Submitted 23 hours ago by Bruncvik@lemmy.world to mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/293024b9-2238-455d-8be1-5c2ef96533c1.jpeg
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 honestly haven’t bought anything from Amazon for a long time. Sure, other online retailers are shit, too, but at least this year most of them like Walmart have been funding the DNC as a result of the tariffs. Amazon is funneling fat stacks into 45’s pockets, doubling down on fascism.
You can also shoplift at walmart.
If you’re in canada just go on the shop app. Forget this Amazon bullshit. Buy local.
Shopify is American
Amazon’s product search is intentionally bad
Why?
Because they’re big enough to get away with it.
Two reasons:
It promotes excessively tagging products with keywords
and
It allows them to seamlessly sort their own promoted products in the top results and actually be considered
I always love the nonsensical order of letters that these companies use.
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.
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 that towards the more expensive brand with a higher profit margin.
My favourite of these comany names is still BOIFUN who obviously sell DVD players, baby monitors and door bells.
The one that really stuck with me was COCKFAIS
CTIRCHIU is definitely the most premium brand judging by that price, truly a name you can trust
I’m pretty sure CTIRCHIU is a Lovecraftian monster.
Hoement sounds like a word, at least. A… Hoe moment?
I don’t care what the Hoe meant, she’s still a hoe.
I was thinking it was a movement for sex worker rights, or something
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:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UrqlMfwUC4&t=192
I also like how sarcastic this person sounds (at least to me) during their sponsor segment.
This shit frustrates me to no end. These days I just look on Aliexpress first, just so I’m aware what the usual drop shipping item actually goes for.
It’s very annoying that platforms like Amazon tolerate this. Because it’s actively driving me away from them. I want to see good quality items, not the same Aliexpress shit priced ten times higher. But I can’t FIND the good stuff because the platform is literally full of garbage.
That’s what’s driving you away from Amazon?!!
Take a step back for a second. They’re complaining about Amazon, and you’re response is “that’s the wrong complaint”.
People have no morals. Most people only care about the cheapest price, and after that getting the best item for the cheapest price
It’s missing the random “Amazon’s Choice” badge on one of the 20 identical choices 🤣
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.
Local appliance dealers likely also have a dude who in a pinch can just carry most appliances where they need to go.
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
Some stuff is more, most is less, at least in my town.
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.
The internet was so good in 08. You searched for stuff, found exactly what you needed, and were done.
Poor kids today will never know anything other than ad ridden bot corponet.
I forget the exact proposed bill, it might have been SOPA (or something else threatening net neutrality), and it might have been around 2010. That made me think “they want to make the internet into cable TV”. And we’re pretty close to that being reality in a way.
The internet was so good in 08. You searched for stuff, found exactly what you needed, and were done.
Shit was bad in 2008, too. The degree to which drop shippers had consolidated down to one mega-wholesaler rather than a dozen crappy fly-by-nights hadn’t happened yet. You got a dozen different flavors of crap rather than just one. But it was still crap.
Poor kids today will never know anything other than ad ridden bot corponet.
Under an Amazon keyword search, sure. You can still find good quality products outside of Amazon. You can even find it inside Amazon if you know what you’re looking for.
The difference between 2008 and 2025 is primarily that Amazon’s degraded to the state of Yahoo or Sears.
In 2008 you could do a web search and have relevant real results right on the first page. Maybe an ad or two.
Now it is effectively:
You think normal people today go outside the 5 walled garden corpo sites?
They dont.
They are terrified of an html website. I dont have tech friends irl, so trust me. The real internet, the original non corpo net, is only for ultra nerds now.
If you seriously think the internet is better now than 08 ish, well I dont agree.
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.
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.
How do they drop ship from China in 2 days?
Because Amazon pushes sellers to use Amazon warehouses and shipping their product in advance
Not everything on Amazon ships in two days. In the picture, the dates vary quite a bit.
Easy, they don’t.
One of the many reasons I canceled my prime subscription is a lot of stuff was not coming in 2 days.
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’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 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!
Man it’s fallen off a cliff. Many years ago I bought a knockoff Chinese messenger bag from Amazon. It’s fantastic, great materials, good quality zipper, it’s he up to daily use for years and looks even better than when I got it (leather developed a nice patina).
So, I needed another bag, went looking for the same brand as mine. No longer there, but there are 75 identical looking but weirdly named brands instead. I found one that looked as similar as I could to my old bag, and this one is an utter piece of shit. I mean, I’ll use it, it’s a duffle bag so not as much use as the messenger bag, but the difference is stark. Stiff, cheap cloth, leather sure, but probably harvested entirely from cow buttholes, zippers look brass, but one zip and the color wore off…
Everything, even purchased goods have nshittified. Everything looks cool but just absolutely sucks.
I wonder what enables this business model to survive? 🤔
People being afraid of AliExpress
A market of lemons
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.
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.
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.
Do Amazon companies count in Scrabble?
So I just got a steam deck… A little birthday present to myself.
My local microcenter sells nothing for it… Neither does best buy. And if best buy did I wouldn’t over pay anyway at that failing store.
So… Amazon it is. 40 bucks and two days later I have a silicone case, anti glare screen protector and a cheapo dock.
I didn’t want to get all that shit off amazon… It was just the most convenient place and in my case the only place.
If anything amazon needs to crack down on these bs Chinese sellers.
I haven’t bought anything at Amazon for like 6 or 7 years now. Alternatives always exist, but you have to look for them. So many people act like there is no option but to submit to Jeff
They have a near monopoly on certain goods. I built my home gym using Amazon 2 years ago. I couldn’t find most of the stuff anywhere else for anywhere near the same prices.
Things have changed. I don’t use Amazon anymore. Out of curiosity I checked some prices on my gym equipment and a lot of it is 50+% more now. The squat rack I have is almost double the price.
Prices elsewhere haven’t gone down. It is still probably cheaper to buy the double the price squat rack from Amazon. But I’m done, Amazon is full evil.
Yeah I had the same thing happen with a smartwatch. I want a new band made of fabric instead of the silicone rubber or whatever it is. It is extremely frustrating to find one anywhere but Amazon. I don’t use Amazon anymore, so I guess I’m getting my random Chinese products from ebay now. Not sure if that’s any better.
Sometimes Amazon has the stupid low priced widget that I need, at a lower price than anywhere else, with next day delivery…
Like… Fuck…
They have a most favored nation policy, meaning that people who sell on their platform can’t have a lower price anywhere else than what they have on their platform.
Are you looking for something which can actually take a beating? I have bought like four of these cheaper bags on Amazon and they all fall apart in a year or two. And before then they all have shitty strap adjustments which slowly slip over time.
I’d strongly suggest getting something like a chrome or timbuk2 bag which will be like 5x more expensive up front but will actually last decades instead of years. I have been dailying the OG chrome citizen messenger bag for five years now and it’s barely broken in.
“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.”
GNU Terry Pratchett
Timbuk2 isn’t as good as they used to be. If you can find a used one it’s worth it, I’ve had mine for like twenty years, but I wouldn’t gamble on one made in the last five years. (They closed all their physical stores and cut costs on manufacturing by moving offshore)
I agree. I have several timbuk2 bags and the only one with significant damage is the pet carrier that my cat clawed the shit out of. The company repaired it for like $10 to cover the shipping
More and more I’m finding things I want either aren’t on amazon or are buried under so many inferior products that they are hard to find. Earlier I was looking for geek themed ugly Christmas sweaters, and the ones on the first few pages of amazon results were absolute garbage. Found several viable suppliers elsewhere in no time.
Maybe people will stop using Amazon?
Nahhhh
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.
Shop local if you can, avoid Amazon.
Once again capitalism has bred all sorts of innovation in the space!
Just choose the one from the brand you trust most!
Don’t use Temu, lol. Good ol’ AliExpress has proven it’s quality over a long period of time. Also, there are many trusted stores that were proven to be of high-quality. Just Google some reddit posts asking for the good ones.
What’s Amazon
It’s like ebay in 2001.
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.
Freedom To Choose
just went through this myself
needed a gooseneck phone mount for tomorrow morning. nothing local has something suitable, so damnit amazon it is
oh look, it’s dozens of the same product, using the exact same photo often even, from random shit brands
I’ve been doing pretty good at avoiding amazon for the past year or two, but every two or three months there’s something that I just can’t get somewhere else on the timeline I need or at a reasonable price
Apologies for the YouTube link but Cory Doctorow explains this phenomenon really well: youtube.com/shorts/vrgtV_yxxn4
harcesz@szmer.info 2 hours ago
Just in case anyone actually intends to buy one, buy european: blahol.com