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I am happy the parts company is ditching Amazon, but its so much more important for us consumers to ditch amazon. I have cut my amazon purchases down to only 16

I am happy the parts company is ditching Amazon, but its so much more important for us consumers to ditch amazon. I have cut my amazon purchases down to only 16 total items this year so far ( down from ~50 in 2020 ) and I am now only ordering from Amazon as a last option when I cant find what I want anywhere else. That brief glimpse of the Amazon future where all stores are shut down, and we can only ever buy things online, and everyone is an amazon serf was such a wakeup call as to what we were heading towards. I just hope enough people can jump ship to keep a functioning non amazon centric supply chain.

Rapzid 5y ago
I like Amazon and online shopping; won't ditch any time soon and don't think it's important for people to do so. The local businesses I was worried about going under were restaurants and others in the food/service industry(would lump experience in there as well; the zoo, botanical garden, museums, and etc).
- jungturk 5y ago
  > don't think it's important for people to do so Is that because you don't believe in the negative externalities or because you think they're worth the convenience?
  - ozzythecat 5y ago
    The narrative I hear is that Amazon is destroying businesses. The issue I have is that this isn’t really true. Here’s an anecdote. I drive 20 minutes to the mall. After finding parking and getting into a shoe store, there’s no one really there to help me. Once they get around to me, they don’t have my size. And it’s also apparent the person working there has no interest in helping. Whether they have my size or whether I found what I was looking for is basically not their problem. So I drive at least 40 minutes round trip, plus the hassle of parking, finding the store in the mall, and waiting on someone to help me. Now my time is valuable. I lost my time. I paid for gas. I also put miles on my car. And depending on the day, I also had to deal with traffic. IMO businesses refuse to compete. If Amazon is doing it better than them, then hats off to Amazon. If a business is doing better than Amazon, then I’ll go with that business. IMO the “negative externalities” puts blame on Amazon while pretending like these other stores even try to compete. Btw this binary view of the world where Amazon is bad and others are good (or vice versa) seems to be a very American thing.
    - belval 5y ago
      I don't know about you but I am also not bound to Amazon, a few years ago some stores actually started putting some work into their website, offered free shipping on order over 50$, etc... and I went back almost naturally. These threads of Amazon-bashing always read like something out of parallel universe, I should go have a worse shopping experience because of some "greater" objective of opposing Amazon?
      - Spivak 5y ago
        For me the sticking point is returns. Amazon makes it so easy to return stuff when other companies make you pay for your own shipping back that I'm way more willing to take a risk on something when it's on Amazon.
        belval 5y ago
        That too! I once received the wrong item from Hudson's Bay (Canadian everything store, think Sears) and not only had to physically go back to the store to get a refund because they wanted 8$ in shipping to let me send it back, they would not reimburse the shipping cost even after admitting that it was 100% their fault that they sent me the wrong item. I don't want a future dominated by mega-corp with 99% market share but traditional retail need to get their shit together at some point.
    - wiether 5y ago
      > Btw this binary view of the world where Amazon is bad and others are good (or vice versa) seems to be a very American thing. It's not. In France it's the same thing. But the "Amazon is bad" is not really about destroying businesses (since it was done decades ago by malls, now cities are just banks, insurances and clothing crapshops like Zara) but about the fact that they are not paying taxes and they provide awful work conditions to people. So you tend to be considered as someone who doesn't care if you buy at Amazon. (But we're still waiting for proof that companies trying to compete with Amazon don't act the same way).
      - 5y ago
  - Rapzid 5y ago
    It depends on the negative externalities. I will specifically address destroying jobs though. In general, there is no standing in the way of progress that improves efficiency and gives consumers what they want. Interestingly, there seems to be an overlap between the crowd that says we need to hold business accountable for packaging waste and those who believe if they virtue signal hard enough Amazon will disappear and everyone will flock back to inconvenient, higher priced shopping.. Going against the general consumer demand grain typically ends up niche. But I digress. Amazon(and other online retailers) are destroying lots of low skill jobs, but that's true for most major gains in the efficiency of producing a product. Usually this is associated with automation, but this shift touches many aspects of the logistics providing a shopping experience to consumers. This is a good thing to me as it will ultimately increase our GDP and standard of living. Resources, particular labor, are freed up to work on other stuff. Over 600k small businesses are created every year. There are millions more small business than there were a decade ago. These efficiency gains create a TON of potential. I think that's good, so what of the net negative in raw job numbers? People without jobs. Well, weren't we at "full employment" pre-pandemic? In any case, I'm a big fan of tackling that with job re-training. We do a really poor job of that in the USA compared to other countries. But there are a number of solutions to different negative externalities that aren't swimming upstream against consumer trends. Unionization failed but it could happen. That could help address some of the workplace issues. The government can trust bust. I don't view this as a binary choice. Different people seem to have different pet grievances with Amazon. Some of them I agree with, some I don't(like Amazon doesn't pay taxes, which is a sound bite to me; ya basic), but generally I believe boycotting Amazon(and other online retailers) isn't really going to affect real change.
- dkhenry 5y ago
  And I believe its exploitive of everyone in the supply chain, from manufacturers to delivery drivers, and has led to the vast centralization of an overwhelmingly large portion of our economy into the hands of corporation with no accountability. Furthermore I am very convinced it makes the lives of everyone, except the tiny minority that are actively exploiting everyone else, much worse. Good jobs are lost, supply chains are made fragile, and monopolistic tendencies are encouraged. I would rather the inconvenience of shopping around than encourage a world with a private entity as the sole source of all consumer goods.
  - cortesoft 5y ago
    Yeah, but we are never going to stop that behavior by individuals choosing not to shop at Amazon. As an individual, my only two choices are to shop at Amazon and get the benefits and Amazon still exists, or don’t shop there and don’t get the benefits and Amazon still exists. Amazon is not going to care if they lose my business. The only person who suffers is me. If we think Amazon business practices are immoral, we need to make them illegal.
    - methodin 5y ago
      And therein lies the main problem with that line of thinking in today's political landscape - when politicians are effectively funded by the large companies that have seemingly unlimited money and power, that will never happen, so where exactly will this new law come from?
    - dkhenry 5y ago
      I believe thats exactly how we stop that, by choosing not to shop at Amazon. The government is ( theoretically ) an expression of the will of the people, if the will of the people is to exploit others for their own benefit, the government will reflect that. Until we individually decide that our neighbors are important enough to us that we are willing to suffer a little inconvenience nothing will change, but if we are willing to individually suffer a little inconvenience we absolutely can effect any company even one as big as Amazon.
iso1210 5y ago
In the UK we had shops that sold everything -- Argos has done catalogue shopping for decades. Sainsburys, a major supermarket, owns them, and does delivery. Amazon makes it trivial to buy pretty much anything I want and get it the next day. Sainsburys sells the same stuff between themselves and argos, yet they failed miserably at competing. They could have worked with companies like royal mail and leverage their logistics expertise to compete, but they failed miserably to even realise why I shop at amazon. I'm not some 1970s afficiando going out to a high street to buy something in person, it's very unlikely I need something right then and can't wait for 24 hours for someone to bring it to me. I have better things to do with my time.
- dkhenry 5y ago
  It's not the mega conglomerates they are putting out of business. It's the bike stores, the hobby shops, the clothing boutiques. In the US with the purchase of Whole Foods, they are also moving more into groceries and everything else. After experiencing not being able at all to go to a high street and buy things and forcing everything to be online, I realized just how bad the experience is, and decided if I had to choose between the two I would choose the physical experience. Once you do that you start to realize just how much of the consumer goods world Amazon has already put out of business. I live in silicon valley and there is no where I can go for electronics any more. My last amazon purchase was getting some 2.5A fuses because every store that would sell them locally has closed ( either before the pandemic, or because of it ). I tried to buy a video card, and the local computer equipment retailer literally couldn't get allocated any stock from the manufacturers, somehow Amazon managed to get first dibs on supply. I don't like that world, and I don't want to live in it.
  - wyre 5y ago
    An auto parts store or Ace Hardware should stock fuses.
    - dkhenry 5y ago
      They should, but they weren't auto fuses, and Ace Hardware didn't sell them either. They were really small and specific to small electronics ( in this case a Honeywell desk fan that had a fuse in the plug ) Fry's would have had them, but Fry's is no more, and there isn't any other store like that anymore.
quadrifoliate 5y ago
> I am happy the parts company is ditching Amazon, but its so much more important for us consumers to ditch amazon. Conversely, maybe it's important for both big and small businesses to realize that investing in your online presence and building out a high-quality local delivery network is much more important than the high-rent place on Main Street? A lot of the reasons I buy on Amazon are that it offers a much more pleasant experience. In fact, if you go to the manufacturers' sites for a lot of the products Amazon sells, they have a slow checkout process, scammy discount codes and email signup incentives, and generally optimize for consumer lock-in rather than getting the product to the consumer quickly. Imagine Google if it had popped up a discount code for "Get 200 searches at 15% off!" every time you searched for something, and think of how successful they would be if they did that. As for a lot of small-time local shops I know, they seem to place an unduly high value on prime real estate, and their websites are at the level of “My nephew says he knows Dreamweaver”. In summary, I am not super surprised they are being beaten out by Amazon, and it is unclear to me as to why I should subsidize their bad web design and reluctance to invest in building a consumer-friendly online experience.
- dkhenry 5y ago
  Thankfully you are not the only person to realize this and a multi-billion dollar industry sprung up to help independent retailers compete. A Shopify website has a customer experience similar to Amazon. The real issue is Amazon has so much market capture that most people don't even look for independent retailers. In fact even suggesting that you can go other places online gets a bunch of push back from people insisting that nothing can compete, and that somehow it's moral to ignore all externalities in the name of pure market efficiency.
  - quadrifoliate 5y ago
    Maybe I am looking in the wrong places, but precisely zero of my local retailers have anything that looks like a Shopify storefront. And it's about the tools (Shopify is a great one), but also about the attitude. Amazon has the attitude of “get the thing to the customer, immediately”. Most of the other places have an attitude of “we want to build a long-lasting relationship with you, the consumer”. Hence they ignore fast deliveries and push coupons and loyalty programs and crowded stores. Ironically, this leads to a place where the only long-lasting relationship the customer ends up having is with Amazon, which is a pretty shitty company. > somehow it's moral to ignore all externalities in the name of pure market efficiency I am not saying that, or I don't think I am anyway. I think the retailers are not taking the externality of reduced attention span in a serious way like Google or Amazon. The technology totally exists for a local retailer to get my location, and deliver a product to me with 3 clicks in under an hour. And yet, apart from food delivery startups (that are not local, and simulate such an experience via a layer), few actual goods retailers (say, my local hardware store) have invested in building such an experience. I can't recall any of them having the courage to at least test out a pilot program with such an experience. Either way, I do try to support my local retailers as much as I can; and my usage of Amazon has seen a slow but steady drop-off over the last 3 years. But that's mainly due to the fact that Amazon makes
r00fus 5y ago
My wakeup moment was when I realized that Fulfill by Amazon + co-mingling means you had no idea what you got - whether it was a return, fake product of random Chinese dropship, or random other item (miscategorized). At that point, you might as well buy from Aliexpress and cut out the middleman (for stuff you want from China). Or drastically cut down purchases (which is what I chose).
- bootlooped 5y ago
  As somebody who has purchased a lot of things from both Ali Express, there is a massive difference between Ali Express and Amazon. To me, Ali Express is great for simple items that are practically fungible commodities, where workmanship and build quality aren't that impactful, and you can afford to wait a long time for it to arrive, and you can afford to receive some nontrivial percentages of those things and they turn out to be substandard or broken or substantially different than what was pictured. No matter the co-mingling issue, the same cannot be said of Amazon.
  - incongruity 5y ago
    Amazon is turning into the fast shipping version of Ali Express. More and more fake / manipulated reviews and a sea of pseudo-English garbled brand names slapped on what looks like identical goods are making it exactly the experience you described, just shipped quicker. Ordering from Amazon is now a definite risk, and commingling is only a small part of that.
    - Spivak 5y ago
      I feel like we have very different buying strategies on Amazon which is what leads to our differing opinion. I never use Amazon for product discovery. It's ... not great. I always research what I want independently and then go to Amazon to make the final purchase knowing exactly what I want. They're basically just a delivery network for me and on that front they're so far ahead of everyone else it's not even funny.
      - 5y ago
quickthrower2 5y ago
My hope is that because Amazon sell everything, they sell everything really badly. You get better product descriptions, choice, help etc. on specialist stores, is my experience in Australia, although admittedly the US Amazon is probably a lot better.
Lamad123 5y ago
My hatred of amazon came from the way they treat their employees (including developers), but especially warehouse employees!! I saw a glimpse of that on PBS documentary Timing your bathroom breaks is super fucked up! I've used them exactly 4 times this year, maybe less than 10 times last year.. Before 2020, I was spending a large part of money on this evil company! I will not use them anymore!!
- Krustopolis 5y ago
  You have every right not to shop there. Employees also have every right not to work there. As you will see stated here time and time again, private businesses can run their operations any way they wish as long as they are not discriminating against legally protected classes.
  - jamincan 5y ago
    That's not true. We have regulations for a reasons, and businesses have to abide by them.
    - Krustopolis 5y ago
      Which regulations does Amazon violate in their warehouses?
      - rocqua 5y ago
        The question OP suggested was "given that sometimes we regulate, should we also regulate against some amazom practices we deem bad".
  - rocqua 5y ago
    And yet, we have a minimum wage, maximum hours allowed to work, accident insurance, mandated sick days, mandated vacation days and other things. If we did not mandate them by law, people could "choose" not to work at places that did not offer the above. However, that choice would probably entail "not having a job at all" which tends to be rather shitty. My point being "it is voluntary" is not a reasonable excuse for treating lower class workers inhumanely. That should be followed by a long discussion of what counts as "inhumane treatment". Where there is much room for disagreement still. But I don't think it is defensible to claim "they could quit" when someone else says "these conditions are inhumane and should be stopped".
curryst 5y ago
I keep telling myself I'm going to do this, but it becomes a huge pain in the ass. First I half to find a half dozen vendors to buy stuff from, because I like multifaceted projects, but no one else stocks all the pieces I need. Then I have to manage accounts across 6 different vendors, and put my credit card info in 6 different places. Then once I've ordered, I have to track 6 different packages. If anything goes wrong, I have to track down which vendor, and how to contact them, and hope that they have a good policy of fixing things like this. What we need is a replacement for Amazon. Federation could solve a lot of my pain points. Just give me an interface like Amazon that is connecting to hundreds or thousands of stores, where the orders are just dispatched to the store you ordered from. It doesn't fix shipping speeds, but it does give me: a) a sane way to order from multiple stores b) an easy means of tracking what I've ordered from all the stores c) an easy way of tracking the shipping for packages I've ordered d) a single point of entry when I know I want to buy something Amazon cornered the market, not on prices, but on convenience. If we want them to stop being so dominant, that's where you want to kick them.
- ohples 5y ago
  I to have also been avoiding Amazon, and mostly just ordering stuff directly from companies. Most of whom use Shopify, it doesn't do all of what your suggesting but shopifys "Shop" app seems to handle the tracking part pretty okay.
- kernoble 5y ago
  Ebay is somewhat like this. Though I don't think it meets all your requirements.

Rapzid 5y ago

I like Amazon and online shopping; won't ditch any time soon and don't think it's important for people to do so. The local businesses I was worried about going under were restaurants and others in the food/service industry(would lump experience in there as well; the zoo, botanical garden, museums, and etc).

jungturk 5y ago
> don't think it's important for people to do so Is that because you don't believe in the negative externalities or because you think they're worth the convenience?
- ozzythecat 5y ago
  The narrative I hear is that Amazon is destroying businesses. The issue I have is that this isn’t really true. Here’s an anecdote. I drive 20 minutes to the mall. After finding parking and getting into a shoe store, there’s no one really there to help me. Once they get around to me, they don’t have my size. And it’s also apparent the person working there has no interest in helping. Whether they have my size or whether I found what I was looking for is basically not their problem. So I drive at least 40 minutes round trip, plus the hassle of parking, finding the store in the mall, and waiting on someone to help me. Now my time is valuable. I lost my time. I paid for gas. I also put miles on my car. And depending on the day, I also had to deal with traffic. IMO businesses refuse to compete. If Amazon is doing it better than them, then hats off to Amazon. If a business is doing better than Amazon, then I’ll go with that business. IMO the “negative externalities” puts blame on Amazon while pretending like these other stores even try to compete. Btw this binary view of the world where Amazon is bad and others are good (or vice versa) seems to be a very American thing.
  - belval 5y ago
    I don't know about you but I am also not bound to Amazon, a few years ago some stores actually started putting some work into their website, offered free shipping on order over 50$, etc... and I went back almost naturally. These threads of Amazon-bashing always read like something out of parallel universe, I should go have a worse shopping experience because of some "greater" objective of opposing Amazon?
    - Spivak 5y ago
      For me the sticking point is returns. Amazon makes it so easy to return stuff when other companies make you pay for your own shipping back that I'm way more willing to take a risk on something when it's on Amazon.
      - belval 5y ago
        That too! I once received the wrong item from Hudson's Bay (Canadian everything store, think Sears) and not only had to physically go back to the store to get a refund because they wanted 8$ in shipping to let me send it back, they would not reimburse the shipping cost even after admitting that it was 100% their fault that they sent me the wrong item. I don't want a future dominated by mega-corp with 99% market share but traditional retail need to get their shit together at some point.
  - wiether 5y ago
    > Btw this binary view of the world where Amazon is bad and others are good (or vice versa) seems to be a very American thing. It's not. In France it's the same thing. But the "Amazon is bad" is not really about destroying businesses (since it was done decades ago by malls, now cities are just banks, insurances and clothing crapshops like Zara) but about the fact that they are not paying taxes and they provide awful work conditions to people. So you tend to be considered as someone who doesn't care if you buy at Amazon. (But we're still waiting for proof that companies trying to compete with Amazon don't act the same way).
    - 5y ago
- Rapzid 5y ago
  It depends on the negative externalities. I will specifically address destroying jobs though. In general, there is no standing in the way of progress that improves efficiency and gives consumers what they want. Interestingly, there seems to be an overlap between the crowd that says we need to hold business accountable for packaging waste and those who believe if they virtue signal hard enough Amazon will disappear and everyone will flock back to inconvenient, higher priced shopping.. Going against the general consumer demand grain typically ends up niche. But I digress. Amazon(and other online retailers) are destroying lots of low skill jobs, but that's true for most major gains in the efficiency of producing a product. Usually this is associated with automation, but this shift touches many aspects of the logistics providing a shopping experience to consumers. This is a good thing to me as it will ultimately increase our GDP and standard of living. Resources, particular labor, are freed up to work on other stuff. Over 600k small businesses are created every year. There are millions more small business than there were a decade ago. These efficiency gains create a TON of potential. I think that's good, so what of the net negative in raw job numbers? People without jobs. Well, weren't we at "full employment" pre-pandemic? In any case, I'm a big fan of tackling that with job re-training. We do a really poor job of that in the USA compared to other countries. But there are a number of solutions to different negative externalities that aren't swimming upstream against consumer trends. Unionization failed but it could happen. That could help address some of the workplace issues. The government can trust bust. I don't view this as a binary choice. Different people seem to have different pet grievances with Amazon. Some of them I agree with, some I don't(like Amazon doesn't pay taxes, which is a sound bite to me; ya basic), but generally I believe boycotting Amazon(and other online retailers) isn't really going to affect real change.
dkhenry 5y ago
And I believe its exploitive of everyone in the supply chain, from manufacturers to delivery drivers, and has led to the vast centralization of an overwhelmingly large portion of our economy into the hands of corporation with no accountability. Furthermore I am very convinced it makes the lives of everyone, except the tiny minority that are actively exploiting everyone else, much worse. Good jobs are lost, supply chains are made fragile, and monopolistic tendencies are encouraged. I would rather the inconvenience of shopping around than encourage a world with a private entity as the sole source of all consumer goods.
- cortesoft 5y ago
  Yeah, but we are never going to stop that behavior by individuals choosing not to shop at Amazon. As an individual, my only two choices are to shop at Amazon and get the benefits and Amazon still exists, or don’t shop there and don’t get the benefits and Amazon still exists. Amazon is not going to care if they lose my business. The only person who suffers is me. If we think Amazon business practices are immoral, we need to make them illegal.
  - methodin 5y ago
    And therein lies the main problem with that line of thinking in today's political landscape - when politicians are effectively funded by the large companies that have seemingly unlimited money and power, that will never happen, so where exactly will this new law come from?
  - dkhenry 5y ago
    I believe thats exactly how we stop that, by choosing not to shop at Amazon. The government is ( theoretically ) an expression of the will of the people, if the will of the people is to exploit others for their own benefit, the government will reflect that. Until we individually decide that our neighbors are important enough to us that we are willing to suffer a little inconvenience nothing will change, but if we are willing to individually suffer a little inconvenience we absolutely can effect any company even one as big as Amazon.

iso1210 5y ago

In the UK we had shops that sold everything -- Argos has done catalogue shopping for decades. Sainsburys, a major supermarket, owns them, and does delivery. Amazon makes it trivial to buy pretty much anything I want and get it the next day. Sainsburys sells the same stuff between themselves and argos, yet they failed miserably at competing. They could have worked with companies like royal mail and leverage their logistics expertise to compete, but they failed miserably to even realise why I shop at amazon. I'm not some 1970s afficiando going out to a high street to buy something in person, it's very unlikely I need something right then and can't wait for 24 hours for someone to bring it to me. I have better things to do with my time.

dkhenry 5y ago
It's not the mega conglomerates they are putting out of business. It's the bike stores, the hobby shops, the clothing boutiques. In the US with the purchase of Whole Foods, they are also moving more into groceries and everything else. After experiencing not being able at all to go to a high street and buy things and forcing everything to be online, I realized just how bad the experience is, and decided if I had to choose between the two I would choose the physical experience. Once you do that you start to realize just how much of the consumer goods world Amazon has already put out of business. I live in silicon valley and there is no where I can go for electronics any more. My last amazon purchase was getting some 2.5A fuses because every store that would sell them locally has closed ( either before the pandemic, or because of it ). I tried to buy a video card, and the local computer equipment retailer literally couldn't get allocated any stock from the manufacturers, somehow Amazon managed to get first dibs on supply. I don't like that world, and I don't want to live in it.
- wyre 5y ago
  An auto parts store or Ace Hardware should stock fuses.
  - dkhenry 5y ago
    They should, but they weren't auto fuses, and Ace Hardware didn't sell them either. They were really small and specific to small electronics ( in this case a Honeywell desk fan that had a fuse in the plug ) Fry's would have had them, but Fry's is no more, and there isn't any other store like that anymore.

quadrifoliate 5y ago

> I am happy the parts company is ditching Amazon, but its so much more important for us consumers to ditch amazon. Conversely, maybe it's important for both big and small businesses to realize that investing in your online presence and building out a high-quality local delivery network is much more important than the high-rent place on Main Street? A lot of the reasons I buy on Amazon are that it offers a much more pleasant experience. In fact, if you go to the manufacturers' sites for a lot of the products Amazon sells, they have a slow checkout process, scammy discount codes and email signup incentives, and generally optimize for consumer lock-in rather than getting the product to the consumer quickly. Imagine Google if it had popped up a discount code for "Get 200 searches at 15% off!" every time you searched for something, and think of how successful they would be if they did that. As for a lot of small-time local shops I know, they seem to place an unduly high value on prime real estate, and their websites are at the level of “My nephew says he knows Dreamweaver”. In summary, I am not super surprised they are being beaten out by Amazon, and it is unclear to me as to why I should subsidize their bad web design and reluctance to invest in building a consumer-friendly online experience.

dkhenry 5y ago
Thankfully you are not the only person to realize this and a multi-billion dollar industry sprung up to help independent retailers compete. A Shopify website has a customer experience similar to Amazon. The real issue is Amazon has so much market capture that most people don't even look for independent retailers. In fact even suggesting that you can go other places online gets a bunch of push back from people insisting that nothing can compete, and that somehow it's moral to ignore all externalities in the name of pure market efficiency.
- quadrifoliate 5y ago
  Maybe I am looking in the wrong places, but precisely zero of my local retailers have anything that looks like a Shopify storefront. And it's about the tools (Shopify is a great one), but also about the attitude. Amazon has the attitude of “get the thing to the customer, immediately”. Most of the other places have an attitude of “we want to build a long-lasting relationship with you, the consumer”. Hence they ignore fast deliveries and push coupons and loyalty programs and crowded stores. Ironically, this leads to a place where the only long-lasting relationship the customer ends up having is with Amazon, which is a pretty shitty company. > somehow it's moral to ignore all externalities in the name of pure market efficiency I am not saying that, or I don't think I am anyway. I think the retailers are not taking the externality of reduced attention span in a serious way like Google or Amazon. The technology totally exists for a local retailer to get my location, and deliver a product to me with 3 clicks in under an hour. And yet, apart from food delivery startups (that are not local, and simulate such an experience via a layer), few actual goods retailers (say, my local hardware store) have invested in building such an experience. I can't recall any of them having the courage to at least test out a pilot program with such an experience. Either way, I do try to support my local retailers as much as I can; and my usage of Amazon has seen a slow but steady drop-off over the last 3 years. But that's mainly due to the fact that Amazon makes

r00fus 5y ago

My wakeup moment was when I realized that Fulfill by Amazon + co-mingling means you had no idea what you got - whether it was a return, fake product of random Chinese dropship, or random other item (miscategorized). At that point, you might as well buy from Aliexpress and cut out the middleman (for stuff you want from China). Or drastically cut down purchases (which is what I chose).

bootlooped 5y ago
As somebody who has purchased a lot of things from both Ali Express, there is a massive difference between Ali Express and Amazon. To me, Ali Express is great for simple items that are practically fungible commodities, where workmanship and build quality aren't that impactful, and you can afford to wait a long time for it to arrive, and you can afford to receive some nontrivial percentages of those things and they turn out to be substandard or broken or substantially different than what was pictured. No matter the co-mingling issue, the same cannot be said of Amazon.
- incongruity 5y ago
  Amazon is turning into the fast shipping version of Ali Express. More and more fake / manipulated reviews and a sea of pseudo-English garbled brand names slapped on what looks like identical goods are making it exactly the experience you described, just shipped quicker. Ordering from Amazon is now a definite risk, and commingling is only a small part of that.
  - Spivak 5y ago
    I feel like we have very different buying strategies on Amazon which is what leads to our differing opinion. I never use Amazon for product discovery. It's ... not great. I always research what I want independently and then go to Amazon to make the final purchase knowing exactly what I want. They're basically just a delivery network for me and on that front they're so far ahead of everyone else it's not even funny.
    - 5y ago

quickthrower2 5y ago

My hope is that because Amazon sell everything, they sell everything really badly. You get better product descriptions, choice, help etc. on specialist stores, is my experience in Australia, although admittedly the US Amazon is probably a lot better.

Lamad123 5y ago

My hatred of amazon came from the way they treat their employees (including developers), but especially warehouse employees!! I saw a glimpse of that on PBS documentary Timing your bathroom breaks is super fucked up! I've used them exactly 4 times this year, maybe less than 10 times last year.. Before 2020, I was spending a large part of money on this evil company! I will not use them anymore!!

Krustopolis 5y ago
You have every right not to shop there. Employees also have every right not to work there. As you will see stated here time and time again, private businesses can run their operations any way they wish as long as they are not discriminating against legally protected classes.
- jamincan 5y ago
  That's not true. We have regulations for a reasons, and businesses have to abide by them.
  - Krustopolis 5y ago
    Which regulations does Amazon violate in their warehouses?
    - rocqua 5y ago
      The question OP suggested was "given that sometimes we regulate, should we also regulate against some amazom practices we deem bad".
- rocqua 5y ago
  And yet, we have a minimum wage, maximum hours allowed to work, accident insurance, mandated sick days, mandated vacation days and other things. If we did not mandate them by law, people could "choose" not to work at places that did not offer the above. However, that choice would probably entail "not having a job at all" which tends to be rather shitty. My point being "it is voluntary" is not a reasonable excuse for treating lower class workers inhumanely. That should be followed by a long discussion of what counts as "inhumane treatment". Where there is much room for disagreement still. But I don't think it is defensible to claim "they could quit" when someone else says "these conditions are inhumane and should be stopped".

curryst 5y ago

I keep telling myself I'm going to do this, but it becomes a huge pain in the ass. First I half to find a half dozen vendors to buy stuff from, because I like multifaceted projects, but no one else stocks all the pieces I need. Then I have to manage accounts across 6 different vendors, and put my credit card info in 6 different places. Then once I've ordered, I have to track 6 different packages. If anything goes wrong, I have to track down which vendor, and how to contact them, and hope that they have a good policy of fixing things like this. What we need is a replacement for Amazon. Federation could solve a lot of my pain points. Just give me an interface like Amazon that is connecting to hundreds or thousands of stores, where the orders are just dispatched to the store you ordered from. It doesn't fix shipping speeds, but it does give me: a) a sane way to order from multiple stores b) an easy means of tracking what I've ordered from all the stores c) an easy way of tracking the shipping for packages I've ordered d) a single point of entry when I know I want to buy something Amazon cornered the market, not on prices, but on convenience. If we want them to stop being so dominant, that's where you want to kick them.

ohples 5y ago
I to have also been avoiding Amazon, and mostly just ordering stuff directly from companies. Most of whom use Shopify, it doesn't do all of what your suggesting but shopifys "Shop" app seems to handle the tracking part pretty okay.
kernoble 5y ago
Ebay is somewhat like this. Though I don't think it meets all your requirements.