I find it mildly infuriating that people still buy on Amazon 😅
Convenience and cost, means amazon isn’t going anywhere. You can spend more time, and more money avoiding them if you want, but don’t be upset others aren’t willing.
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.
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.
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.
Fine, then I’ll be upset at people continuing to support a company that systematically abuses its workforce.
I’d love to see the list of companies that produced all the various products in your house.
That’s exactly why climate change is going to kill us all.
Edit : you can downvote me, but if you systematically go for the easiest and cheapest solution, and can do otherwise (and generally, you do), you’re a big part of the problem.
It shouldn’t be on the individual consumers to avoid monopolies; we need antitrust enforcement; we need to break up Amazon.
It shouldn’t be indeed, but unfortunately it is. We can’t just hide our personal responsibility behind the State when the State is deficient.
Our personal responsibility is to make the State not deficient though, not a boycott of amazon.com or whatever you’re suggesting. A boycott of even their digital and physical storefronts probably wouldn’t even change much, since Amazon makes most of their profit via AWS. Something like 33% of all internet traffic goes through AWS in some fashion, so boycotting that is even harder. The only real option I can see is to make the State regulate them in some manner because all the people in the world can’t fight a trillion dollar company themselves.
There are certain things I can’t get anywhere near me from anyone other than Amazon, and I live in a city of 6 million people. Sadly I need to use Amazon about once a month. Getting groceries from them is ridiculous though.
It’s not just about the monopoly though. Their site is rife with counterfeits and is basically Wish now. Want a GE lightbulb? There’s a 50/50 chance you’re getting a counterfeit that isn’t UL tested so you don’t know it’s safe, and that’s if you can even find the product at all hidden between the random name generator company listings for random garbage that’s slightly similar to the search term you entered.
And if there was a competitor that sold only legit products without having to compete with AmazonBasics (who just steals designs and sells them for a cheaper price) or from JSOIY (who also steals designs, and yes, I made up that name), people would use them instead of Amazon.
A monopoly enables this behavior, since there are no other options.
Don’t even get me started on phone chargers. Good fucking luck. The cheap knockoffs are such a fire hazard too I stg
What’s a better alternative? All I know of is eBay, but I used Amazon to buy DVDs and Blu-Rays to support films, and eBay sales don’t count as disc sales the same way that Amazon sales do.
So drive around from store to store in 104°F (40°C) heat looking for the thing that I want, but everyone seems to be out of, just to go home and order it online anyway (for less money, too) because no one had it?
With Fry’s and Radio Shack gone, I can’t even find electronics anymore. Best Buy is fucking useless, and they just closed the one nearest to me (not surprised. They were always out of stock of everything).
If I need electronics, I’m honestly not sure what my choice is.
So do you just assume everyone lives within convenient travel distance of a wide variety of shops that would supply everything that they could possibly want, or are you claiming moral superiority because you shop at Walmart instead of online at Amazon?
LOL the state of buying discs in brick and mortar store is abysmal now. I used to like buying discs from Walmart but the one near me has relegated everything to a bargain bin of kids’ movies, basically. Practically the only way to buy discs now is to do so online, or at a Best Buy or Barnes & Noble if you have one near you
Genuine question, what better alternative is there? I put a lot of effort into buying from small businesses with good morals, but I have no idea how to do this for the things I would buy online. If I don’t buy from amazon, i’m buying from target, Walmart, or some other supermarket. I don’t see how those are better.
Dumb question incoming; do these companies not offer delivery via postal services or the like? Where are you located?
eBay is ok for a good portion of what Amazon sells, but it’s not a perfect replacement. It’s not all auctions now. There are lots of things you purchase outright and they ship very quickly. Watch out for people who resell Amazon items at a mark up though. It too is not all that much better than Walmart, Amazon, etc, but at least you keep anyone from dominating.
Otherwise, sometimes there are small sellers you can find for niche products.
eBay is ok for a good portion of what Amazon sells
How is eBay better than Amazon though?
It is faster to have 20 slaves in 20 different parts of the warehouse stuff 20 different envelopes than it is to have 1 single slave go to 20 different locations in a warehouse and stuff a box.
Their obligation is just to get the product from their facilities to your door. They don’t give a shit HOW it gets there.
I mean, if it were 20 different items I could probably put it down to that but there were six packets of each of the flavours and types. You’d think all the Alfredo’s could go in one package, for example, not each in their own padded envelope. Does pasta even need padding? It was just ridiculous, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it were a disgruntled worker engaged in a bit of malicious compliance!
I used to work in a shipping depot that delivered to Amazon, among others.
And whenever a shipment went out to Amazon, we had to take packages of 20 items, like they’d be delivered to retailers, and rip them open to put each item into packaging carton individually, before it was even delivered into an Amazon warehouse.
In our case, it was parasols, so it could be different for smaller items or just items that are more likely to be ordered in bulk, but yeah, I imagine, Amazon just does not want to deal with the packaging in their warehouse, if possible.
Assuming the person lives in a normal town or village, you always have plenty of options. Groceries by post is totally absurd.
They’re not shipping groceries from an Amazon warehouse lol. It’s usually just whole foods. Basically the same as doing a doordash or Instacart etc. It actually used to be pretty sweet because if you had prime they didn’t add the delivery fee so it would save me a trip. Sadly, they got rid of the free delivery. I believe there is or was a class action about them charging the delivery fee now
Why tho. Their shipping is amazing. And they have pretty much anything you could want.
And you will have no recourse wheb the product you buy is (a) not what you thought you were getting, (b) going to break in a month or two or © set your house on fire if you leave it plugged in.
If you know exactly what you’re looking for and you know the seller, Amazon can be alright. I just bought an album CD there from MusicMagpie who’s set up shop on Amazon.
But if what you want is vague, be prepared to be bombarded with a bunch of Chinese sellers with weird brand names going through shittier couriers than Amazon themselves. It’s getting worse than AliExpress at this point.
Really cuz I have returned tons of stuff without even being questioned. Amazon doesn’t make most the products they sell?
My house isn’t on fire.
Hate these bubble envelopes! They cannot go into paper recycling because of the plastic liner, and cannot go into plastic film recycling because of the paper wrapping. The two are glued inseparably together and can only go IN THE TRASH!
They have something like “recycle me like a cardboard box” printed on them, and I’ve been putting the in my recycling :/ are they lying?
It honestly depends on your local municipality. Where I live they don’t take anything but straight up hard plastic that is cleaned, and clean cardboard, cleaned tin cans. Anything else they don’t process. And even then they’re probably throwing out the whole truck of recyclables cause one dingus didn’t clean out a can and it got tomato soup on everything else. Recycling is honestly a scam in America, especially once China stopped buying our waste years ago.
I just checked and these bags have no such thing written anywhere on them.
they did it out of spite, to get you to stop ordering groceries from the internet, lol
There was like 12 packet pastas @ 85 grams each, 12 cans of spaghetti and baked beans. A couple of other odds and ends. All piled on my front porch when I arrived home from work today. The postman must’ve been livid.
Kinda sorta…while it’s a lot to take to the door, it knocks off most of the packages off our list in one stop. I’m more upset when people order cat litter.
I put the packages in this box to bring them in, so I can imagine it would’ve been pretty frustrating going back and forth to the truck with handfuls of packages. I sure hope he forgives me. lol.
But anyway, why cat litter? Because it’s heavy, or spills? I’m in Australia so online cat litter offerings are not a cost effective option, but I’ll keep your protest in mind for the future.
Cat litter weighs a ton and must always be brought to the door. Really, anything heavy and bulky is just a pain. I’d rather take the 20+ little parcels to the door.
