3 ms·

You live in Europe, where everything is harder, and when it comes to shopping, you have maybe one-fifth of the choices Americans have. I spend a good four mont

You live in Europe, where everything is harder, and when it comes to shopping, you have maybe one-fifth of the choices Americans have. I spend a good four months every year in Poland and Austria, and there’s really nowhere in the world except China that offers consumers as much choice and availability as the U.S. does.

AlanYx 2mo ago
>there’s really nowhere in the world except China that offers consumers as much choice and availability as the U.S. does. This is true, although I find it interesting that so many people then gravitate to Costco, where consumer choice in a given category is deliberately restricted to one or two product variations selected by the head office.
- pirates 2mo ago
  Over time I have come to trust Costco’s curation. Their standards seem high, and there are definitely products and brands that they sell that I don’t like, but those are subjective tastes vs objective low quality in my experience. I don’t buy everything there, but I take note of the brands and products that they either keep for a long time or dump quickly.
- patmorgan23 2mo ago
  Quality vs variety trade off. Costco only has a couple options but they are well better and you don't have to do extra work to make sure you're not buying a piece of crap. Also, you don't have to shop at Costco exclusively, you still have all the other options available. Costco is just a good default if you're not looking for something specific.
retired 2mo ago
It really baffles me when an American can just walk into a store and buy car parts for their fairly niche model from the 1990s. Meanwhile in Europe I spend many evening on internet forums and Facebook groups doing research trying to find a part that will work with my car, then finding someone willing to sell it and finally using Google Translate getting someone to ship it to my foreign (to them) country. I even had to resort to proxies just to get car parts from Eastern to Western Europe.
- shimman 2mo ago
  Weird, I rather have more government mandated vacation, public healthcare, and a pension system that doesn't mean I have to work in my 60s but I understand people have different priorities in life. Hopefully you move beyond the consumerist phase as it's probably the lowest rung of the human experience.
  - retired 2mo ago
    Jokes on you, in my part of Europe I don’t have access to public healthcare, I don’t have mandated vacation, I don’t have a pension system. And I can’t even have a consumerist phase apparently since car parts are so hard to acquire.
  - TaLiTr 2mo ago
    What a strange and pretentious comment. They're not mutually exclusive, two things can be had at the same time.
    - shimman 2mo ago
      Not only are they mutually exclusive, the current neoliberal regime has dismantling the welfare state as its explicit goal. Wish to live in your reality tho, where I can buy a dozen different brands of hot dogs while visiting the doctor for elevated blood pressure without needing to take out a payment plan on klarna.
      - volkl48 2mo ago
        They aren't mutually exclusive in the least. The ease of buying things that the prior poster referred to is basically just three things: - A massive common market with few to no internal trade barriers/complications. The EU is still nowhere near as integrated and has all sorts of odd hidden complications to actually moving + selling things. - Hell, just this week I've seen that one of the indie record labels I pay attention to will no longer sell merch within the EU other than to the country they're based in, because the new EU packaging regulations make it infeasibly expensive to comply with for every country for the small volumes they move. - A common language that ~92% of the population speak fluently. - Relatively efficient logistics. None of this has anything to do with "dismantling the welfare state" and has only a little to do with differences in workers rights/benefits - giving delivery workers in the US better wages/job security would not make the "Amazon" logistics model infeasible.

AlanYx 2mo ago

>there’s really nowhere in the world except China that offers consumers as much choice and availability as the U.S. does. This is true, although I find it interesting that so many people then gravitate to Costco, where consumer choice in a given category is deliberately restricted to one or two product variations selected by the head office.

pirates 2mo ago
Over time I have come to trust Costco’s curation. Their standards seem high, and there are definitely products and brands that they sell that I don’t like, but those are subjective tastes vs objective low quality in my experience. I don’t buy everything there, but I take note of the brands and products that they either keep for a long time or dump quickly.
patmorgan23 2mo ago
Quality vs variety trade off. Costco only has a couple options but they are well better and you don't have to do extra work to make sure you're not buying a piece of crap. Also, you don't have to shop at Costco exclusively, you still have all the other options available. Costco is just a good default if you're not looking for something specific.

retired 2mo ago

It really baffles me when an American can just walk into a store and buy car parts for their fairly niche model from the 1990s. Meanwhile in Europe I spend many evening on internet forums and Facebook groups doing research trying to find a part that will work with my car, then finding someone willing to sell it and finally using Google Translate getting someone to ship it to my foreign (to them) country. I even had to resort to proxies just to get car parts from Eastern to Western Europe.

shimman 2mo ago
Weird, I rather have more government mandated vacation, public healthcare, and a pension system that doesn't mean I have to work in my 60s but I understand people have different priorities in life. Hopefully you move beyond the consumerist phase as it's probably the lowest rung of the human experience.
- retired 2mo ago
  Jokes on you, in my part of Europe I don’t have access to public healthcare, I don’t have mandated vacation, I don’t have a pension system. And I can’t even have a consumerist phase apparently since car parts are so hard to acquire.
- TaLiTr 2mo ago
  What a strange and pretentious comment. They're not mutually exclusive, two things can be had at the same time.
  - shimman 2mo ago
    Not only are they mutually exclusive, the current neoliberal regime has dismantling the welfare state as its explicit goal. Wish to live in your reality tho, where I can buy a dozen different brands of hot dogs while visiting the doctor for elevated blood pressure without needing to take out a payment plan on klarna.
    - volkl48 2mo ago
      They aren't mutually exclusive in the least. The ease of buying things that the prior poster referred to is basically just three things: - A massive common market with few to no internal trade barriers/complications. The EU is still nowhere near as integrated and has all sorts of odd hidden complications to actually moving + selling things. - Hell, just this week I've seen that one of the indie record labels I pay attention to will no longer sell merch within the EU other than to the country they're based in, because the new EU packaging regulations make it infeasibly expensive to comply with for every country for the small volumes they move. - A common language that ~92% of the population speak fluently. - Relatively efficient logistics. None of this has anything to do with "dismantling the welfare state" and has only a little to do with differences in workers rights/benefits - giving delivery workers in the US better wages/job security would not make the "Amazon" logistics model infeasible.