10 ms·

It's ridiculous that I have to have a spreadsheet with pricing information and links for household goods just to spot check and make sure I'm getting the actual

by booi 2y ago

It's ridiculous that I have to have a spreadsheet with pricing information and links for household goods just to spot check and make sure I'm getting the actual price per quantity that I want due to the multiple dynamic listings that change every day nightmare. Don't ask how many times I receive more or less than I thought I would or something came in 10 packages of 3 instead of 1 30x package.

mschuster91 2y ago
Vote for politicians that campaign on consumer protection legislation. Here in Europe, it's been mandatory to show a price related to a reasonable common base point (e.g. liter, kilogram, piece, usage-unit for laundry detergent) adjacent to the actual product's price for many years now. You can go and use 1/10/100 grams/milliliters though for small scale packages where that is reasonably common (e.g. spices), and that's it. Fun fact, that piece of legislation significantly contributed to Brexit propaganda, the campaign was based on "the EU wants to take away our pints/stones/pounds/whatnot".
- zyberzero 2y ago
  Fun fact: my local store uses different units for the comparisons. Not that you can choose from that many different units, but for example brand A corn flakes comparison price is price/serving while brand B corn flakes is compared by price/kg. Sure, the serving is based on weight but I still need to do some math to figure out which one is cheaper :) This is one of the biggest food chains in Sweden.
  - fbdab103 2y ago
    Incredibly common in the US as well to use different units per item. All the better because our garbage measuring system can make unit switches significantly trickier.
    - Arrath 2y ago
      I had to do a double take a few weeks ago when I found the price/unit to be drastically different for the name brand to the store brand of something, until I realized they strategically switched the <unit> (# to oz I think it was) to make the store brand look astronomically cheaper instead of just slightly cheaper.
      - newzisforsukas 2y ago
        > strategically More like deceptively... If a person did that, I would consider the behavior antisocial.
        bombcar 2y ago
        The one I’ve seen a couple of times recently is where the bigger item is more expensive per unit volume unit weight. This is sneaky as hell.
  - rqtwteye 2y ago
    "Serving" is the biggest vector for manipulation ever. They can make up whatever they want. I still remember looking at a small bag of potato chips that had 3 servings.
- linsomniac 2y ago
  Here in the US with Amazon it will usually give you a price per quantity, though that can vary between "each", "oz", etc... The real issue being complained about is that there may be 10 listings in Amazon for "Tide Pods", so if you say to Alexa "Order Tide Pods" you aren't sure what you'll get, what quantity, or what price. Amazon REALLY needs to do some product normalization. It is true that if you go into a grocery store, you're literally presented with a whole aisle of detergent, and even if you are as the section for "Tide Pods" there may be quite a few options (larger/smaller, "stain blaster", "fresh", whatever), you very quickly get a pretty good view of what the options are and their differences, plus prices and things like "on sale" cards. The shopping experience is absolutely inferior with Amazon for things for which there are many alike products. One could even imagine some sort of mega page for "slim network cables" where you'd select the standard and color and length and be presented with a few options. They try this with things like screws, though I can't believe they have one option for star drive 5/8" wood screws...
  - ryandrake 2y ago
    Even if you search for the exact item, including the brand name and the size, you get pages and pages of choices, many of them just wrong. I just did a search for "sprayway glass cleaner 19 oz 1 pack". This contains all the information you need to uniquely identify a single product. Brand, Product, Size, Quantity. Yet Amazon returns 3 pages of crap, including Wrong Brand, Wrong Product, Wrong Size, and Wrong Quantity. I can't make the query any more specific, Amazon, what the hell is your problem? This query should return one and only one result.
    - ethbr1 2y ago
      Pretty sure that's Amazon selling your query results, not a failure in search algorithm.
      - Arrath 2y ago
        For the sponsored returns to the search query, sure. But for the rest, isn't that the fuzzy search crapping the bed in the face of our expectations? When I specify what I want I want the search to return what I searched for, not a lot of kinda similar junk. I've tried to explain the concept of fuzzy search to my girlfriend a few times and she still gets annoyed when a search for "24"x24" shadow box" returns a whole bevy of standard picture frames at an utterly random spread of sizes, for example.
- tgma 2y ago
  Nah. Just choose to buy the way you wish to. Vote with your money and don’t artificially restrict where there’s zero issues. Everything works out in the end. I’d much rather transact in the US than Europe. The entire retail customer experience and return policy is unmatched. The last thing I want is for some government regulation to make it suck like Europe.
  - mschuster91 2y ago
    > The last thing I want is for some government regulation to make it suck like Europe. Are you aware that Europe has a mandatory 2 year minimum warranty period on consumer purchases? A mandatory 14-days no-questions-asked return window on all purchases? In the US, AFAIK you're fully at the mercy of whatever the vendor so graciously offers you. [1] https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/shopping/guarantees-returns/index_en.htm https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/shopping/gua...
    - tgma 2y ago
      Yes I am aware and I stand by my statement. Have you actually returned stuff to stores over there? I have returned half eaten cake that I did not like the taste to Costco and didn’t have to face a weird looking employee. No law and regulation necessary just capitalism.
      - timClicks 2y ago
        That's not capitalism, that's culture. In the USA, it's very common to return products because of a change of mind and/or complain. That isn't universal.
        tgma 2y ago
        The fact that a retailer is willing to accept it despite not being forced to is absolutely the result of capitalism. If they don't, you buy from a competitor. This is not some hypothetical. People in the US routinely choose retailers based on their service experience. In any case, the overall retail experience is much better on west side of the Atlantic and prices are generally better too, without the need of too many "customer protection laws" so I don't think a good case is to be made to copy from a failed continent.
- eru 2y ago
  > Here in Europe, it's been mandatory to show a price related to a reasonable common base point (e.g. liter, kilogram, piece, usage-unit for laundry detergent) adjacent to the actual product's price for many years now. You can go and use 1/10/100 grams/milliliters though for small scale packages where that is reasonably common (e.g. spices), and that's it. That's pretty irrelevant to the discussion at hand. It's about blind ordering without worrying about the price. No one complained that Amazon was hiding prices or making price per quantity hard to discover. Even with the legislation you suggest, wild price swings are still entirely legal.
  - tomoyoirl 2y ago
    Amazon is kind enough to include unit pricing on many UI elements. It does seem to be less than consistent about the units, though. $/count, $/oz, $/g, $/lb, all on the same search page? Yes, and more :)
    - schrodinger 2y ago
      The point was that they're _not_ kind enough when you buy through Alex. The instant coffee you bought last month could have doubled but if you say "Alexa add [the coffee] to my cart ot just work… and if my anexcodes extrapolate at all, LOTS people use this feature.
ghaff 2y ago
It'd not even that I care much about small deviations--I just don't trust that something really crazy won't happen if I put it on autopilot. If I walk into Walmart and grab a big armful of Bounty I'm fairly confident things will be fine.
- bsimpson 2y ago
  I'm in the process of moving. I thought maybe I'd give Prime Day a try and send some soaps ahead to my new place. In my last apartment, I used Method's pump-dispenser laundry detergent and their basil-scented kitchen hand soap. Amazon is selling the laundry detergent for $75 and the hand soap for $15. I'm guessing Method discontinued the SKUs I was used to, and there's some leftover stock on Amazon with crazy prices.
  - ssl-3 2y ago
    Or: There's third-parties that are selling the stuff at seemingly-outrageous prices just because there aren't other sellers moving them in large, efficient [at least pallet-sized] quantities on Amazon. People sometimes want whatever they want, and some people are willing to pay a lot for whatever that is. That is not necessarily abusive. eg, I like sardines, and there's some very particular sardines that I'm rather fond of. I'd love to pay $1 or $2 per tin for them, but I'll also pay $6 per tin for them if I must when they just aren't available otherwise for whatever reason. Much of this can be explained with just supply and demand. Don't even ask me about the price of Heinz canned beans in tomato juice or bottles of HP Sauce in grocery stores in my part of Ohio. They're inexpensive staples in some parts of the world, but if I can even find them here they're ludicrously expensive. Amazon (and third-party sellers using Amazon) are no different than my local grocer is in that particular way. Back in context of TFA: The problem isn't that things can be expensive; the problem is primarily that one must be able to easily compare prices and products, and an Alexa device is presently a terrible interface for letting that happen. (The Amazon website is also sometimes not very good at this, even on a real computer.)
- prepend 2y ago
  I switched to Walmart a few years ago and their online experience has been more consistent. Although I detect it’s starting to drift as they switch to a “marketplace” approach similar to Amazon.
polynomial 2y ago
This creates the opportunity for a start up offering such spreadsheet management as a service to flourish in the ecosystem whether or not Amazon ends up acquiring them. Yes I am being facetious. (obvi)
- cqqxo4zV46cp 2y ago
  Unfortunately, another commenter is indicating that they’ve done just that. This is truly some darkest timeline stuff.
juxtaposicion 2y ago
We're building that spreadsheet as a product. I'd love to show you. I'd message you a private link to a prototype but you have no contact info on your profile. If you are interested, can you email or DM me using my profile info?
- jaggederest 2y ago
  You also don't have an email on your profile, for what it's worth. I don't use Twitter. I'd be interested in something like this as well.
  - juxtaposicion 2y ago
    Oh, thanks! I added my email to my profile. Look forward to replying to your note!
- b3ing 2y ago
  Oh wow, I’ve had that idea for 14yrs but never wanted to start coding it
supportengineer 2y ago
Prescription drugs have something called "NDC number" ( National Drug Codes ). What we need is NDC numbers but for consumer goods.
- n_plus_1_acc 2y ago
  European Article number
- doubled112 2y ago
  Like a UPC?
  - ethbr1 2y ago
    Are UPCs stable at scale and over time? It's been a minute since I was in retail, but I remember there being a bunch of asterisk-but's around them.
    - neltnerb 2y ago
      They're not perfect, and I think Amazon does combine listings for the same item (see "other sellers"), but the bigger issue is that the system prioritizes getting you exactly what you ask for over warning you of weird market shenanigans or out of stock sellers meaning prices are way higher than usual. If Target is out of the brand of paper towels I like I don't go to the next store and buy them no matter the price, I get a different brand or skip it. If I had a human shop for me, they would also get a different brand of skip it. But that logic doesn't work with Amazon so it's not safe to trust it.
    - zo1 2y ago
      Last time I looked at it, they fell prey to the region-locking-franchise nonsense. Something like each country had a registered office that would manage their namespace of codes with some sort of segregation or grouping. Ofc what inevitably happened: same product from same company had two codes because because. Heinz Ketchup in Germany is not the same as Heinz Ketchup in Australia...and no one can tell you why. Different recipe? Labeling? Different sizes... 160ml vs Country Z standard of 13.2oz, etc. Oh and different codes for different groupings. Pack of 6 somethings got a new code VS the item itself as the barcode. Not sure if you encountered the same shenanigans but I just stayed away. This is ultimately a people co-ordination problem and everyone thinks they're special. Meanwhile China spams all our market places with "Wish Wonder Elements Store" sellers that sell "40mm 1/2/6 pack of nail screws, woodworking, drill, conical shape, amazing product $1.22" and 5000 variations across all their sellers.
jonhohle 2y ago
I worked at Amazon when Fresh was rolling out in Seattle. A coworker thought he was ordering 10 bananas but when his order arrived he received 10 bunches of bananas. Generously, he brought them in to share along with the story. I’m sure they made a lot of banana bread the following week.
- wombatpm 2y ago
  All stores have problems with produce. Is that 2.99 a pound for peaches, bag or each?
  - gessha 2y ago
    They typically list out the unit but what ticks me off is when adjacent items have different units. One is in ounces, the second is per unit, their third one is per bag.
- senderista 2y ago
  Was that the origin of the banana stand?
  - camkego 2y ago
    For a little context, Amazon has one or more “community banana stands” For more info: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Banana_Stand https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Banana_Stand
  - jonhohle 2y ago
    I don’t think it was related. This incident would predate those by 4-5 years.
- ssl-3 2y ago
  Same, but different. I once ordered qty. 6 bananas from Instacart, expecting one fairly-medium bunch of bananas to show up with about 6 fruits in that bunch. The listing clearly showed that it was for "quantity", not "weight." But I got 6 pounds of bananas, which is a ton for a single person living by themself. [And I don't bake, so I got plenty of fresh potassium that week.] It only happened once. After that, I started leaving careful notes that describe each item where quantity/volume/weight might be confusing and things have been fine. (I could have complained and Instacart would have rubber-stamped a refund for that part of the order without discussion, but it wasn't worth that much effort.)
ssl-3 2y ago
I buy a lot of household stuff from Amazon. I also buy a lot of household stuff from lots of other places, mostly bricks-and-mortar. I don't keep a spreadsheet. I find that when I buy a thing enough times (a particular size of a particular shampoo, say), I get a vague feel for what it "should" cost, and I definitely have a range of values around that expected cost that may be acceptable to me. I don't need a spreadsheet for this. (A spreadsheet wouldn't hurt at all, but it just isn't necessary for me; I don't want to spend the time to get that level of accuracy since the return on my time isn't there for me.) But sometimes, an item is relatively unfamiliar or the price "feels" somewhat high or low -- whether at Amazon or locally. When this happens, I comparison shop. I've gotten pretty quick at it. Charts of historic Amazon pricing for things -- often pretty good but sometimes with large granularity -- are available at camelcamelcamel.com, which scrapes Amazon pricing and has done so for quite a long time. So I look there to see if Amazon's price is good, relative to Amazon's previous pricing. And then, if I still haven't found clear direction, I fire up Instacart's website. This lets me search many local stores all at once. (Their prices are often [but not always] inflated, but that's easy to get a feel for as well.) After that, I have enough vaguely-accurate data to say to myself "Self, this shampoo is a terrible deal at Amazon and I'll just pick some up at the store," or "Self, this shampoo is a fantastic deal at Amazon, and I should order one or two extra bottles while it is cheap." I wish Amazon's prices were more consistent (why is it $13 this week for a 24-pack of cans of V8 juice delivered to my door, and $60 the next week?), but meh. I can deal with it, as long as I have a real computer or time to fiddle with my pocket supercomputer. It's not so different from conventional "shopping." I just can't deal with it using an Echo speaker and the limited interactions possible with Amazon's broken Alexa "AI". That's a non-starter, as things are today. --- In terms of quantities, I don't think I've ever been surprised by Amazon. I do not think I've never experienced a thing on Amazon like my parents once did, where they bought mustard at a wholesale club ("Wow, 208 ounces [or whatever] of mustard! What a great price!") and wound up with several hundred individual packets of Heinz mustard loose-packed in a cardboard box. They were pretty surprised by this. Discussions were had. "What will we ever do with these mustard packets? Should we take it back? What if they refuse to accept it? Is it even worth the money to drive over there again just for this? We still need mustard right now, too..." They elected to keep it, and that wasn't the end of the world at all: We had plenty of mustard for a very long time, and it was indeed priced right; it just wasn't packaged in a particularly good way for what we were using it for. (But then, maybe that experience when I was a kid made a lasting impression on me. And perhaps this was reinforced every time I went to retrieve some mustard from that huge box, wherein: I looked at that box. And when I looked at that box, I could always see that it was neatly labeled from the factory and that the contents wouldn't be surprising at all to anyone who was actually paying enough attention. It is entirely possible that I might automatically scrutinize the offerings at Amazon, and also at the local grocery store, more than others do.)

by booi 2y ago

mschuster91 2y ago

Vote for politicians that campaign on consumer protection legislation. Here in Europe, it's been mandatory to show a price related to a reasonable common base point (e.g. liter, kilogram, piece, usage-unit for laundry detergent) adjacent to the actual product's price for many years now. You can go and use 1/10/100 grams/milliliters though for small scale packages where that is reasonably common (e.g. spices), and that's it. Fun fact, that piece of legislation significantly contributed to Brexit propaganda, the campaign was based on "the EU wants to take away our pints/stones/pounds/whatnot".

zyberzero 2y ago
Fun fact: my local store uses different units for the comparisons. Not that you can choose from that many different units, but for example brand A corn flakes comparison price is price/serving while brand B corn flakes is compared by price/kg. Sure, the serving is based on weight but I still need to do some math to figure out which one is cheaper :) This is one of the biggest food chains in Sweden.
- fbdab103 2y ago
  Incredibly common in the US as well to use different units per item. All the better because our garbage measuring system can make unit switches significantly trickier.
  - Arrath 2y ago
    I had to do a double take a few weeks ago when I found the price/unit to be drastically different for the name brand to the store brand of something, until I realized they strategically switched the <unit> (# to oz I think it was) to make the store brand look astronomically cheaper instead of just slightly cheaper.
    - newzisforsukas 2y ago
      > strategically More like deceptively... If a person did that, I would consider the behavior antisocial.
      - bombcar 2y ago
        The one I’ve seen a couple of times recently is where the bigger item is more expensive per unit volume unit weight. This is sneaky as hell.
- rqtwteye 2y ago
  "Serving" is the biggest vector for manipulation ever. They can make up whatever they want. I still remember looking at a small bag of potato chips that had 3 servings.
linsomniac 2y ago
Here in the US with Amazon it will usually give you a price per quantity, though that can vary between "each", "oz", etc... The real issue being complained about is that there may be 10 listings in Amazon for "Tide Pods", so if you say to Alexa "Order Tide Pods" you aren't sure what you'll get, what quantity, or what price. Amazon REALLY needs to do some product normalization. It is true that if you go into a grocery store, you're literally presented with a whole aisle of detergent, and even if you are as the section for "Tide Pods" there may be quite a few options (larger/smaller, "stain blaster", "fresh", whatever), you very quickly get a pretty good view of what the options are and their differences, plus prices and things like "on sale" cards. The shopping experience is absolutely inferior with Amazon for things for which there are many alike products. One could even imagine some sort of mega page for "slim network cables" where you'd select the standard and color and length and be presented with a few options. They try this with things like screws, though I can't believe they have one option for star drive 5/8" wood screws...
- ryandrake 2y ago
  Even if you search for the exact item, including the brand name and the size, you get pages and pages of choices, many of them just wrong. I just did a search for "sprayway glass cleaner 19 oz 1 pack". This contains all the information you need to uniquely identify a single product. Brand, Product, Size, Quantity. Yet Amazon returns 3 pages of crap, including Wrong Brand, Wrong Product, Wrong Size, and Wrong Quantity. I can't make the query any more specific, Amazon, what the hell is your problem? This query should return one and only one result.
  - ethbr1 2y ago
    Pretty sure that's Amazon selling your query results, not a failure in search algorithm.
    - Arrath 2y ago
      For the sponsored returns to the search query, sure. But for the rest, isn't that the fuzzy search crapping the bed in the face of our expectations? When I specify what I want I want the search to return what I searched for, not a lot of kinda similar junk. I've tried to explain the concept of fuzzy search to my girlfriend a few times and she still gets annoyed when a search for "24"x24" shadow box" returns a whole bevy of standard picture frames at an utterly random spread of sizes, for example.
tgma 2y ago
Nah. Just choose to buy the way you wish to. Vote with your money and don’t artificially restrict where there’s zero issues. Everything works out in the end. I’d much rather transact in the US than Europe. The entire retail customer experience and return policy is unmatched. The last thing I want is for some government regulation to make it suck like Europe.
- mschuster91 2y ago
  > The last thing I want is for some government regulation to make it suck like Europe. Are you aware that Europe has a mandatory 2 year minimum warranty period on consumer purchases? A mandatory 14-days no-questions-asked return window on all purchases? In the US, AFAIK you're fully at the mercy of whatever the vendor so graciously offers you. [1] https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/shopping/guarantees-returns/index_en.htm https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/shopping/gua...
  - tgma 2y ago
    Yes I am aware and I stand by my statement. Have you actually returned stuff to stores over there? I have returned half eaten cake that I did not like the taste to Costco and didn’t have to face a weird looking employee. No law and regulation necessary just capitalism.
    - timClicks 2y ago
      That's not capitalism, that's culture. In the USA, it's very common to return products because of a change of mind and/or complain. That isn't universal.
      - tgma 2y ago
        The fact that a retailer is willing to accept it despite not being forced to is absolutely the result of capitalism. If they don't, you buy from a competitor. This is not some hypothetical. People in the US routinely choose retailers based on their service experience. In any case, the overall retail experience is much better on west side of the Atlantic and prices are generally better too, without the need of too many "customer protection laws" so I don't think a good case is to be made to copy from a failed continent.
eru 2y ago
> Here in Europe, it's been mandatory to show a price related to a reasonable common base point (e.g. liter, kilogram, piece, usage-unit for laundry detergent) adjacent to the actual product's price for many years now. You can go and use 1/10/100 grams/milliliters though for small scale packages where that is reasonably common (e.g. spices), and that's it. That's pretty irrelevant to the discussion at hand. It's about blind ordering without worrying about the price. No one complained that Amazon was hiding prices or making price per quantity hard to discover. Even with the legislation you suggest, wild price swings are still entirely legal.
- tomoyoirl 2y ago
  Amazon is kind enough to include unit pricing on many UI elements. It does seem to be less than consistent about the units, though. $/count, $/oz, $/g, $/lb, all on the same search page? Yes, and more :)
  - schrodinger 2y ago
    The point was that they're _not_ kind enough when you buy through Alex. The instant coffee you bought last month could have doubled but if you say "Alexa add [the coffee] to my cart ot just work… and if my anexcodes extrapolate at all, LOTS people use this feature.

ghaff 2y ago

It'd not even that I care much about small deviations--I just don't trust that something really crazy won't happen if I put it on autopilot. If I walk into Walmart and grab a big armful of Bounty I'm fairly confident things will be fine.

bsimpson 2y ago
I'm in the process of moving. I thought maybe I'd give Prime Day a try and send some soaps ahead to my new place. In my last apartment, I used Method's pump-dispenser laundry detergent and their basil-scented kitchen hand soap. Amazon is selling the laundry detergent for $75 and the hand soap for $15. I'm guessing Method discontinued the SKUs I was used to, and there's some leftover stock on Amazon with crazy prices.
- ssl-3 2y ago
  Or: There's third-parties that are selling the stuff at seemingly-outrageous prices just because there aren't other sellers moving them in large, efficient [at least pallet-sized] quantities on Amazon. People sometimes want whatever they want, and some people are willing to pay a lot for whatever that is. That is not necessarily abusive. eg, I like sardines, and there's some very particular sardines that I'm rather fond of. I'd love to pay $1 or $2 per tin for them, but I'll also pay $6 per tin for them if I must when they just aren't available otherwise for whatever reason. Much of this can be explained with just supply and demand. Don't even ask me about the price of Heinz canned beans in tomato juice or bottles of HP Sauce in grocery stores in my part of Ohio. They're inexpensive staples in some parts of the world, but if I can even find them here they're ludicrously expensive. Amazon (and third-party sellers using Amazon) are no different than my local grocer is in that particular way. Back in context of TFA: The problem isn't that things can be expensive; the problem is primarily that one must be able to easily compare prices and products, and an Alexa device is presently a terrible interface for letting that happen. (The Amazon website is also sometimes not very good at this, even on a real computer.)
prepend 2y ago
I switched to Walmart a few years ago and their online experience has been more consistent. Although I detect it’s starting to drift as they switch to a “marketplace” approach similar to Amazon.

polynomial 2y ago

This creates the opportunity for a start up offering such spreadsheet management as a service to flourish in the ecosystem whether or not Amazon ends up acquiring them. Yes I am being facetious. (obvi)

cqqxo4zV46cp 2y ago
Unfortunately, another commenter is indicating that they’ve done just that. This is truly some darkest timeline stuff.

juxtaposicion 2y ago

We're building that spreadsheet as a product. I'd love to show you. I'd message you a private link to a prototype but you have no contact info on your profile. If you are interested, can you email or DM me using my profile info?

jaggederest 2y ago
You also don't have an email on your profile, for what it's worth. I don't use Twitter. I'd be interested in something like this as well.
- juxtaposicion 2y ago
  Oh, thanks! I added my email to my profile. Look forward to replying to your note!
b3ing 2y ago
Oh wow, I’ve had that idea for 14yrs but never wanted to start coding it

supportengineer 2y ago

Prescription drugs have something called "NDC number" ( National Drug Codes ). What we need is NDC numbers but for consumer goods.

n_plus_1_acc 2y ago
European Article number
doubled112 2y ago
Like a UPC?
- ethbr1 2y ago
  Are UPCs stable at scale and over time? It's been a minute since I was in retail, but I remember there being a bunch of asterisk-but's around them.
  - neltnerb 2y ago
    They're not perfect, and I think Amazon does combine listings for the same item (see "other sellers"), but the bigger issue is that the system prioritizes getting you exactly what you ask for over warning you of weird market shenanigans or out of stock sellers meaning prices are way higher than usual. If Target is out of the brand of paper towels I like I don't go to the next store and buy them no matter the price, I get a different brand or skip it. If I had a human shop for me, they would also get a different brand of skip it. But that logic doesn't work with Amazon so it's not safe to trust it.
  - zo1 2y ago
    Last time I looked at it, they fell prey to the region-locking-franchise nonsense. Something like each country had a registered office that would manage their namespace of codes with some sort of segregation or grouping. Ofc what inevitably happened: same product from same company had two codes because because. Heinz Ketchup in Germany is not the same as Heinz Ketchup in Australia...and no one can tell you why. Different recipe? Labeling? Different sizes... 160ml vs Country Z standard of 13.2oz, etc. Oh and different codes for different groupings. Pack of 6 somethings got a new code VS the item itself as the barcode. Not sure if you encountered the same shenanigans but I just stayed away. This is ultimately a people co-ordination problem and everyone thinks they're special. Meanwhile China spams all our market places with "Wish Wonder Elements Store" sellers that sell "40mm 1/2/6 pack of nail screws, woodworking, drill, conical shape, amazing product $1.22" and 5000 variations across all their sellers.

jonhohle 2y ago

I worked at Amazon when Fresh was rolling out in Seattle. A coworker thought he was ordering 10 bananas but when his order arrived he received 10 bunches of bananas. Generously, he brought them in to share along with the story. I’m sure they made a lot of banana bread the following week.

wombatpm 2y ago
All stores have problems with produce. Is that 2.99 a pound for peaches, bag or each?
- gessha 2y ago
  They typically list out the unit but what ticks me off is when adjacent items have different units. One is in ounces, the second is per unit, their third one is per bag.
senderista 2y ago
Was that the origin of the banana stand?
- camkego 2y ago
  For a little context, Amazon has one or more “community banana stands” For more info: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Banana_Stand https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Banana_Stand
- jonhohle 2y ago
  I don’t think it was related. This incident would predate those by 4-5 years.
ssl-3 2y ago
Same, but different. I once ordered qty. 6 bananas from Instacart, expecting one fairly-medium bunch of bananas to show up with about 6 fruits in that bunch. The listing clearly showed that it was for "quantity", not "weight." But I got 6 pounds of bananas, which is a ton for a single person living by themself. [And I don't bake, so I got plenty of fresh potassium that week.] It only happened once. After that, I started leaving careful notes that describe each item where quantity/volume/weight might be confusing and things have been fine. (I could have complained and Instacart would have rubber-stamped a refund for that part of the order without discussion, but it wasn't worth that much effort.)

ssl-3 2y ago

I buy a lot of household stuff from Amazon. I also buy a lot of household stuff from lots of other places, mostly bricks-and-mortar. I don't keep a spreadsheet. I find that when I buy a thing enough times (a particular size of a particular shampoo, say), I get a vague feel for what it "should" cost, and I definitely have a range of values around that expected cost that may be acceptable to me. I don't need a spreadsheet for this. (A spreadsheet wouldn't hurt at all, but it just isn't necessary for me; I don't want to spend the time to get that level of accuracy since the return on my time isn't there for me.) But sometimes, an item is relatively unfamiliar or the price "feels" somewhat high or low -- whether at Amazon or locally. When this happens, I comparison shop. I've gotten pretty quick at it. Charts of historic Amazon pricing for things -- often pretty good but sometimes with large granularity -- are available at camelcamelcamel.com, which scrapes Amazon pricing and has done so for quite a long time. So I look there to see if Amazon's price is good, relative to Amazon's previous pricing. And then, if I still haven't found clear direction, I fire up Instacart's website. This lets me search many local stores all at once. (Their prices are often [but not always] inflated, but that's easy to get a feel for as well.) After that, I have enough vaguely-accurate data to say to myself "Self, this shampoo is a terrible deal at Amazon and I'll just pick some up at the store," or "Self, this shampoo is a fantastic deal at Amazon, and I should order one or two extra bottles while it is cheap." I wish Amazon's prices were more consistent (why is it $13 this week for a 24-pack of cans of V8 juice delivered to my door, and $60 the next week?), but meh. I can deal with it, as long as I have a real computer or time to fiddle with my pocket supercomputer. It's not so different from conventional "shopping." I just can't deal with it using an Echo speaker and the limited interactions possible with Amazon's broken Alexa "AI". That's a non-starter, as things are today. --- In terms of quantities, I don't think I've ever been surprised by Amazon. I do not think I've never experienced a thing on Amazon like my parents once did, where they bought mustard at a wholesale club ("Wow, 208 ounces [or whatever] of mustard! What a great price!") and wound up with several hundred individual packets of Heinz mustard loose-packed in a cardboard box. They were pretty surprised by this. Discussions were had. "What will we ever do with these mustard packets? Should we take it back? What if they refuse to accept it? Is it even worth the money to drive over there again just for this? We still need mustard right now, too..." They elected to keep it, and that wasn't the end of the world at all: We had plenty of mustard for a very long time, and it was indeed priced right; it just wasn't packaged in a particularly good way for what we were using it for. (But then, maybe that experience when I was a kid made a lasting impression on me. And perhaps this was reinforced every time I went to retrieve some mustard from that huge box, wherein: I looked at that box. And when I looked at that box, I could always see that it was neatly labeled from the factory and that the contents wouldn't be surprising at all to anyone who was actually paying enough attention. It is entirely possible that I might automatically scrutinize the offerings at Amazon, and also at the local grocery store, more than others do.)