My neighborhood stores have huge markups and bad customer service. I don’t love Amazon but they are a better alternative for most things.
People should check again. After I decided to avoid Amazon, I’m surprised by how many things are cheaper and/or better quality at my local stores. I think Amazons reputation for lowest prices is less true every year.
How about both arguments are true. You just have to price check constantly and you will find some stores are cheaper and some are pricier than Amazon.
Yes, sometimes Amazon is cheaper. But one reason I quit amazon was because, even when it’s cheaper, I got so much counterfeit and super low quality disposable junk.
Seriously, take another look at your local stores. I suspect many people aren’t and are just making assumptions. I was surprised to find my local pet store offers free delivery, and literally everything at my local mom and pop hardware store is cheaper and better quality.
Local hardware stores are a must. And if you find a good one where they know what they’re talking about you can get a lot of great advice depending on the project you’re working on.
Did they ever have a reputation for lowest price? I assumed I was paying more for the convenience of not having to go to 5 different dollar stores to find the thing I need.
Amazon was better in 2012, but now it’s all just drop shipped shit that arrives broken. Local stores are surprisingly way better these days
Try using them as a reference guide instead of buying from them. I find what I’m looking for rhen loom up the products own website. A couple extra steps but it’s not like I’m out hunting and gathering, I’m in air conditioning and chair or taking a huge dump.
I’m sure most people here don’t remember when power strips and HDMI cables were $40 and coin batteries were like $15 each pre inflation because stores wanted to make money on them. We could only read, listen to, and watch what our local stores decided to stock and most things didn’t have reviews. If we needed a new power adapter for that one device with a special shaped connector, too bad. It’s literally impossible to buy it.
Europe:
- ‘Local’ stores were/are often ridiculously overpriced, had a very limited range, and it’s not like we’re talking about independent stores either. Many of those were killed by the unfair practices of large corporate chains who would sell at a loss. Before amazon killed chain mall businesses, the mall killed independent businesses on the high street.
- Packages are delivered to me personally. If I’m not there, they don’t deliver and are forced to try another time.
- No need for a PO box, as small independent stores and grocery stores often have a side hussle as a pick-up point. You go to pick-up your parcel and buy something in their store or do your groceries.
- Amazon prime is entirely unnecessary. You simply have to wait a bit longer.
- You can find independent sellers on amazon, then if their product is good, you buy from them directly next time around.
- Thanks to amazon, ebay, etc. it’s become far easier to buy second hand products. In the past you’d have to go to a second hand market, garage sales or visit twenty vintage/antique stores to find what you needed.
Amazon is evil though. So, yeah.
But there are perfectly rational reasons to use amazon.
Yeah if you live in like, Germany or France
More like Europe: sorry we don’t ship there lol. Oh we do? Hope you like paying twice the price for shipping that takes two weeks if you’re lucky
Sucks that my packages keep getting stolen
And that’s why in other countries, delivery services aren’t allowed to drop a package at the door unless you’ve explicitely told them to do so
Amazon totally drops packages outside in Ireland
Here in Romania that is unheard of. The courier will personally hand it to the recipient. If you are not home, you have the option to redirect it to a different address, courier HQ or some local stores that they have contract with. And even so, they ask for a verification code you get via sms in the morning. It’s very unlikely to lose a package.
Sounds like a better system. Here in Ireland, the trucks park with two wheels on the footpath and the flashers on, blocking one lane of traffic on a two lane road (completely fucking pedestrians and cyclists, and making cars have to be driven out into the opposing lane of traffic) while the driver fucks your package up against the door and they leave without ringing the bell (you’ll get an email or text, though).
We don’t use Amazon unless we, in the over 40 year old person usage of the word literal, literally cannot find something we literally need. When we extremely reluctantly do though, this is how it goes.
Up until a few months ago amazon didn’t have free delivery here, it was about 6-11€ for shipping, so the deals had to be really good to make it worth it. But since then, they added free delivery for orders over 49€, so I expect ppl to start using amazon more often.
The way couriers deliver the packages is the same for both amazon and the local online stores tho.
Not true here in Sweden, tho. I work in parcel delivery and I’m instructed to leave at the door (or next to the mailbox if it doesn’t fit), at least if it’s Class A or Express. Class B get one delivery attempt and then sent to service point if unsuccessful.
Although I don’t do all types of parcels.
Are there even thieves in Sweden ?
Sweden has changed a bit in the last decade. Especially bigger cities. Luckily I’m in a small one.
I wish Amazon didn’t treat their employees so shittily. But I really don’t want to find out which of the stores around me have the thing I want and go there by bus. Even without prime the tickets are more expensive than shipping.
Yeah that’s a big thing for me. I hate having to check out 2-3 local stores to find out they don’t have the product I want. A lot of small businesses have such shitty online presence.
Yeah, and shopping locally is so hit-and-miss. Some smaller stores are great, but there are also plenty that seem to act like serving you is such a fucking inconvenience. Oh I’m sorry you have to get off your phone because I want to buy something. You have to make change from £10? Sorry it’s inconveniencing you that I have to bring fucking cash just because you want to dodge some tax by not taking cards.
Depends on the area. Where I live I’ve never had a package stolen, Amazon or otherwise.
Who the absolute hell is doing this? I’ve had very few packages stolen in my decades of experience. Maybe, 1 or 2 out of hundreds?..
Yeah this is such a strawman argument lol. There’s lots to hate about Amazon as a company, but to act like it’s actually an inconvenient service to use is fucking stupid. And Amazon didn’t put all the small businesses out of business, Target, Walmart, and friends had already done that. At this point it’s just Amazon vs the giant retail corps, and frankly I couldnt care less who wins that battle, except that I’d love to see the final outcome be mutual annihilation (not that that’s likely)
Same. And the thing with Amazon is most of the shit I buy on there, I can’t really buy local. Computer shit especially. Used to be, we had a Fry’s that was about 2 hours away. So, far enough that it required planning and usually would wait for the weekend, which usually meant amazon would be faster anyway.
edit: just to be clear, I wish that amazon didn’t have as much utility as it does because they’re a shit company, but I kinda feel like this is the norm with just about every corp these days.
Plus you just mark it as not delivered and they’ll send you another.
That s not very few imo. I ve had zero out of hundreds
I mean, I’ve been getting packages a long time. I am not saying it’s happened for sure… or hasn’t for sure. But if it did it wasn’t memorable
For me Amazon delivers to my doorstep, listens and acts on complaints if undelivered or product is faulty, arrange replacement for free, allow me to use stuffs for a month and then return no questions asked, and is way more cost effective.
Say whatever about their business practices, they beat local stores in every possible way and it’s not even close.
For me as a customer, local stores doesn’t make any possible sense.
Never had a package get stolen before, but if I ordered something expensive I have it sent to the Amazon locker about 5 min away. Last year I needed an ironing board, I went to Walmart, Target, Bed Bath and Beyond, and Roses. The only ironing board I found was at Bed Bath and Beyond for $120. I bought my ironing board on Amazon for $25 and it arrived the next day, also I didn’t have to pay shipping because of prime. I have prime, but I cut Netflix when I got it. Now I get my packages faster, with free shipping, and I get Prime Video.
Recently I bought a new foam mattress and they brought it to my house, unboxed it, put it on the bed frame, and took the old one away. This cost me $200 and I had free shipping with Prime.
Hate on Amazon all you want, there are plenty of reasons, but they’re doing the business better than big box stores which had already driven most small businesses out years ago.
Never had anything stolen. Guess living in a European village is nice after all.
I absolutely agree that local shops closing is a bad thing, but for a lot of niche goods companies like Amazon are a good thing. Delivery by one vehicle is far more efficient than everyone driving their own vehicle to whatever niche shop has your stuff. Don’t get me wrong, Amazon is 100% a big evil corporation with huge problems… but the fact that they deliver goods to your house is not the problem lol. Doubly so since you can designate a day for them to deliver and just be in on that day!
Niche shops are great, but fuck Amazon. The majority of what they sell is available directly from the companies that supply them.
To be fair, the delivery really is handy if you’re shopping for something niche enough that it isn’t sold locally, or if you don’t have a car and are trying to buy something not sold within walking distance/within easy access to transit if available, or which is too heavy to carry without a vehicle. There’s definitely a point here about local stores not being able to compete or with Amazon’s monopolistic business practices though. The ideal thing I suppose would be some sort of website that local stores could sign up with to let people order stuff from to be delivered by the store or by a service the store uses, run as a non-profiting venture just at breakeven to avoid a motive to exploit stores that use it and have less individual power, combined with some kind of law against averaging shipping costs into the base costs of products and making shipping seem free, so as to ensure that local items are generally cheaper due to less needed transportation. In such a scenario, the central online shopping area wouldn’t end up as a competitor to smaller local stores since it wouldn’t actually sell anything itself, customers would be encouraged to buy items that take less transportation and thus fewer carbon emissions, and the convenience of having an online space in which almost everything for sale can be found and delivered can be preserved.
Such a system could very much exist in a decentralized manner with blockchain, it’s just a matter of time until somebody builds it. All stores could have constant visibility into the shipping/logistics network capacity, lead times, etc and list their items with those prices baked in. Importantly, a single party like Amazon can’t dominate the market. Importantly the entire system could be administered by the participants in that system (stores and consumers) instead of some third-party siphoning off value from the interactions between the two (rent-seeking leads to enshittification).
Examples of things you could do:
- You could get a discount for choosing a slower shipping option that only used “un-booked” capacity in the shipping chain.
- Different couriers could compete for different parts of the shipping/logistics network (so you could have a package routed via DHL internationally and have last-mile delivery completed by a local bike messenger company). Consumers could have some choice in how routing for their packages was done, and eco-friendly routing methods could be incentivized by however the system is administered.
- You could actually trust product reviews to be honest since there’s a built-in reputation system and you don’t have the same incentives Amazon has to allow fake products and fake reviews to proliferate.
- Because you, as a consumer, can get insight into the whole supply chain, you can make more educated choices about the environmental/social/etc impacts of the products you buy. A whole ecosystem of apps would exist to help assign ratings to products and you could pick which one you liked.
The problem in this scenario is that the biggest player will still have an opportunity to dominate. Proof of work blockchain? Well, Amazon just has to outspend all the others—which they can handily do, or run computation on AWS. Similar with staking, except worse because more money = more direct influence.
Our local stores, as discussed in other comments, can’t even offer shipping or workable websites. And we expect them to self administer part of that blockchain? They are just going to pay Amazon to do it.
And big data companies like Amazon would love to peer into the blockchain and see the throughput for each of these competitors and discover patterns. Edit: and they already do that for vendors selling on Amazon, which is where all these Amazon-branded products come from.
That’s probably the biggest turn off to the MBA-types; it would require sharing information, even if obfuscated.
The problem in this scenario is that the biggest player will still have an opportunity to dominate. Proof of work blockchain? Well, Amazon just has to outspend all the others—which they can handily do, or run computation on AWS. Similar with staking, except worse because more money = more direct influence.
Not necessarily, it greatly depends on the incentives the system is setup with and how distribution of the token supply goes. And if you use PoW, PoS, DAG, or other systems. If what you are saying were true, Bitcoin mining for example would be entirely dominated by Amazon or some other major player, but that’s not the case. It’s a lot more complicated than just more money = dominance of the system. With Blockchain, we can have the participants in the system vote on how the system is administered in a more democratic and transparent way than amazon reviews or central banks or name your existing structure. It’s just a matter of how it’s all setup from the jump and how those incentives shape behavior in that system. Just like capitalism’s starting parameters and current legal environment (like concepts around the shareholder corporation) encourage the formation of monopolies, consolidation of power, and “externalizing” costs like destroying the environment to make 10c more per unit.
Our local stores, as discussed in other comments, can’t even offer shipping or workable websites. And we expect them to self administer part of that blockchain? They are just going to pay Amazon to do it.
One benefit of Amazon, eBay, etc is that companies producing goods no longer have to administer their own website, storage, or logistics chain. Amazon has resulted in massive efficiency gains both economically and environmentally (depending on where you draw the box of course) for these kinds of businesses. I don’t expect small companies to be developing the blockchain, just using it as a turnkey system like they currently use Amazon, Facebook, and other tools in their tech stack. They would however be able to vote on governance decisions like for example what fees exist in what categories or what rules shipping suppliers would have to abide by or how much to incentivize greener shipping methods etc. Consumers could also vote. It all depends on how you structure the system.
And big data companies like Amazon would love to peer into the blockchain and see the throughput for each of these competitors and discover patterns. Edit: and they already do that for vendors selling on Amazon, which is where all these Amazon-branded products come from.
Ok sure. This evens the playing field by giving all parties access to this information instead of it being monopolized by Amazon et al. One of the great ineffiencies of capitalism is the siloing if information. Company A needs to compete with Company B which needs to Compete with company C yet none of them know what the others is doing or how the market is responding. And really the only way to test some of this information is to bring a product to market and potentially waste millions of dollars and countless environmental resources building a product there is no demand for or which there would be demand for if Company B hadn’t also come out with a very similar bug slightly better product at the same time. You could also add some privacy and obfuscation layers, for example, I don’t think consumers want everybody on the blockchain knowing what brand of sex toy they prefer.
I mean this buisness model is a dream for introverts
I mean, I take advantage of everything Prime offers. Movies, discounts, games, books, all of it, so I definitely get back more than the cost. I’ve also got a locker within walking distance of my house, and Walmart already did in all my local businesses, so I’m not worried about hurting their bottom line.
I used to go to a local book store, until they stopped stocking any new science fiction. Then they went out of business and I was forced to buy books at Amazon as there was no other book store to go to.
USPS has lost a dozen or so of my checks and packages but I have never had any of the hundreds of packages delivered stolen.
