” product to sell at other outlets. An example of what I mean is, Poppi soda sells for $20/12 pack on Amazon. They sell a 15 pack at Costco for the same price. Because it’s a “different” product they are not in breach of contract.
Mean while my Best Buy has so much crap in the aisles that you can’t pass a person without having to do the weird turn side ways shuffle. Home Depot isn’t much better. Trying to push a lumber carts around is a joke now. So much crap stuck in the middle of the aisles or at the end of the aisles. So I don’t think it’s a lack of inventory but a variety of inventory.
Having worked at a Target like this, I can assure you there is still a lack of inventory on top of these stores being extremely short staffed. Target in particular completely eliminated their storeroom staff a few years ago and just doubled the work load of the floor staff. Both the floor and the storeroom were absolute nightmares to navigate because there were not enough people to actually organize and stock.
Here in Germany there are still plenty of independent online retailers and they’re competitive with Amazon. I always try to avoid buying from Amazon and for tech products that’s usually no problem.
Do you have some good examples? I recently moved there, and want to avoid Amazon, when possible
In more general terms, you can look up the item at e.g. Idealo.de or other product comparison sites and then decide where to buy. Amazon is most often not the cheapest, even including additional delivery cost
I like to order tech stuff from mindfactory.de
Same in Spain. I don’t even have an Amazon account, btw.
Here in Italy practically no one is as quick as Amazon tho
So? What’s the deal in waiting a couple of days?
Sometimes I need stuff faster.
And usually it’s more than a couple of days. For example I always order PC parts from other stores, and some of them take over two weeks to deliver. Of course that’s not an urgent purchase… Usually.
Exactly. I convinced my wife that we really don’t need everything to arrive in 0-2 days, it’s totally fine if things take 3-5 days. So I cancelled our Prime sub, and it’s been absolutely fine. In fact, we spend a bit less due to that minimum order size. We still usually get things in 2-3 days if we go w/ Amazon (we’re right next to a hub), but we’ve been buying from more retailers now that we plan for longer delivery times.
I’m also in Spain, and only use Amazon for things i genuinely cannot find elsewhere, which happens to be like once a year
Let me guess, the EU actually put laws in place to ”remediate that problem” like a ”functioning government”.
Netherlands here and as well we have so many local shops that outbeat Amazon that it isn’t even fair. There is a very small chance I buy something of Amazon, think the only time I did was for a replacement item for a Dyson.
I think “beat out” may have been what you meant. And in this example I would probably just say they “beat” Amazon.
How dare you expose my mobile typing and/or my not-native language speaker! /s
OP, I dislike Amazon and there are definitely plenty of things to accuse them of, but you’re literally describing the opposite of a monopoly. Generally the problem with monopolies is that they don’t need to compete on price so they’ll over charge. You’re saying Amazon is a monopoly because they’re the cheapest option though. That doesn’t follow.
Again, to be clear, I dislike them and believe they’re worthy of criticism. I’m not trying to “defend Amazon” here.
“A monopoly is a market structure with a single seller or producer that assumes a dominant position in an industry or a sector. Monopolies are discouraged in free-market economies because they stifle competition, limit consumer substitutes, and thus, limit consumer choice.” ~investopedia
Nothing about needing to jack prices up. I’d say Amazon fits the description perfectly
Just because they are the cheapest option doesn’t mean they aren’t a monopoly. They clearly have the most inventory. One store having all of the inventory of everything and being the leader for selling products of any kind, is a pretty big problem.
If they can put others out of business (pretty sure they have put smaller stores out of business in the past), they can become an even bigger monopoly.
I am no economist, but don’t you think this behaviour of Amazon leads to “carrot and stick” and at that point it is basically a monopoly right?
OP didn’t say it, but Amazon also forces agreements with sellers not to list same items cheaper elsewhere online which is monopolistic.
I get the nuance you are communicating though.
You need to read The Amazon Anti-Trust Paradox by current FTC head Lina Khan. She argues that the consumer price oriented monopoly definition is old and outdated in the modern setting. Price is not a sufficient proxy for market competitiveness, and in fact, price is often used to kill competitiveness by undercutting new and innovative products.
I agree. Price is important in a classic “free market” where people compete to sell goods and services for cheaper and whoever does it best makes a profit and grows, etc, etc.
This ain’t a classic free market. We frequently see companies become market leaders without ever earning a profit. That’s not a classic free market.
Succeeding as a company because you make customers happy sounds nice, but the most powerful companies today succeed by gaining favor from those already in power (venture capitalists, etc), and the customers are just a bargaining chip to be tossed about on the bargaining tables of the wealthy.
I sound agree price isn’t always the best factor to determine a monopoly.
Walmart use to go into a town, sell everything cheap and drive everything else out of business.
It’s one of the many reason I hate Walmart.
Growing up we have a cool downtown area. It wasn’t big but had a bunch of small stores. They all closed within a year of Walmart.
I avoid Walmart for this reason as well as quite a few others. I think I’ve bought about 3 items from them in the past 5-6 years and typically because they have something others don’t that i need that same day (the store is about a mile from my house.)
Wal-Mart does a lot of things I don’t agree with. Their labor practices along with their sourcing and many other things make them the last place I will shop.
That’s a good point. Especially when we see so many things where there are exactly two companies competing.
Many monopolies form by first using a dominant market position to sell at a price no competitor can afford to match. Choice has already been removed before the “competition” folds or pulls out of the market. The consequences don’t happen overnight; you feel the squeeze before the “true” monopoly emerges. Amazon isn’t going to sell at a cheaper price once their competitors go out of business out of the kindness of their hearts.
Further, high consumer price is just one form monopoly power takes. Reduced labor power, wages, and worse working conditions are other important concerns, in addition to removing product variety and innovation incentive.
That’s a fair point. Bring loss leader can be a stepping stone on the path to being a “real” monopoly.
Amazon literally did this with diapers.com that led to them acquiring the company and shutting it down. I’m sure they’ve done it in hundreds of other product spaces as well.
It’s not just the tech industry, it’s most industries. They have tons of inventory of everything.
You were looking for office supplies: did you check an office supply store?
Definitely would have been my first choice to look also, but do you think that staples or office max is going to have something cheaper than amazon?
It depends on the paper based on some quick searching, but I can pickup the paper from staples faster than Amazon will deliver it.
I’m thinking op isn’t the brightest tool on the short bus. Walmart has a far better market place/e-commerce platform than shitass Amazon. Same delivery windows of 1-3 says. Can order groceries that aren’t fuckin wierd marketplace seller with a garage packed with dented pallets of Nutella, wild rice and 5hr energy drinks lol. The groceries actually come from the store or the next nearest one. They basically already had the warehouse infrastructure. The dumped billions with a fuckin B last year just on developing and expanding on drone deliveries. Plus when your order gets fucked up from Walmart… YOU TALK TO A FUCKIN PERSON WHO ISNT HALF WAY ACCROSS THE PLANET WITH 3 PRELOADED REPLIES TO FIX EVERY PROBLEM. Fuuuuuuuuuck Amazon customer service. But also unless op was looking for the holy grail of printers I will bet my annual salary that Walmart’s online store had the exact printer they were looking for or one that is an exact copy but another brand. So dramatic to write this whole post up for such a dumb reason lol.
Edit: Also no person or brand selling on Amazon is exclusively selling on Amazon. If the printer wasn’t available anywhere it’s prolly a discontinued model or a fuck up by the mfg. Such a dumb post.
How did Walmart become the good guy in all this shit? What the ever living fuck is going on with capitalism?
I gave up on Amazon a while ago except for very niche things, and Walmart if great. Orde groceries, they tell me to come get them, dude loads them up in my car and tells me have a good day. It’s amazing. No extra charge, nothing. Don’t have to deal with any of the people of Walmart.
Microcenter price matches amazon, you could’ve bought it for the same price at microcenter. Also, you can try ebay, I’ve been buying more stuff from ebay and the experience is pretty good.
1/2 the time on eBay (for new stuff) it’s someone sending a gift package from Amazon and pocketing the difference.
Micro center does that? Because I asked them about that and they said they will only do it for certain items. That’s really strange honestly. I would also feel a little bit bad about it, because Amazon is clearly trying a loss leader strategy to mark down the product prices to ridiculous levels, I’m sure that would not help local small businesses if I can’t afford it, so I wouldn’t want to exploit that
Ive had different stores & managers give me different policies. One told me the items needed to be shipped and sold from Amazon. Another told me it was only for items that weren’t on sale. Another told me I couldn’t price match a part that was in a bundle purchase. But yes, they respect price match to almost every major competitor.
Best Buy does some price matching as well.
Same with most brick and mortar retailers. When in doubt, ask, and they’ll probably say yes, they just need to confirm the price on their own device (so you’re not manipulating images or whatever on your phone).
I’ll say one problem is that for a number of items, there’s a technicality in the supply chain that exempts stuff from the price match. I don’t know about Microcenter, but have seen it in other contexts.
For example “Oh, Amazon is selling a 120 pack, but we only carry 125 packs, so it’s not equivalent”. Or in the most egregious, “You have the price for model number 762LAZ, but we stock 762LWM”, and you search and find out those two model numbers are absolutely identical, but “AZ” models come in a box with an Amazon logo printed on it.
So politely, how does Amazon offering a better price on a niche paper product conflate into them having a monopoly on the “tech industry”?
I’d posit the real thing here is that Amazon’s warehouses allow them to keep less-purchased products around in stock that a brick-and-mortar retail store simply wouldn’t bother with at all, but that’s been the case for decades at this point.
And, yes, printing out images has become an uncommon activity and I can’t say I’d blame any of the larger stores for only having a single expensive option available, but that’s their decision, not Amazon’s.
Not only that but Amazon isn’t the only online retailer to sell stuff like this. OP only checked some brick and mortar stores then went straight to Amazon without even checking out other places like Canon directly, B&H, Walmart.com, etc.
Doesn’t look like they went to an Office Max/Depot or Staples either, which honestly, would be my first stop for printers and printer accessories these days, since printers have very much fallen into just office-use shit and that one damn thing a year you have to print because some jackass is still stuck in 1988.
The long tail has always been one of Amazon’s strengths.
That said, buying anything from them runs a good chance of getting knock off garbage these days.
knock off garbage these days
Yep. I actually order more junk from AliExpress than Amazon now, because it’s the same shit except AliExpress is half the cost so if I’m going to get junk at least I’m paying junk-level prices.
(This is mostly components and other hobby-related stuff where there never really was any difference between AliExpress and Amazon, other than faster shipping.)
Bingo. Temu and Aliexpress. Same site, really.
Woodpecker or the item you can freely drop on the concrete floor without crying due to loss of investment.
Eh, going to disagree that Aliexpress == Temu.
Not that I’m saying Aliexpress is a paragon of virtue, but Temu is full of dark patterns, scammy “discounts” and just nonstop playing games trying to get you to buy now, refer people, and “win” shit. It’s a gambling app that happens to sell toxic trash as a side gig.
Aliexpress really has cleaned their shit up and basically sends you what you expect to get, when you expect to get it, and has made refunds for blatant bullshit (I had to return some clearly counterfeit remarked chips) if not easy then at least something you could actually accomplish.
100% agreed. There’s no way I’m touching Temu, but I do go to AliExpress every now and then. And most of the time, I can line up the Amazon listing for whatever I’m buying with a bit of research, so I can benefit from the reviews there (and not the 5 star reviews, but 1-2 star reviews).
how does Amazon offering a better price on a niche paper product conflate into them having a monopoly on the “tech industry”?
For starters, it’s typically not “better price” so much as “only people able to consistently obtain supply”. The real price is very likely higher than it was 5-10 years ago when production was prolific.
But also, we saw this game play out with Walmart. The monopoly retailer has an opportunity to outsource to the least ethical producer.
So Amazon gets to be the sole distributor of printer paper, the manufacturer is some old growth harvestor in the Amazon using prison/slave labor for harvesting/processing, and even then you’re paying more for a worse product than when a well regulated and unionized workforce was producing the commodity a decade earlier.
So Amazon gets to be the sole distributor of printer paper, the manufacturer is some old growth harvestor in the Amazon using prison/slave labor for harvesting/processing, and even then you’re paying more for a worse product than when a well regulated and unionized workforce was producing the commodity a decade earlier.
That doesn’t really make sense in this context as this paper is made by Canon not Amazon. You could make the argument that Canon is using rainforest paper, but then the rest of this kind of falls apart.
this paper is made by Canon not Amazon
Rubbermaid had to completely downsize and restructure its workforce as Walmart chewed through the retail competitors who purchased their products wholesale. This was back in the 90s.
Canon is under the same pressure today. Amazon sets the wholesale price point as a monopsony and Canon has to deliver at that price or fail to make the sales.
Not just tech, all over the product spectrum. They started by selling books.
A large problem is payment system and accounts. I hate going to a new shop and create a new account, a new password, bla bla bla. I hate it. And wiring with online banking is still a pain the ass, you have to enter some password into your shitty phone keyboard and then wait for an SMS… paypal and amazon payment make shopping convenient.
So part of the problem is banks who have been sleeping on the job for decades. At least here in Europe. You finally can wire money so it arrives immediately from your bank account at a shop! (without having to waste some tax on a payment provider either). But 2 factor authentication is still a pita. Where is my online bank with easy to use FIDO2?
There are now alternative popping up because amazon has become so enshittified (high prices for many smaller items and reviews etc). And of course I’m a fan of aliexpress but shipping from China is stupid too.
Books have always been a tool for power.
Guess even in our times that’s true.Y’all havemt even broached Amazon Web Services market share.
And then amazon, a book seller, bought IMDB and eventually burned down the discussion section - which contained so much “secondary literature” about films. I’ll never forgive them for that.
I always forget about that. Makes me sad.
I’m completely unfamiliar with this, can you elaborate?
IMDB used to be independent and have a pretty amazing forum for movies. Like people would have lots of debate and discussion and insight. I loved going there after watching a movie. It was sort of “secondary literature” and nothing like this existed before. Then they just decided to delete countless contributions and shut it down. Instead of paying for moderation for the few trolls.
Of course there are plenty of other movie forums, some even copies the old posts and there is r/movies, but it’s much more fractured now. There are certain network effects for social media that need to reach a critical size.
Yes, you could have watched a 5- (or 10-) years old movie and went there for a forum full of threads about that specific movie. Some threads might be old, but people did make new threads even after years, and they were all in one place and easy to find. It was a big loss when it was shut down, and I haven’t found a place that offers a similar experience.
