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I don't care if people sell clean, safe, reasonable things that are gleaned from a dumpster. That's waste reduction and a net good. What I hate are all the lo

I don't care if people sell clean, safe, reasonable things that are gleaned from a dumpster. That's waste reduction and a net good. What I hate are all the low quality and fraudulent items on Amazon (It's not quite as bad as Ali Express, yet--Ali Express also happens to sell everything ever conceived and people generally accept that a certain portion of things are counterfeit, Amazon pretends to enforce quality.) This is the opening that Sears should have been waiting for. They used to provide the service of selling a curated selection of pretty much anything you would need. Back in the day they had 3 of everything, you needed a widget, you could go to Sears by buy the "good", "better", or "best" version of that thing at a competitive price. Sears, if it were managed worth a damn, could do that. They still have stores all over the place to serve as distributed warehouses, show-rooms and customer service centers. Maybe Target will figure this out. I don't think Amazon will. The closest Amazon has come to addressing this is making their own house brand (a la Kenmore). Which is fine, I guess, if you don't have congress calling you a monopoly. If anything is going to bring Amazon down a peg, it is going to be the ingenuity of fraudulent sellers outstripping the ingenuity of their anti-fraud systems and policies.

asdf21 7y ago
This seems so easy to me to fix... just have a decently-sized QA department and add in reputation score variations for sellers... if a seller gets caught selling anything counterfeit, their reputation takes a huge hit for 6 months or so and they barely show up on search results. Trusted sellers would be folks who have managed to go several years without this happening.. I swear I could implement a whole solution for around ~$2M + $1M a year for ongoing QA staff / call center employees... basically nothing for a retailer the size of Amazon. It makes me think they've done the CBA on it and somehow determined they would rather have all retailers selling on Amazon for some reason, even the shady ones, despite some damage to their reputation. I don't understand why though.
- briefcomment 7y ago
  Who has the last word on if something is fake?
  - egdod 7y ago
    Facebook.
    - kill_nate_kill 7y ago
      Brr-rr-rr-rr-rap!
  - asdf21 7y ago
    Your decently-sized QA department would investigate, case-by-case. Some examples would probably be controversial and you'd need to escalate to a higher tier of analysis.
    - dkonofalski 7y ago
      The issue here is that, like YouTube, it's so simple to create a new account that you'd just be chasing an endless stream of nothingness. I mean, just look at Amazon's review system. That's a system that they actually do investigate and have a department for and yet there are hundreds of thousands of sellers that have fake reviews and paid reviews for lots of different products and brands.
    - DrScump 7y ago
      Your decently-sized QA department would investigate, case-by-case This describes The Real Real's business model perfectly... but turns out a lot of their "curated" stuff... wasn't. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21477730 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21477730
      - asdf21 7y ago
        Wow, very cool. That's a $1.6B company I've never even heard of. The stock hasn't gone down at all since that article was published either. They must be doing something right..
- TurkishPoptart 7y ago
  Your CBA might be accurate. If that's the case, they're digging their own coffin. Maybe Bezos should dump .com and go all in on AWS.
  - DrScump 7y ago
    go all in on AWS Amazon Waste Services?
- headcanon 7y ago
  seller reputation wouldn't be a terrible idea, but the devil is in the details. Items certainly have their own quality, but people's opinions are fickle. Who gets to say what is counterfeit, unless you have a trusted authenticator looking at every item? If someone is unhappy with an item it could be for any number of reasons, and no seller is perfect, even ones with good intentions and operations. So from amazon's perspective, they have to spend a ton of time, effort, and money to risk alienating their sellers. So I think you're right - they've thought about it and decided that the risks were not worth the gains.
  - asdf21 7y ago
    >but people's opinions are fickle. Who gets to say what is counterfeit, unless you have a trusted authenticator looking at every item? Correct, that's what I mean by a decently-sized QA department. I would never base the score directly on end-users opinions, although the opinions of end-users could certainly be used to initiate the verification process: Customers say something is fake --> raises ticket to QA department --> a few automatic orders are placed to different "fake" addresses over a period of weeks and months --> these delivered items are authenticated --> Reputation score modified --> customers are followed up with by the call center agents.
izzydata 7y ago
Walmart seems like a possible competitor.
tracker1 7y ago
Walmart seems to be heading in that direction... though I do hope they keep the reigns in on third party sellers. On Amazon, I generally only buy if it's sold by Amazon, I could still get a counterfeit or bad item, but at least it's easy enough to return... third party sellers, it's a crap-shoot.
solotronics 7y ago
Ok, how do you know if something is clean, safe, and resonable if it comes out of a dumpster? A kids toy could have biohazard material on it, that is disgusting.
- astrodust 7y ago
  It could have that coming out of the factory. How would you know? Do you personally conduct inspections? Not every dumpster is filled with expired vegetables or used heroin needles. Some are just full of discarded products.
  - wavefunction 7y ago
    Presumably the factory's reputation would suffer, their manufacturing dries up and folds. Any consequences from a one-off sale by a third party are borne by the official source and Amazon. Which is the confusing part for me: why does Amazon not care about their reputation hit from enabling fraudulent third parties?
    - buckminster 7y ago
      Third parties have been selling junk (figuratively and literally) on Amazon for years. Yet people still buy it in vast quantities. Why would Amazon change?
  - uoaei 7y ago
    > Do you personally conduct inspections? What a dishonest argument. Pointlessly contrarian. The whole point of having vetted suppliers is that they've been vetted, so that their output's QA is authorized by a regulatory body. Sure it's possible to sneak past that but it's very hard to do so. Dumpsters don't have QA. Amazon is performing a negligible vetting process in a race to the bottom.
    - yellowapple 7y ago
      > Amazon is performing a negligible vetting process in a race to the bottom. I suspect this is exactly astrodust's point. Amazon ain't doing any meaningful vetting, so unless you're doing your own inspections, you have effectively zero reliable way to know whether or not your brand-new toy is going to give your child radiation sickness. Nothing dishonest about that argument at all.
nickpsecurity 7y ago
That's one of the things Costco does. They should've already capitalized on it with online ordering. Another really cool company that does "best of" and unique items is Hammacher Schlemmer: https://www.hammacher.com/home https://www.hammacher.com/home
- lotsofpulp 7y ago
  You can order online at costco.com.
  - kec 7y ago
    As far as I can tell, Costco.com doesn’t give you the same price as in warehouse, even if you’re a member.
    - lotsofpulp 7y ago
      Why would they have an obligation to provide the same price?
      - thiagomgd 7y ago
        It's the same store/chain?
        lotsofpulp 7y ago
        What does that imply? What if it costs more to ship items than to sell them in their stores? You expect people who shop in stores to subsidize those who shop online? Much of Costco’s value proposition is they don’t waste time with packaging and so everything is designed to be taken off the pallet by the customer. If they now have to package and ship bulky items, it’s plausible it costs more to do that. Or maybe they’re just price discriminating. Either way, they have no obligation to provide the same prices online and offline, or even between their stores in HCOL vs LCOL areas.
tjr 7y ago
I don't care if people sell clean, safe, reasonable things that are gleaned from a dumpster. That's waste reduction and a net good. Years ago, I lived in a city that decided to offer a "garbage collection amnesty week". For one week (with your regular pickup day, Monday-Friday), you could put out as much garbage as you wanted at the curb, and it would be collected for no extra charge. The city apparently vastly underestimated how much garbage was going to go out. It was not all collected that week. There was junk sitting out on the curb, all over the city, for 1-2 months. There were also people driving around, searching for cool stuff. For example, one of my items out on the curb was an old bird cage. One morning, the bird cage was gone, and there was someone else's old doll house in its place. A friend of mine found a complete metal suit of armor; not really functional, but a nice decorative piece. There can definitely be value left in someone else's trash. But if ordering on Amazon, as a paying customer, I would at least want to know up front if I'm buying something that came out of the trash, and make my own decision on if I wanted to buy it or not.
- qorrect 7y ago
  > A friend of mine found a complete metal suit of armor; not really functional ... so you fired arrows at it from a longbow ? And he got injured, then had to explain at the hospital why his friend shot him with an antique weapon ? S'pretty great.
- notme77 7y ago
  Boston has "Allston Christmas" on Sept 1st each year. Tons of people move. There's lots of nifty stuff on the sidewalks waiting to be discovered.
  - james-skemp 7y ago
    Madison WI has this around that time from when college students move. I feel like that might be a University-town thing.
    - logfromblammo 7y ago
      If you live in a university town, find out which dorms the international students live in, and locate the nearest trash bins. At the end of spring semester, during finals week, check in and around those bins daily. The graduating international students who are returning to their home countries frequently discard things that they bought locally, as it may be too expensive to ship larger items in either direction. Those who will be returning in the fall might put their dorm stuff into storage, or they might just toss it, and re-buy if/when they return. The cheaper it is to ship, store, or sell, the lower the quality of the items discarded. That's why you focus on those who will be flying home.
tdurden 7y ago
So you are not happy with the low quality and fraudulent items, but you are OK with items literally pulled out of a dumpster? I personally don't really want either.
SubiculumCode 7y ago
That is Costco's game, and I play it with them every year.
_-david-_ 7y ago
I think Wal-Mart is doing it. They allow 3rd party sellers but it says if it is sold by the third party or by Wal-Mart. As far as I know everything that says Wal-Mart is the same as they sell in their stores.
jdkee 7y ago
The sad story of Sears is unfortunately the story of private equity stripping away all value and quality until nothing but a husk remains.
jmspring 7y ago
Back in the preinternet days, a catalog company called Service Merchandise had a business model similar to this. Catalog company with retail stores that had a subset of the popular items.
- mcgrath_sh 7y ago
  I used to love to go to Service Merchandise as a kid and watch the boxes/items come out on the belt/wheels. I was oddly fascinated by it and excitedly waited for whatever Mum/Nana bought.
  - geerlingguy 7y ago
    I also remember they had a really fun audio room with boom boxes and very nice stereo systems, along with keyboards and the like. Lots of fun while others were out shopping!
- seltzered_ 7y ago
  If I remember correctly there was a "Scratch & Dent" section in those stores.
- DrScump 7y ago
  There were also Best Products and Consumers Distributing with similar business models ("catalog showrooms"). We had all three in SV.
joyjoyjoy 7y ago
"I don't care if people sell clean, safe, reasonable things that are gleaned from a dumpster. That's waste reduction and a net good." I could agree with that but I am worried about foot items. Do you know why a Pharmacy NEVER takes back any medicine for resale? Too much risk that the product has been tampered with. The same is true for food items.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
caro_douglos 7y ago
If only sears didn’t charge 3rd party merchants way more than amazon to list items. RIP
OrgNet 7y ago
The worst thing about amazon is that it doesn't charge everyone the same price
OrgNet 7y ago
The worst thing about amazon is that it doesn't charge everyone the same price... someone connected on my home network was able to pay 15% less then me and I try to block tracking
jader201 7y ago
> The closest Amazon has come to addressing this is making their own house brand People are starting to figure out how to even post counterfeit “AmazonBasics” items — at least, this item [1] that I came across recently seems very suspicious. So even those can’t be trusted anymore. Edit: maybe this isn’t counterfeit, but the fact that I’m not confident says a lot. [1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07Q2PGH2T https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07Q2PGH2T

asdf21 7y ago

This seems so easy to me to fix... just have a decently-sized QA department and add in reputation score variations for sellers... if a seller gets caught selling anything counterfeit, their reputation takes a huge hit for 6 months or so and they barely show up on search results. Trusted sellers would be folks who have managed to go several years without this happening.. I swear I could implement a whole solution for around ~$2M + $1M a year for ongoing QA staff / call center employees... basically nothing for a retailer the size of Amazon. It makes me think they've done the CBA on it and somehow determined they would rather have all retailers selling on Amazon for some reason, even the shady ones, despite some damage to their reputation. I don't understand why though.

briefcomment 7y ago
Who has the last word on if something is fake?
- egdod 7y ago
  Facebook.
  - kill_nate_kill 7y ago
    Brr-rr-rr-rr-rap!
- asdf21 7y ago
  Your decently-sized QA department would investigate, case-by-case. Some examples would probably be controversial and you'd need to escalate to a higher tier of analysis.
  - dkonofalski 7y ago
    The issue here is that, like YouTube, it's so simple to create a new account that you'd just be chasing an endless stream of nothingness. I mean, just look at Amazon's review system. That's a system that they actually do investigate and have a department for and yet there are hundreds of thousands of sellers that have fake reviews and paid reviews for lots of different products and brands.
  - DrScump 7y ago
    Your decently-sized QA department would investigate, case-by-case This describes The Real Real's business model perfectly... but turns out a lot of their "curated" stuff... wasn't. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21477730 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21477730
    - asdf21 7y ago
      Wow, very cool. That's a $1.6B company I've never even heard of. The stock hasn't gone down at all since that article was published either. They must be doing something right..
TurkishPoptart 7y ago
Your CBA might be accurate. If that's the case, they're digging their own coffin. Maybe Bezos should dump .com and go all in on AWS.
- DrScump 7y ago
  go all in on AWS Amazon Waste Services?
headcanon 7y ago
seller reputation wouldn't be a terrible idea, but the devil is in the details. Items certainly have their own quality, but people's opinions are fickle. Who gets to say what is counterfeit, unless you have a trusted authenticator looking at every item? If someone is unhappy with an item it could be for any number of reasons, and no seller is perfect, even ones with good intentions and operations. So from amazon's perspective, they have to spend a ton of time, effort, and money to risk alienating their sellers. So I think you're right - they've thought about it and decided that the risks were not worth the gains.
- asdf21 7y ago
  >but people's opinions are fickle. Who gets to say what is counterfeit, unless you have a trusted authenticator looking at every item? Correct, that's what I mean by a decently-sized QA department. I would never base the score directly on end-users opinions, although the opinions of end-users could certainly be used to initiate the verification process: Customers say something is fake --> raises ticket to QA department --> a few automatic orders are placed to different "fake" addresses over a period of weeks and months --> these delivered items are authenticated --> Reputation score modified --> customers are followed up with by the call center agents.

izzydata 7y ago

Walmart seems like a possible competitor.

tracker1 7y ago

Walmart seems to be heading in that direction... though I do hope they keep the reigns in on third party sellers. On Amazon, I generally only buy if it's sold by Amazon, I could still get a counterfeit or bad item, but at least it's easy enough to return... third party sellers, it's a crap-shoot.

solotronics 7y ago

Ok, how do you know if something is clean, safe, and resonable if it comes out of a dumpster? A kids toy could have biohazard material on it, that is disgusting.

astrodust 7y ago
It could have that coming out of the factory. How would you know? Do you personally conduct inspections? Not every dumpster is filled with expired vegetables or used heroin needles. Some are just full of discarded products.
- wavefunction 7y ago
  Presumably the factory's reputation would suffer, their manufacturing dries up and folds. Any consequences from a one-off sale by a third party are borne by the official source and Amazon. Which is the confusing part for me: why does Amazon not care about their reputation hit from enabling fraudulent third parties?
  - buckminster 7y ago
    Third parties have been selling junk (figuratively and literally) on Amazon for years. Yet people still buy it in vast quantities. Why would Amazon change?
- uoaei 7y ago
  > Do you personally conduct inspections? What a dishonest argument. Pointlessly contrarian. The whole point of having vetted suppliers is that they've been vetted, so that their output's QA is authorized by a regulatory body. Sure it's possible to sneak past that but it's very hard to do so. Dumpsters don't have QA. Amazon is performing a negligible vetting process in a race to the bottom.
  - yellowapple 7y ago
    > Amazon is performing a negligible vetting process in a race to the bottom. I suspect this is exactly astrodust's point. Amazon ain't doing any meaningful vetting, so unless you're doing your own inspections, you have effectively zero reliable way to know whether or not your brand-new toy is going to give your child radiation sickness. Nothing dishonest about that argument at all.

nickpsecurity 7y ago

That's one of the things Costco does. They should've already capitalized on it with online ordering. Another really cool company that does "best of" and unique items is Hammacher Schlemmer: https://www.hammacher.com/home https://www.hammacher.com/home

lotsofpulp 7y ago
You can order online at costco.com.
- kec 7y ago
  As far as I can tell, Costco.com doesn’t give you the same price as in warehouse, even if you’re a member.
  - lotsofpulp 7y ago
    Why would they have an obligation to provide the same price?
    - thiagomgd 7y ago
      It's the same store/chain?
      - lotsofpulp 7y ago
        What does that imply? What if it costs more to ship items than to sell them in their stores? You expect people who shop in stores to subsidize those who shop online? Much of Costco’s value proposition is they don’t waste time with packaging and so everything is designed to be taken off the pallet by the customer. If they now have to package and ship bulky items, it’s plausible it costs more to do that. Or maybe they’re just price discriminating. Either way, they have no obligation to provide the same prices online and offline, or even between their stores in HCOL vs LCOL areas.

tjr 7y ago

I don't care if people sell clean, safe, reasonable things that are gleaned from a dumpster. That's waste reduction and a net good. Years ago, I lived in a city that decided to offer a "garbage collection amnesty week". For one week (with your regular pickup day, Monday-Friday), you could put out as much garbage as you wanted at the curb, and it would be collected for no extra charge. The city apparently vastly underestimated how much garbage was going to go out. It was not all collected that week. There was junk sitting out on the curb, all over the city, for 1-2 months. There were also people driving around, searching for cool stuff. For example, one of my items out on the curb was an old bird cage. One morning, the bird cage was gone, and there was someone else's old doll house in its place. A friend of mine found a complete metal suit of armor; not really functional, but a nice decorative piece. There can definitely be value left in someone else's trash. But if ordering on Amazon, as a paying customer, I would at least want to know up front if I'm buying something that came out of the trash, and make my own decision on if I wanted to buy it or not.

qorrect 7y ago
> A friend of mine found a complete metal suit of armor; not really functional ... so you fired arrows at it from a longbow ? And he got injured, then had to explain at the hospital why his friend shot him with an antique weapon ? S'pretty great.
notme77 7y ago
Boston has "Allston Christmas" on Sept 1st each year. Tons of people move. There's lots of nifty stuff on the sidewalks waiting to be discovered.
- james-skemp 7y ago
  Madison WI has this around that time from when college students move. I feel like that might be a University-town thing.
  - logfromblammo 7y ago
    If you live in a university town, find out which dorms the international students live in, and locate the nearest trash bins. At the end of spring semester, during finals week, check in and around those bins daily. The graduating international students who are returning to their home countries frequently discard things that they bought locally, as it may be too expensive to ship larger items in either direction. Those who will be returning in the fall might put their dorm stuff into storage, or they might just toss it, and re-buy if/when they return. The cheaper it is to ship, store, or sell, the lower the quality of the items discarded. That's why you focus on those who will be flying home.

tdurden 7y ago

So you are not happy with the low quality and fraudulent items, but you are OK with items literally pulled out of a dumpster? I personally don't really want either.

SubiculumCode 7y ago

That is Costco's game, and I play it with them every year.

_-david-_ 7y ago

I think Wal-Mart is doing it. They allow 3rd party sellers but it says if it is sold by the third party or by Wal-Mart. As far as I know everything that says Wal-Mart is the same as they sell in their stores.

jdkee 7y ago

The sad story of Sears is unfortunately the story of private equity stripping away all value and quality until nothing but a husk remains.

jmspring 7y ago

Back in the preinternet days, a catalog company called Service Merchandise had a business model similar to this. Catalog company with retail stores that had a subset of the popular items.

mcgrath_sh 7y ago
I used to love to go to Service Merchandise as a kid and watch the boxes/items come out on the belt/wheels. I was oddly fascinated by it and excitedly waited for whatever Mum/Nana bought.
- geerlingguy 7y ago
  I also remember they had a really fun audio room with boom boxes and very nice stereo systems, along with keyboards and the like. Lots of fun while others were out shopping!
seltzered_ 7y ago
If I remember correctly there was a "Scratch & Dent" section in those stores.
DrScump 7y ago
There were also Best Products and Consumers Distributing with similar business models ("catalog showrooms"). We had all three in SV.

joyjoyjoy 7y ago

"I don't care if people sell clean, safe, reasonable things that are gleaned from a dumpster. That's waste reduction and a net good." I could agree with that but I am worried about foot items. Do you know why a Pharmacy NEVER takes back any medicine for resale? Too much risk that the product has been tampered with. The same is true for food items.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

caro_douglos 7y ago

If only sears didn’t charge 3rd party merchants way more than amazon to list items. RIP

OrgNet 7y ago

The worst thing about amazon is that it doesn't charge everyone the same price

OrgNet 7y ago

The worst thing about amazon is that it doesn't charge everyone the same price... someone connected on my home network was able to pay 15% less then me and I try to block tracking

jader201 7y ago

> The closest Amazon has come to addressing this is making their own house brand People are starting to figure out how to even post counterfeit “AmazonBasics” items — at least, this item [1] that I came across recently seems very suspicious. So even those can’t be trusted anymore. Edit: maybe this isn’t counterfeit, but the fact that I’m not confident says a lot. [1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07Q2PGH2T https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07Q2PGH2T