Amazon hit a sweet spot of "good enough, so why bother looking elsewhere." If you wanted a widget, they'd have it, it would be roughly what you expected, at th

Amazon hit a sweet spot of "good enough, so why bother looking elsewhere." If you wanted a widget, they'd have it, it would be roughly what you expected, at the right price, shipped quickly. That's what got them where they were. Once you're committed to that philosophy, stuff like paying for Prime or using their automatic-services (Dash buttons before they were deprecated) is a feasible leap and encourages their stickiness. The moment you lose that perception, things fall apart rapidly. People go back to comparison shopping and I'm not convinced Amazon wins that battle. They lost "They'd have it" with terrible search and attempts to salvage a cross-sell out of anything. Their search might still be able to work for "I want a FooCorp model 37ABC34567 television" but a simple browsing-focused request like "PCI-E 802.11ac cards" is going to be a nightmare of miscategorized items and terrible filters. They're losing "It would be roughly what you expected" with the combined-inventory scandal, but also the product line so broad that there's going to be room for inherently dodgy crap. Specialist retailers provide value in curation-- they won't sell the absolute worst junk that sneaks into essentially unpoliced AliExpress/eBay/Amazon listings. "At the right price" is surprisingly spotty. They often aren't the cheapest, and some items are locked behind a $120-per-annum paywall. They also put their pricing reputation on the line with third-party sellers on board-- for the last month, they'd have been happy to sell you a Ryzen 3900X, but at 50% over MSRP. Even now, they're still $60 over sticker. Retailers: It is not a sign of weakness to say you're out of stock, rather than hand off the sale to a bottom-feeder reseller who's treating their wares like Cabbage Patch Kids in 1982. "Shipped quickly" has become a joke. Maybe if you buy Prime it's different, but I never know what to expect for paid shipping. They'll quote a range 5-10 days from now, and sometimes it will take 1 day and sometimes the full 10. I hesitate to buy time-sensitive gifts with them and would fear to trust it for business-critical timing. You've built one of the most sophisticated logistics networks on Earth, cutting out USPS/UPS/etc. and you can't get me a more accurate delivery estimate than a mail-in offer from the back of a cereal box?