Plus, even when you do find what you’re looking for elsewhere, are Walmart, Target, and Home Depot really so benevolent? The odds of me finding what I need from a small locally owned business (at least in my area) are pretty slim.
I know that feeling all too well. The small local grocery store is, at minimum, 2 to 3 times more expensive than Walmart, or even the Dollar General a block away. The local hardware stores aren’t much better.
This is also my experience. Recent example, I can buy a 1.9L container of mayonnaise for $8.99 at Costco to make homemade potato salad for my grandmother’s 95th birthday party. But I forgot to prepare until the last minute and realized I had no mayo, and so I went to the local place who charged $7.99 for 443mL of mayonnaise from the same brand.
Amazon sells 3.78L of mayonnaise (dear God who needs that much mayo?) for $18.70, making them not quite as competitive as Costco in terms of price per mL, but pretty damn close, and moreover still way better than the local place.
Increasingly I can’t be confident what the quality level of products will be at those places. Amazon has huge counterfeit item and poor quality item problems that they don’t care to fix. I know Target will have reasonable quality, I know if I buy a brand name product l, I’m getting that product. I know if I buy Walmart brand, the quality is lower, but not pure garbage. I currently get none of those guarantees on Amazon, even Amazon basics aren’t safe from these problems.
Definitely had issues with quality and/or damage, haven’t gotten a true counterfeit yet to my knowledge, but I can at least partially attribute that to the fact that I almost never buy things that aren’t shipped/sold by either Amazon or the manufacturer.
When I shop I usually search for something on Amazon, check if the manufacturer has a website & it is comparably priced, check if the local stores (Target, etc.) stock it at a fair price, and if all else fails I buy through Amazon (after checking CamelCamelCamel to verify I’m getting a good deal).
To my knowledge the worst offers for counterfeits are tech items like cables, chargers, and drives. I’ve also learned some designer board games are commonly counterfeits. Amazon comingles stock so it doesn’t matter who you buy from, if someone puts counterfeit product X into the system you have a chance to get it.
Then I decide I want to try and support a small business. So, I find a website for one that looks legit enough. So far so good. Find the product. Yep! Go to check out… $10+ delivery fee. I know that’s not their fault. I do. But I’m not spending $20 on a $10 item that’s just not reasonable. Sometimes it’s fine to eat that cost if it’s like a cart full of stuff with just the one fee but for a bunch of individual things that I can’t get locally it doesn’t work.
