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Before the internet, brick and mortar stores and distributors had 'buyers' who were intimately familiar with products in their particular sector. They would rev

Before the internet, brick and mortar stores and distributors had 'buyers' who were intimately familiar with products in their particular sector. They would review products and decide how many to order if any. If you wanted to sell some consumer product you'd have to ship pre-production models to the buyers. They would test them and tear them down to see how well they were built. That imposed reasonable quality standards on manufacturers. With the rise of Amazon that's all gone.

lotsofpulp 5y ago
It is not solely Amazon. It mirrors the widening gap in income/wealth in society. Walmart and BestBuy were already selling models of appliances slightly tweaked to have inferior components at cheaper prices, imperceptible to people who were not doing deep research online. Although the veneer of quality Amazon have to third party sellers certainly exacerbated the issue, but I think that is close to exhaustion.
zz865 5y ago
I can also remember small local shops having assistants actually know what they were talking about and recommending what is best for you.
PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
This is also simplistic. I lived before the Internet, and I can't remember the number of times I tried to buy some sort of product from a specialist store that turned out not to carry a product because they instead carried those of a competitor? Was it because the one they carried was better? Sometimes, perhaps. But often it was because of a better business arrangement, and those arrangements were often informally exclusionary to competition. With online commerce, and particularly Amazon, the testers are now us, the consumers, and the scale of testing is far wider and deeper, which seems like a good thing in some respects. However, apart from the onus now falling on us, which might or might not be a good thing, there's the problem of getting past the "top rated" items in a given domain, and that might be a really big problem.

lotsofpulp 5y ago

It is not solely Amazon. It mirrors the widening gap in income/wealth in society. Walmart and BestBuy were already selling models of appliances slightly tweaked to have inferior components at cheaper prices, imperceptible to people who were not doing deep research online. Although the veneer of quality Amazon have to third party sellers certainly exacerbated the issue, but I think that is close to exhaustion.

zz865 5y ago

I can also remember small local shops having assistants actually know what they were talking about and recommending what is best for you.

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago

This is also simplistic. I lived before the Internet, and I can't remember the number of times I tried to buy some sort of product from a specialist store that turned out not to carry a product because they instead carried those of a competitor? Was it because the one they carried was better? Sometimes, perhaps. But often it was because of a better business arrangement, and those arrangements were often informally exclusionary to competition. With online commerce, and particularly Amazon, the testers are now us, the consumers, and the scale of testing is far wider and deeper, which seems like a good thing in some respects. However, apart from the onus now falling on us, which might or might not be a good thing, there's the problem of getting past the "top rated" items in a given domain, and that might be a really big problem.