A real reason to avoid Amazon is fake merchandise. I'd been buying a vitamin supplement from them for years. Then they sent me a notice that it was being recalled as a fake.[1] (Archive [2]) They paid a refund for the last purchase.
But that's all. Amazon won't respond to questions about what was in it or who the real seller is.
I no longer buy anything from Amazon that could be faked.
I think it's even worse. They have a completely chaotic returns policy meaning they re-sell used things pretending they are new all the time. I stopped buying from Amazon UK after I received 6 opened and used items in just 20 orders. Some were even missing components. I even received used underwear (yuck!) from a brand that sells boxers inside sealed packages and doesn't allow returns. I heard some scammers were exploiting this returns policy by purchasing phones, installing malware, and sending them back to Amazon.
I’m about to start grad school to get my clinical mental health counseling licensure, and Amazon has multiple fake/counterfeit DSM-5s (basically the holy grail of recognized mental disorders and their insurance billing codes) on it, so much in fact that my program director mentioned the Amazon problem in the orientation.
So I’ll add “if you need to guarantee the accuracy of the information in whatever you’re buying… avoid Amazon as well”
What is a "fake DSM-5"? It is a book, anyone can copy it, legally or not.
Why would someone go out of their way to produce different content if they are going to violate intellectual property anyways, be it trademarks or copyright?
Sorry, counterfeit is more accurate (edited original comment) - director mentioned a number of previous students who ordered their copy from Amazon and got DSM 4s or copies missing huge sections of diagnostic criteria, etc.
the fact legitimate electricians buy fuses/wiring/circuit breakers/crimps off amazon thinking they're as advertised is actually terrifying
all the buildings you enter: houses of friends/family, supermarkets, hospitals, transport, restaurants, offices, all with potentially fatal fake electrics
hopefully the fire door and extinguishers weren't bought from amazon
It’s usually homeowners buying and installing crappy electrical products off Amazon, or ‘handyman’ types who don’t have a license. I sell and run commercial electrical work at a union shop and we buy electrical material from supply houses, not Amazon.
You certainly could buy material off Amazon but if you’re passing the cost onto the customer, why not just buy the real thing?
People buy fuses from Amazon for the cars/motorcycles not understanding it can kill them. They are actually evil at this point for doing nothing about any of these ongoing issues. They can't be unaware if us rando consumers are aware (or if they are doing recalls for fake products).
>Good rule of thumb is that if it goes on or in your body do not buy it from Amazon.
If I do that, I always make sure I'm buying from the seller and not a reseller or distributor; I meant to say no other party besides the Seller and Amazon.
If it ships from Amazon, you can still run the risk that you get a counterfeit item since Amazon will co-mingle the inventory. Safer to only buy from the seller and is shipped by the seller.
Good point! But it's very rare to see Seller shipping the product, as Amazon likes to control the inventory itself. Also, I believe Amazon encourages sellers to ship the products to their warehouses for faster delivery to customers, and they'd cover all the costs within their 15% fees.
When I tried to buy quercetin from Vitacost recently, they dropped a second, unwanted item into my cart. I noped right out of there. Turns out they were acquired by notorious lawbreakers Kroger.
Bezos personally blocked the WaPo editorial board from endorsing Kamala resulting in multiple resignations and a 10% loss in subscribers. A paper that adopted the tag line “Democracy Dies in Darkness” bending the knee to an authoritarian who committed election fraud would be hilarious if it weren’t so depressing.
But we shouldn’t be surprised that these liberal journalism outfits consistently fail the public. The same thing happened in Germany in the 20s and 30s with Ullstein. And in Italy with their liberal papers. And with the Times running cover for Hitler’s regime under Ochs.
I would consider the capture of journalist outfits by billionaire capitalists who kowtow to authoritarians to be an erosion of our democracy. They call it the fourth estate for a reason.
I bought a book. A literal book. And it was wrong size, wrong paper, printed on a 5 degree skew including the cover. It should have been from Simon and Schulster, but despite Sold and Shipped, it just wasn’t.
I've switched to iHerb for my supplements about a month ago after reading a handful of stories about non-genuine supplements being sold on Amazon. It's been a good experience so far, even next-day (sometimes 2-day) deliveries. And the search/discovery on their website is superior.
I ordered replacement earpads from Amazon for one of my headphones. Ended up developing a rash around my ears. So it's not just about clothing, and, yes, you should be concerned.
All products can be faked, but I thing that GP means "cannot be faked without being obvious". Obvious fakes are not as much of a problem since Amazon has a pretty good return policy.
In the "cannot be faked" category, you can have:
- products so cheap that making a fake wouldn't make sense. for example an unbranded glass jar won't be faked because anything that looks like a glass jar but isn't a glass jar will be more expensive than a glass jar.
- products too complex and/or too low margin to be worth faking. For example, you will probably never find a fake desktop printer, as even the most simple printers are hard to make and sold at a low margin, maybe even at a loss. However, consumables are (very) high margin and you will find fakes, lots of them.
- products that have effective anti-counterfeiting systems. For example, Nintendo Switch games.
No, that is not correct or at least it has not been. Amazon was said to intermingle the inventory in the warehouses, mixing third party products with those shipped and sold by Amazon. So that gave you zero protection.
I read that they made internal changes to tag shippings properly to reduce the risk of that behaviour, but am not sure it is true or has been effective.
Has this co-mingling of sold by Amazon ever actually been documented at any scale beyond “extremely rare stock/pick” mistake? I am of course aware of the option for manufacturers to enable this for their registered products on FBA - and it may not have been optional at one point in time.
When I researched this a while ago I was unable to come up with much compelling evidence that it was an actual thing. It certainly has not happened to me over thousands of purchases - or anyone I know for that matter. Of course a fake could have been so good none of us could tell, but I do actually attempt to inspect carefully.
I have found counterfeit items from other web stores not on Amazon so it’s not like my detection skills are zero. Third party marketplace of course is different.
Heck, even Costco sent me an unsolicited refund for a counterfeit item they unknowingly sold me - so supply chain issues are bound to happen.
I don’t want to defend Amazon too much here, but this one is almost at urban legend status to me. Likely happened at limited scale some time ago, but it’s strange everyone says it’s endemic but no one IRL I know across probably tens of thousands of purchases has noticed it.
I don't think Amazon has ever outright admitted that they do, but Amazon's own terms give them the right to commingle their inventory with those of third party sellers.
F-4 Storage
We will provide storage services as described in these FBA Service Terms once we confirm receipt of delivery. We will keep electronic records that track inventory of Units by identifying the number of Units stored in any fulfillment center. We will not be required to physically mark or segregate Units from other inventory units (e.g., products with the same Amazon standard identification number) owned by us, our Affiliates or third parties in the applicable fulfillment center(s).
Right, that’s FBA. I’m talking about sold by Amazon. I’m specifically talking about a case where a sold by Amazon item came from co-mingled inventory from a FBA seller.
I also know from direct second party experience (I also personally saw the terms) that at least at a certain level of “brand” you can decline this option with Amazon for your registered product skus/ASIN even for FBA. I don’t know if this is offered to everyone though - I know it went through some sort of “deal reg” process in the one case I saw. I imagine this came through some sort of lawsuit or threats of one for a major brand at some point - but that is speculation on my part.
> I’m specifically talking about a case where a sold by Amazon item came from co-mingled inventory from a FBA seller.
The FBA terms I quoted specifically say that Amazon can co-mingle FBA inventory with their own (if the FBA seller doesn't opt out of "virtual tracking").
> The FBA terms I quoted specifically say that Amazon can co-mingle FBA inventory with their own (if the FBA seller doesn't opt out of "virtual tracking").
The wording in the quote explicitly states that an FBA unit can be substituted by owned by Amazon unit or other FBA units. But the wording is not clear whether SBA (Sold By Amazon) unit can be substituted by an FBA inventory. The terms covering Amazon's "first party inventory" (SBA, a.k.a. Amazon retail) are internal to Amazon and are not shared, AFAIK. But i can be wrong :-)
> The wording in the quote explicitly states that an FBA unit can be substituted by owned by Amazon unit or other FBA units. But the wording is not clear whether SBA (Sold By Amazon) unit can be substituted by an FBA inventory.
It would have to go both ways. If there are 10 FBA and 10 SBA units in the inventory, and Amazon decides to fill an FBA order with an SBA unit for operational reasons, now there are 10 FBA and 9 SBA units in inventory but the FBA seller only owns 9 units. That 10th FBA unit eventually has to go somewhere. The only options are that it fulfills an SBA order or Amazon forces the FBA seller to buy the SBA unit that Amazon shipped for the FBA order. As far as I know the latter does not happen.
But that has to go in both directions, necessarily. If they are not marked, as the terms say, they can't fulfill FBA from SBA but not SBA from FBA. It's all one big pile.
I don't believe this to be true. SBA in theory has it's own "pile" that they can of course use to substitute with a FBA third party seller if they deem it cheaper as they are confident that they are substituting like for like.
Given how FBA items are labeled differently (the Amazon required ASIN sticker) than SBA I can't recall a time I've received a third party item when buying direct from Amazon. I also can't really say with any certainty it does not or did not happen, but it was not obvious at least.
I've also seen contracts the explicitly forbid the co-mingling for brands that sell direct to Amazon. By necessity these would need to be under different piles on the backend - and it's easy to see different ASINs for the same SKU by searching for common big brand items. There will be a SBA listing, and then many other listings gaming the qty/size of the item that are FBA. An item that comes in the same size and packaging often is listed twice (or more) times with one being SBA and the rest third party.
It's definitely clear as mud, but I think the "sold by amazon/fulfilled by amazon" being co-mingled is largely urban legend. It's all speculation like this thread here, and very few verifiable facts when you dig into any of the reporting/social media accounts. I'm 100% sure it happens by mistake and very well may have happened as routine business in the past, but these days I cannot come up with an example that shows this happening on any scale.
I have absolutely bought multiple hard drives that were "shipped & sold by amazon" which turned out to be fake/counterfeit in some way. The serial numbers did not verify on the manufacturer's website either and they were completely DOA.
It doesn't matter. Amazon co-mingles product they sourced themselves with product from all the marketplace sellers. They also resell returns, which could have been swapped with something else.
> Amazon needs to be stopped, and legislation will not do so. Only its loyal consumers – who keep the beast alive – can do that by taking their money elsewhere.
We've (my wife and I) tried to stop using Amazon. But recently, I've run into issues where I need particular specialized bits and pieces (e.g. just today, a low profile 4" HVAC 90 degree elbow) that are only available via Amazon. A variation is where the item is available from one or two other places, but at a 10x markup.
We need to convince vendors to also avoid Amazon, and that may be even more of a difficult sell (no pun intended).
ps. Amazon employee #2, and I approve this message.
The other problem are people doing price arbitrage. You find the item on eBay and think to yourself, "cool, I'd rather patronize a small business" - but as it turns out, the item is drop-shipped from Amazon, Walmart, or the like.
This got me the other day, and it had me cracking up, they just put my shipping address and and checked out from Walmart. $5 lesson that Walmart actually sold what i wanted and i should have checked there first.
I recently had something very similar happened to me, and then the seller accidentally sent me another weirdly expensive item by mistake. Unfortunately it's a large heavy part from a ride lawn mower
I just read your Vox article and the comment "We exist with multiple hats" really resonated with me. I find it difficult to interact with a lot of people in tech because they too often seem to be overly dogmatic and unable to consider that other valid perspectives can and do exist... and that they might not know everything.
Sometimes I just want to say to those people, "I want to live in your world, where everything is black and white and you have all the answers in your pocket. It sounds comfortable and easy."
Cancelling Prime seems to have a big natural impact. I heard stories about how much order volume goes up after someone joins Prime, and it seems the opposite is true as well. I cancelled my membership when they started charging extra for ad-free video. It just felt so cheap and petty, since I was already paying for Prime. This was just the straw the broke the camel's back. I was already pretty fed up with Amazon due to being sent counterfeit products, used or open box items being sold as new, the push to leave retail packaging on my porch, all the fake reviews, the inability to find quality items via their search, the site being overrun with low quality garbage being resold from AliExpress for 10x the price, the concern for the future of my local stores, wishlists no longer supporting external links or simply ideas, etc, etc, etc.
I still do make the occasional order out of laziness or a lack of other options. However, I looked up all my orders from the lifetime of my account and charted them a couple weeks ago. After 6 years of year-over-year order increase, and a 17+ year overall uptrend in orders... they fell off a cliff once I cancelled. My orders fell by 60% the year after I cancelled Prime, and it's on pace to drop even further this year. I even did all my Christmas shopping last year without any Amazon orders, while previous years were 100% Amazon.
Going down to 0 can be hard, but even big drops in orders will have an impact. And if that money goes to other retailers, and demand grows, they can invest in more inventory and a wider array of goods that people need. Any percentage shift away from Amazon is progress, especially in done my the masses.
I'd encourage everyone to dump their Prime membership. If you order more than $35 you can still get free shipping (you just have to be explicit in selecting it and be vigilant during checkout to avoid the multiple traps to try and get you to sign back up... lots of dark patterns). Shipping times are a little more unpredictable. Sometimes it still only takes 1-2 days, while other times it seems to take a week or two. Most things aren't urgent. If they are, I try to find them locally.
I've also tried to stop obsessing about finding the "best" whatever it is I'm looking for. When online, there are a lot of traps, but one of the things I expect retail stores to do is make sure they are carrying quality products they'd stand behind. They don't want returns or to get a reputation for selling junk. I was getting a toaster a while back and instead of spending hours researching online, I just went to a store I frequent, looked at the 5 options they had, and picked the one I liked the best. Hours of time saved, and the toaster works fine. I expect I'll have it for many years to come.
I've discussed it to death here on HN. Sort of over doing that anymore. I was only there for 14 months before getting out to become a stay at home parent.
I would love to avoid Amazon, and indeed I would love to support local retailers, but more often than not it is simply impossible. The only way I can find out if a local vendor carries an item I'm interested in, and if they have it in stock, is to physically go there. The amount of time that requires is orders of magnitude more than what it takes to order the item on Amazon, where I am all but guaranteed that it will be available.
It is astonishing to me that brick-and-mortar retailers have not banded together to put an on-line front-end onto their stock. It would technically straightforward (albeit not trivial) to build a web site as easy to use as Amazon, but with guaranteed same-day or next-day delivery via a partner like doordash, and with more reliable quality because local vendors have more of an incentive to vet their suppliers. I would love to use a service like that, but AFAICT it doesn't exist.
Someone here, please build this. I will be your first customer.
The other thing is local retailers have cut back on all specialty items because they expect people to buy those items online.
The problem is that buying specialized things actually makes sense to do online. But online buying has the problem that an average online retailer gives no guarantee that they will fulfill an order faithfully (I still remember trying to order shoe from Target online and getting ... a used masked and I assume others remember online "burn" as well) so Amazon has a key position of online guarantor. As a "natural monopoly", one might imagine such a role would be regulated but not in the present climate, ha ha ha.
Some stores do have their stock available online. I know Home Depot does. The website tells you what aisle the item is in, which rack in that aisle, and how many they have.
I've also seen where stores won't have it at the store I have selected, but it will also check the stock of nearby stores to tell me of one of those other stores have it.
It's not ubiquitous yet, but I'm seeing it more and more. I've also found with things like Apple Pay that checkout on random online stores is just as fast and easy as Amazon, which is quite nice.
You seem to forget that you can call nearly any local retailer and they will check their inventory for you and often even set it aside for you. A phone call does not require orders of magnitude more time than an online order and you can build a friendly connection in your community that way, too.
I'll show my ass on this, but calling someone is absolutely an order of magnitude more effort than checking online. Anytime I have to put in an order via phone or place a reservation, I do a mental check of if I actually care enough to not just go with something else. There's a social battery cost associated with it, even higher than talking to someone in person.
For a lot of random things, like... say, a suction cup thingy that mounts my smartphone to a car dashboard, I have no idea which stores are likely to sell such things, and they could have a wide discrepancy in prices. I can type into Amazon and see a list of products and prices, but if I want to buy one at a local retailer I might have to call three or four stores before finding someone who carries the thing I'm looking for. It would be really nice to have a search engine that can search products across brick-and-mortar retailers.
So for another example, I wanted to get a stainless steel pasta strainer. I checked four different kitchen/cooking stores and the ones that had them them only had ones that were too deep, and they were all priced as ridiculously luxurious items, over $90. Then I checked a local hardware store and they had exactly what I wanted and it was only $12. I only thought of that place because I passed it on the way home and was desperate.
Sure, sometimes things take a bit of work and might not be instantaneous or easy. It all boils down to whether or not one values immense convenience over not supporting Amazon.
I honestly wish this were the case for 80% of the calls I make to local stores. Most people they have working the phones do not care about the inventory and will just say they're out of stock or don't know if there are any on the shelves. This goes double for requesting a special item from a store that would normally carry it, but doesn't. They put the order into their "system" and then it disappears, never to be heard from again.
Calling retail stores to do anything other than to see if they're open or, in the case of restaurants, get a reservation is just wasting time. At least for the retailers that I've communicated with.
> A phone call does not require orders of magnitude more time than an online order and you can build a friendly connection in your community that way, too.
I fear it's too late for this. For any category of item, pretty much all the stuff you buy from Amazon or elsewhere online generally comes from the same few factories in China. Any other potential suppliers probably went out of business years ago, are too expensive, or are too small or local to work with.
You could open a brick and mortar store tomorrow but you'd be selling the exact same products that come from the same factories as Amazon.
In Japan, the Yodobashi Camera chain has a web interface tied to their huge retail stores. The page for each product [1, for example] has a link to a list of stores where it is in stock [2]. If you’re in a hurry and near one of those stores, you can have it held for pickup later that day. If not, you can have it delivered.
I buy a lot from Amazon Japan as well, and I haven’t had the problems with shoddy or counterfeit products that others have reported. I don’t know if that’s just my luck or if Amazon Japan screens its suppliers better. But it’s nice to have strong competitors to Amazon in online shopping. In addition to Yodobashi, there are Rakuten, Yahoo Japan, Bic Camera, and Yamada Denki for a wide range of products, as well as Kinokuniya, Maruzen Junkudo, Sanseido, and others for books.
I've been hoping someone would build the same thing. Even without delivery, I'd love to be able to search for products across multiple stores through a web interface and see their availability in a map view, with price and in-stock status. I would be happy to go to the store and buy it, as long as I only need to make one trip and I know it will be in stock and at a certain price.
I worked on this, it was called Milo.com. we had crazy scraping and xml/csv feed ingestion. It was a terribly difficult business because most retailers hated us. ebay bought it and eventually killed it.
Why did retailers hate you? Wouldn’t they want a solution that brings people to their store because you listed their product as being there and available?
That's a big part of it, yes. Retailers take advantage of information assymetry after all. While you're in Best buy, you may pay more than online to walk out with an item, but would you pay more if you could instantly confirm it's at Walmart next door for $20 less? Maybe not.
Funnily enough though Best Buy loved us and provided real time data via API and daily CSV data dumps just for us. They were like that, along with Toys R Us and AutoZone. Most others hated us, including Guitar Center after we accidentally DDOSed their web site with our scrapers.
I do technical consulting for small food companies
This is an immediate non-starter for most local retail businesses because of the steep (25+%) transaction fees Doordash and other consumer last-mile providers charge, and the razor-thin margins of many retail stores
To be clear I agree with your proposal overall and suspect this particular challenge is surmountable, but it's very difficult to get it right, and either way relying on another parasitic platform won't be the answer
It must be cheaper than UPS/FedEx for some items, because Home Depot and Lowes have started using DoorDash and other similar services for 'shipping'. I'm sure they batch up the orders and get discounted rates, but that seems to be their preferred method for items that exist in a store within 20 miles and can't be shipped directly from the manufacturer.
In my country (and this might be very specific to my city), one of the drugstore chains partnered with Uber, so you get deliveries within a few hours at a cheaper rate compared to other last-mile delivery options, probably by allocating drivers in off-peak hours.
Wolt is great. I’m in Cyprus currently and Wolt feels so much nicer to use than DoorDash, UberEats, etc. Much of it’s the user interface which feels a bit like Waze back in the day and without all the gimmicky ads and in your face junk. Bummer to hear DoorDash owns them.
That you can do groceries, order flowers, drinks, or dinner makes it great for dates.
Downside is that apparently Wolt charges stores something like a €250 fee a month. It’s ridiculous how much any of these services charge small businesses.
I hope automated drone delivery becomes a thing and make it easier to bring up competitors.
It's like $140 annually now... and if you're mostly just buying things and not watching their content, it's a nice speed bump to just accumulate items in the cart until you hit the minimum free shipping and only order then.
When you occasionally do for some reason need an instant item, you can pay the shipping then. It's kinda like for most people, having a second or third car is much more expensive than just renting one when you actually need it.
That said, I am close to a Costco so that's where I get most of my bulk items - the Amazon stuff tends to be more discretionary.
Amazon is very convenient when needing something one off. But we are not going to renew Prime and slowly ween off it.
Still looking for alternatives though, Costco is okay, but when you want something asap, you need either to drive to stores or pay for same day delivery and tips.
Home Depot seems to delivering some stuff for free the next day (and occasionally the same day.) And they can always have the product ready for pickup in front. Sometimes its so hard to find stuff in their store. Even some of the delivery charges feel lower than before.
None of these are good arguments to convince the average person to not use Amazon (or any other service provided by a megacorp). A better argument (well, maybe not as of May 2025) is that most crap on Amazon is available for 1/5 the price from websites like Aliexpress. Nothing on Amazon is sold for less than ~8 dollars, meanwhile you can buy the exact same product from Aliexpress for less than a dollar.
I feel like the author is undermining their own complaint in regards to Rekognition. Anyone can just sign up for an AWS account and start using the service, pretty much the same as anything else AWS sells. Then in response to specific bad behavior by US police departments Amazon cut off their access, a practice they've kept up to this day.
Amazon could have quietly (or loudly in 2025) lifted the ban at any point in the last five years to much nothing in the terms of pushback.
Myself I can't stand the media blitz that tries to talk up Prime Day every year.
I like hunting for bargains as much as anybody, I love checking out the used games at Gamestop or items on clearance at Best Buy, not least the reuse center at Ithaca where I might find a cassette or Video CD deck with karaoke features or a minidisc player.
Prime Day seems to be just a waste of time. I don't see any attractive prices on anything I want to buy. So many web sites scour Amazon for good deals and can't find any. It's a snoozer.
Fun fact: if you click on Amazon affiliate link, anything you put in your cart in the next 24 hours counts towards that affiliate once you hit purchase on that cart
I wish our local postage carrier was more efficient. Amazon provides next day delivery, whilst other online stores dispatch your purchase within 2-3 days and the package arrives is a further 2-5 days.
I noped out of Prime a long time ago when it became clear they were training the population to treat all their purchases as instant gratification impulse buys.
No, because taking a week out of my life to go by train instead of plane is impractical. Making myself wait a few extra business days for my books to arrive is not. I apologize if you had a better point you were trying to make and I missed it.
The point might have been that booking travel online is now fairly easy and seamless, to the point where people might impulse book international vacations when they might otherwise have stayed close to home.
Sure, I'm not a fan of the environmental footprint of casual air travel, but offsetting that there are positive effects of the world having become smaller. My subscription to Prime would only be an unnecessary convenience.
Stupid Best Buy had to have a 5090 in stock and available for me to purchase within one hour. Otherwise I'd probably willing to run me 3080 into the ground. For some reason Amazon next day delivery doesn't check my "instant gratification" box, but I'm a sucker for hour availability.
Quite a bit, I usually try not to buy anything other than groceries, but when I need something I usually really need it because something has either broken or a sudden need has arisen. That said I do try to get it locally first.
It can be about predictability as well. If Amazon says two days, it is usually two days. I arrange the purchase for a day when I don't work or work a short shift. If it is a valuable product that requires someone to receive the parcel, I don't have to deal with shippers who force people to use a pickup point that is a 15 minute drive away. (I don't drive, so that is usually problematic.) At the end of the day, in my case, it is more about receiving the product than getting it right away.
Am I missing something, the article randomly says:
"For context, the US federal government spent $53 million on public education in 2022." and links to: https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti... which says K-12 schools spend $857.2 billion.
The federal government is distinct from state or local governments. The numbers still might not be consistent (it says “[t]he federal government provides 13.6% of funding for public K-12 education”, which would be more than $53MM) but the page you linked draws that distinction too. State and local funds make up the difference.
You didn't miss anything, the author of the piece was just wrong. They either screwed up the math or didn't read their own link correctly, or both. Moreover, it is trivial to search for the US Dept of Education's budget for 2022 and fact check this.
It's also cited as evidence that Amazon is now more powerful than the US Government which is just factually fucking false. It really is a different breed of person that thinks some millions of dollars > sovereign power. It's like, yeah, they lobby, but they also have people lobbying against them, including near-competitors. The dynamic is not as simple as spend some $X millions of dollars and get some amount of equivalent benefit. You lobby because an entity with sovereign power can trivially destroy your business.
I guess, but Amazon gets me stuff tomorrow or the next day, reliably, week in and week out. Yeah, I could find this stuff elsewhere on the internet. But not for Tuesday delivery. And not without opening another account. Also, right now, often only by paying a tariff-adjacent fee to cover the import costs of the vendors that didn't have the foresight to pre-stock imports like Amazon did.
People who want to write stuff like this really need to reckon with the fact that Amazon is and remains the superior product, and by a very significant degree.
They're not winning because they "hate democracy" or are "full-stop evil" or whatever. They're winning because they're the best.
And that's kind of an issue. Amazon effectively has a monopoly in this space, and competing at a similar level just is not possible anymore. And Amazon is so big that, even when you have a better product and service, it can buy you off¹.
I have moved anything I don’t need quickly off Amazon as much as reasonably possible, and I do avoid some things from Amazon as well, but for too many things they’re the cheapest and fastest option, or the 2nd cheapest and fastest option.
Also if I think there is a reasonably high chance I’ll return an item, I also go through Amazon, because they haven’t once in 20 years I’ve been using them giving me an issue, charged a restocking fee etc.
Other online shops simply don’t match enough of these Amazon value prop to sway me over
My take is that Walmart.com comes pretty close. When I was driving through Pennsylvania two weeks back I saw a huge Walmart.com warehouse right next to an Amazon warehouse. The last mile delivery service of the two seems close to identical (though Walmart+ disingenuously offers "free" delivery from my local store that expect you to tip the driver. [1])
Amazon often costs 5 cents less and you might find that all the issues of Bocci the Rock are at Amazon and one is missing from Walmart, but Walmart is taking the fight to them.
For photography stuff in particular, I buy from B&H, Adorama or direct from vendors such as Red River Paper. Often the prices are better than Amazon and the service is much better (e.g. the owner of the later has schooled me on details of papers and printing that most people couldn't imagine)
[1] Not against giving the tip, just against saying I don't like the comparison against free shipping from other vendors.
If the idea is to avoid Amazon on any sort of ethical basis (including monopolistic practices and squeezing suppliers etc) Walmart is no different. You could change any issue you have with Amazon and replace it with Walmart and they all still apply, sans the peeing in bottles of delivery drivers
At least as a shopper my feelings about Walmart are pretty mixed.
That time I needed a game camera immediately and AMZN said 5 days I got it at 7am the next day at Walmart. Most of the bread at the bakery is that awful stuff people accuse of being “ultra-processed food” but they have something like the Vollkornbrot you see in German Bäckerei that is 100% honest and delicious to my taste. The pharmacist there is a real eager beaver who never fails to tell me something I didn’t know about a medicine I take and that’s not easy. On the other hand I ride the bus with someone who used to work there who says it was a shit place to work.
Walmart didn’t have a representative sitting behind Trump at his inauguration and even if it’s evil it’s better to have two evil competitors than one evil monopoly.
FWIW, my suspicion is that people motivated by "Amazon is full-stop evil and an enemy of Civil Rights, Human Rights, Workers, Small Businesses, and Democracy"[1] would be even less motivated to shop at the temple of Sam Walton.
But even so, I just checked and of the last 12 items in my Amazon purchase history, Walmart.com loses on every one of them before shipping is included. They're not really in the game absent externalities like location or specific product.
[1] Not hyperbole: those are the sections in the linked article!
I have my own grievances with Amazon, not least that 2 day shipping became 5 day shipping without warning during the pandemic although I know they had infrastructure in my area because for years I saw their delivery van going around on Sunday. I felt it was really unfair because if I have to wait 5 days for something to arrive I am inclined to go get it at Target or another store in town if I can.
Since then I’ve taken them up on offers of a free month of Prime or a week for $2 which is attractive if it gets me free shipping on a purchase. Now I get the same service as everyone else but if they wanted to be a loyal customer hey should have treated me as if they wanted to impress me as an earlier.
Notably Walmart has a + service which is a little cheaper than Prime but doesn’t have the video and other benefits that I’m indifferent too. I agree with the direction of that guy’s critiques of Amazon but not the magnitude but I’m a strange case in that I’m an amateur political scientist who works as a software dev with real political scientists that I have to be deferential to.
Canceling my Prime account mainly meant I bought less stuff overall. A win for my wallet and the planet in the end. I need zero friction in my life for healthy eating and exercise, not for buying crap from a Chinese brand of the week (Glorf, Qerdu, Plund or whatever).
> Canceling my Prime account mainly meant I bought less stuff overall.
Which sounds like an agreement with my point, no? Buying stuff without Amazon was in aggregate "more expensive" for you in the broader sense of value that includes effort/experience/whatever. So you didn't.
And, bravo? I'm all for efficiency and reasonable asceticism, and likely agree with you about the general consumerist bent of our society.
All I'm saying is that constitutes an argument in FAVOR of Amazon as a retailer product, and not an indictment.
They are also actively preventing other marketplaces from being better. For example, for exclusive audiobooks on audible, the producers are paid 40% but only 25% for non-exclusive ones.
Amazon enables us to buy lots of things we just wouldn't if there was just a little bit more of friction. I'm not sure it's an overall positive that they have next day delivery. We'd definitely be better overall if Amazon didn't undermine smaller shops using discounts only they can afford long term.
This statement is not an attack on your character or being just a broad generalization.
The biggest addiction of the modern era is convenience. Once people have it, it is very difficult to give up. We are all addicted to this, we aren't running this site via the letters column in a newspaper, because of convenience. But it also means we tend to ignore the negatives of said services.
Your point of them winning because they're the best, that can also be true. But because of that and the convenience addiction they provide, we let them get away with all the other stuff.
I'm not saying this is an excuse to use Amazon, I have never used it. I am just saying it is a hard hurdle for some to overcome.
It's baked into the price, but I can buy a free shipping item cheaper from Amazon than what the shipping alone would cost, if I just went to FedEx/UPS myself.
The author reeks of self importance and what he thinks is moral superiorioty. Was too hard to read.
To the point of the post, Amazon engages in lawful tactics to conquer the retail market. Consumers are incentivelzed to get the best value out of their money. If you want change legislation is needed. Your approach of shaming people for using their services isn't scalable. And I also don't agree with plenty of the premises in your article but it doesn't matter.
I can almost always find a small company - often thing-i-want.com that has just as good deals and they provide useful advice about which version is best - often I have bought the more expensive version for those reasons. (I think for the better though I rarely buy enough of anything to have an informed opinion on relative merit)
When I lived in the US, I tried to order stuff from Amazon as less as possible. The problem was the lack of decent urban areas and public transport. Going to a shop in my city where they had the same thing which I wanted would take the better part of a day.
One of the people I follow on tiktok suggested abstaining from shopping from large corporations for Lent except for sundays. I tried it and ended up finding out some things about myself I did not realize, which I guess is kind of the point.
Strangely enough, yes to both (at least for in store purchases). And I find neither company particularly ethical.
They have a tighter control on their supply chain and don't have a truly open "market" where anyone can sell crap (or stolen crap).
A lot of this comes down to limited stocking and shelf space. Amazon effectively has unlimited storage space. Hence their ability to show off 6000 drop shipping products which are actually the same product.
Walmart and Target, on the other hand, have to be somewhat judicious because shelf space is limited. They can't have a row of the same products under different labels. And if what they choose to sell has quality problems they get hit harder for it. They take the loss for the unsold counterfeit goods. Amazon, by their nature, sees minimal hits when products are determined to be counterfeit. That usually just means they blacklist a seller. They are hardly impacted.
Also, funnily enough, it's why I don't worry about counterfeits at Wholefoods even though it's parent company is Amazon.
What you said is true for their physical locations, but both Target and Walmart implemented Amazon-style marketplaces a while back, and my impression is that there's very little oversight or quality control. Even less than on Amazon.
I'm pretty sure they don't co-mingle though. So if you make sure you're buying from Walmart or Target and not some other party you should be getting the same items that are in the stores.
Yes, it's on you to identify if the seller is Target or a third party. It's listed on the product page, but if you didnt know that there were third party items, you would probably just assume you were buying from Target/Walmart.
Happened to me a month ago when purchasing an item for my wife from walmart website. Ended up being 3rd party, slow delivery, and counterfeit item upon arrival. An issue i’ve actually never had with amazon.
Mostly social reasons here but there are also practical reasons even for those who don't care about any of this stuff.
Amazon is becoming more and more like AliExpress and Temu. They can always do it cheaper, but it's very touch and go when it comes to the quality of the merchandise you'll receive.
If that quality isn't a concern for you, Temu and AliExpress can give you similar quality for much less. Take a screenshot of the item on Amazon with Google Lens and use the image search on either of these platforms to get the item even cheaper.
For LPs specifically: it's much better than paying import fees now that preorders are instant with RSS alerts. Also AWS Science/Dev Program Training is nice. Supplement labels can be cross-referenced elsewhere. Just use Nootropics Depot, Science Bio, Cosmic Nootropics,iHerb, Syntharise, etcetera. All legal/not iillicit.
Many commenter's here saying they cannot avoid Amazon. I am not here to deny their reality, but I have a different story
I have avoided Amazon since ~2004 when I accidentally bought two box sets (double clicked) and there was no way to undo one. Clearly a Dark Pattern. Fuckers
I have succeeded. I always find another source for everything (mostly books, some small electronics).
I am not in the USA, I am in the South Pacific, a long way away however you measure it (except we speak English, mostly, here too). I have to wonder if that is a reason? Yet we use the same Internet
I started avoiding Amazon because they dishonestly ripped me off 20 years ago. I would start to avoid them today because they are evil
I refuse to boycott Amazon, but I do try other sites and local places first, but I'm not going to to a 100% boycott that doesn't really prove much; I just don't run to Amazon first to get stuff.
As someone who is very personally interested in the intersection between different political opinions, I really like how this article side-stepped individual issues to present the argument that Amazon is bad as a whole. “Ok, you don’t connect with BLM? Let’s talk about something else.” I find very, very often that conservatives & liberals are talking past each other and cannot even understand why the other side is making the argument they are. This is the first time in a while I’ve seen that side-step motion applied productively.
I agree with the authors conclusion about Amazon, but even if you don’t, you should think about how polarized the nation is and what political issues we can try to coalesce on.
It felt pretty insulting to me. It had the smug, sarcastic, holier-than-thou kind of flavor to it—"there are only 3 ways to think about things, I already know more than you do about who you are and what you believe, you must be one of THAT tribe of one-dimensional dummies, here's YOUR flavor that I've so generously dumbed down for you."
Kind of like the "didactic" voice that the young men on YouTube use when they're cosplaying documentarians or newscasters.
It works better for authors who genuinely know what they're talking about--but in most cases, the closer you look at something, the more complexity you notice, and the less breezily confident you are about it. So often, it's like this—"reheated nachos," do the kids call it? A big sassy omnibus "take" of "takes," more than, like, facts and analysis? All building up to a meaningless language-of-empowerment call to action?
Mm, I could see someone deeply invested in and knowledgeable about politics feeling this way. But I think it’s an uncharitable read. I don’t think the average layman would bristle so hard at this.
Regardless of what one thinks about Amazon, one's actions have approximately zero effect on it.
Even if one controlled, 10, 100, 1,000, 10,000, or 100,000 people and commanded them to not use Amazon, it would have little effect.
If someone opts to stay away from Amazon, they should at least do it with clear eyes: they are doing it to feel something and will not actually affect the company.
I've been a vegetarian for 30 years. Big beef is still raging despite all the Hindus and abstainers. Doesn't mean I'll grill a burger and chow down. It would be great if suddenly the world woke up and thought about consequences of what they do in a myriad of things. It will never happen, but acting unaware when you are aware is something you have to live with. Some people think morals are divine, but I guess some people think of them as "feelings".
I hate to be this guy, really, but did you consider that hypocrisy and anti-hypocrisy is basically what OP meant by "feelings" since they are based on (mostly self) perceptions? (Have you ever pointed out hypocrisy to someone? They are quick to tell you why you're wrong - it's absolutely about self justification not external judgement)
I don't understand the point you're making. Someone is living according to their principles and we're playing games with semantics as if "feelings" is a bad word? Okay, you win, it "feels" better to satisfy one's values.
If those principles don't make a difference on the world around you then it's not bad but it is quite limited. It's fine to do things that don't make a difference, but it's important to keep perspective.
In particular, if you have an urge to make a difference on a regular basis, that's a great urge, but you need to make sure you don't fall into the trap of doing something that feels good but has negligible effect and thinking the job is done.
I don't really get this. The things I've chosen not to get from Amazon are similarly measurable in dollars or other units. Not that I think I'm going to win you over, but I don't understand this argument.
For the sake of mind melding I'll give it one more shot, but don't mind if we just don't connect on this issue at this time.
OP says stopping Amazon purchases have near zero effect, but might make you feel better, you said you don't do it for feelings but instead to avoid hypocrisy. My 1st comment was directed ONLY at the hypocrisy statement.
Hypocrisy is not a quantifiable thing, and is actually ONLY about how two decisions are interpreted. What is hypocrisy to one person is not to another. So it's subjective. Yet your subjective analysis of your own actions takes precedent, justifying your decision to avoid Amazon. Fine. The term I use for "subjective analysis that forms a most-likely-post-hoc justification for an action" is feeling. It feels right to do it is all we can really say about that. This is important and good and unassailable. It's morals and character. Good stuff definitely but not quantifiable.
As for the rest of the stuff about voting. Taking one dollar from Amazon is quantifiable, but we don't know how many dollars are required to make them change. It comes down to how the board or CEO or analysis or market feels about Amazons p/e or profit. So, not helpful. Will cutting another 100$ out of Amazons profits bring us closer to a change? What will that change look like? How much more do we have to cut to create a change? Are there better or worse changes if we cut more now vs more later vs quickly vs gradually? Etc etc.
Unlike voting which has a very precise decision point and an exact measure of progress towards that decision point for each vote cast. Perfectly quantifiable.
He pretty much hits the nail on the head as far as describing modern-day political and social movements. It's about doing the bare minimum to make oneself feel better and to be able to brand oneself as an activist.
It seems like all the real-deal movements and protests died out or were neutralized by the late '70s.
"For context, the US federal government spent $53 million on public education in 2022" Hilarious, the federal government probably spent more on photocopiers for the department of education in 2022 than that.
Honestly I hate Amazon because they are a mega corp that just gets bigger and bigger. But on the other hand they are just the best online store hands down. I ordered an electric toothbrush yesterday at 23:30 and it arrived today at 15:30 - that's just amazing. Also returning stuff is hassle-free and they often are the cheapest.
I tried using Otto for some time but it just cannot compare. Sure. I could also shop from multiple shops but that is kinda waste of time. Amazon is a real one-stop shop.
As they get bigger competing with them becomes harder and harder as their overhead per transaction reduces due to volume. Eventually they become the only choice. I feel like with Amazon this is nearly the case. Many local brick-and-mortar stores that would have existed in the early 200's are non-existent today. Even chains like RadioShack and Circuit City are gone. This leaves the next alternative to be slower and more expensive online stores that struggle to compete.
The only standard I hold Amazon to is if they can get me the things I want in the fastest time. Until someone does that better, I have no reasons not to use Amazon.
This behavior works in a competitive, monopoly averse economy. In the US, this means you will eventuy have no alternative to Amazon.
I've been thinking about the poor quality and availability of Communist goods in the 1980s. I think about the bread lines every time I shop at Costco. What happened to make us so complacent?
I understand hyperbole is a useful rhetorical device, but it's very hard for me to take anyone who uses it seriously or trust anything they say at all.
And it really doesn't help develop trust when the citations used to support one's points directly contradicts them (like that bit about Amazon providing real-time surveillance from Ring doorbells to police without owners' knowledge - the one and only thing I decided to read the source for which said quite the opposite).
It's a shame too since I'm sure the author had some good points, but I have neither the time nor energy to research every single claim made to see which ones aren't bullshit.
It’s right there in the second paragraph of the WaPo(!) story that Ring owners opt in and can decline to share data.
Does Rekognition perform poorly? Maybe it does, but it’s a best effort service, not a police officer in a box. That AWS was shamed into not selling it to law enforcement doesn’t mean law enforcement won’t have access to facial recognition, only that the vendor they choose isn’t capable of being embarrassed by bad PR.
Yes. That made me scratch my head. It also says explicitly that no real-time feeds were available. It appears the program just let police contact owners to request video. Never mind that program was discontinued last year.
I can only assume the author didn't think anyone would read the links they provided.
"Amazon only stopped for PR reasons at the start of the George Floyd protests, and even then they only issued a “one-year moratorium.” This has since been extended indefinitely, but frankly that doesn’t matter."
So he's... blaming them... for doing what he wishes they would do?
This honestly may as well have been a paid ad by Amazon. It served as a reminder for me that Prime Day is coming up. That reminder was followed up with several extremely weak arguments that Amazon is the pinnacle of evil. Also felt like it was written largely by AI
Many of the things the author accuses Amazon of doing are troubling, but the logic the author used in the Chris Brown music buying example to tie it all together shows of a lack of distinction between types of cooperation with evil.
When an act has both a potentially good and bad effect Philosophers like to distinguish the morality of this act of "cooperating with evil" by analyzing the degrees to which your cooperation is:
- formal or material (do you want the bad thing to happen and that's why you're buying from Amazon?)
- immediate or mediate (are you supplying a critical component such that without your specific instance of cooperation the evil could not occur?)
- proximate or remote (Do you work for Amazon?)
Each of these dimensions should be taken into consideration because without such analysis one can easily become scrupulous about every act that one does that may have unintended side effects. This is how you get people who say things like "there is no such thing as ethical consumption in capitalism" and other extreme statements that would otherwise force you to be a monk in a desert lest your acts accidentally create harm.
To learn more about this principle of double effect:
It’s like some Soviet-style retailer where everyone is supposed to shop for everything. It’s about as contrary to competitive capitalism as a company can be. I signed off two years ago and haven’t missed it for a minute - though you should make your own decisions, as with everything.
Amazon manipulates your product searches. When you search for a product, it will push a few select brands and you won’t get past that, except you deliberately search for a specific brand. So it will limit your options. But it will give you the illusion to show you a large amount of various brands.
Searching for a product category on Google won‘t allow you to find a big number of brands either. Because they will push certain products as well.
So be aware that these platforms will limit your options.
But I admit that Amazon has a very polished UX. It‘s a one-stop shop, returns are handled very generously, and you don’t need to visit a dozen sites to get various products.
Trains are shaped like penis, bus is shape like penis, skyscraper is shape like penis, rocket is shape like penis, now Amazon logo is shape like penis? Why are all Americans always looking everywhere for shape like penis. Every time.
"Hello, American, look at this pencil"
"Pencil?! Shaped like penis!"
"Hello, American, look at your hands"
"Oh my god! That is five penises a hand!"
Constantly searching for penis everywhere. Is there reason for this? It is not as common elsewhere, but American is always constantly searching for penis. If not provided, American will construct it out of household objects. Desperate for penis, American will find it even in intangible objects like logo.
Ha! Good reference. Look at perplexity logo. It is fan of rectangular slats with line in middle. To American this is "butthole". Can only imagine that in USA, people are like duck with strangely corkscrewing genitals. Fan shaped butthole is for insertion of Torx T6 bit perhaps, to fulfill local slang of "screwing".
It's not enough to be against Amazon.
You need to be against everyone who
- sells tech to the gov,
- undercuts prices,
- exploits employees,
- lobbies for regulation.
Not to mention the real reason we hate Jeff Bezos.
Because you wouldn't like it if I mentioned it.
A real reason to avoid Amazon is fake merchandise. I'd been buying a vitamin supplement from them for years. Then they sent me a notice that it was being recalled as a fake.[1] (Archive [2]) They paid a refund for the last purchase. But that's all. Amazon won't respond to questions about what was in it or who the real seller is.
I no longer buy anything from Amazon that could be faked.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/ask/questions/Tx2Q5O0C84HF1GU/
[2] https://archive.is/rN8B9
Good rule of thumb is that if it goes on or in your body do not buy it from Amazon.
I think it's even worse. They have a completely chaotic returns policy meaning they re-sell used things pretending they are new all the time. I stopped buying from Amazon UK after I received 6 opened and used items in just 20 orders. Some were even missing components. I even received used underwear (yuck!) from a brand that sells boxers inside sealed packages and doesn't allow returns. I heard some scammers were exploiting this returns policy by purchasing phones, installing malware, and sending them back to Amazon.
I received only one part of a chair, repackaged in a box much to small to hold the entire chair (which I received when seeking replacement)
I’m about to start grad school to get my clinical mental health counseling licensure, and Amazon has multiple fake/counterfeit DSM-5s (basically the holy grail of recognized mental disorders and their insurance billing codes) on it, so much in fact that my program director mentioned the Amazon problem in the orientation.
So I’ll add “if you need to guarantee the accuracy of the information in whatever you’re buying… avoid Amazon as well”
What is a "fake DSM-5"? It is a book, anyone can copy it, legally or not.
Why would someone go out of their way to produce different content if they are going to violate intellectual property anyways, be it trademarks or copyright?
Sorry, counterfeit is more accurate (edited original comment) - director mentioned a number of previous students who ordered their copy from Amazon and got DSM 4s or copies missing huge sections of diagnostic criteria, etc.
Or if it's electronic. Fire risk.
the fact legitimate electricians buy fuses/wiring/circuit breakers/crimps off amazon thinking they're as advertised is actually terrifying
all the buildings you enter: houses of friends/family, supermarkets, hospitals, transport, restaurants, offices, all with potentially fatal fake electrics
hopefully the fire door and extinguishers weren't bought from amazon
I recall reading about some counterfeit circuit breakers that were basically just toggle switches. They had no "trip" mechanism at all.
The few tradespeople I know don't even shop at Lowes. They have accounts at supply houses that don't even offer public retail sales.
It’s usually homeowners buying and installing crappy electrical products off Amazon, or ‘handyman’ types who don’t have a license. I sell and run commercial electrical work at a union shop and we buy electrical material from supply houses, not Amazon.
You certainly could buy material off Amazon but if you’re passing the cost onto the customer, why not just buy the real thing?
People buy fuses from Amazon for the cars/motorcycles not understanding it can kill them. They are actually evil at this point for doing nothing about any of these ongoing issues. They can't be unaware if us rando consumers are aware (or if they are doing recalls for fake products).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B90_SNNbcoU
I wonder if this applies to Amazon Pharmacy — seems like maybe this might have a bit more governance.
Amazon Pharmacy is its own regulated pharmacy with licenses in all of the states, not a marketplace/platform like Amazon.com.
It’s really a renamed PillPack [1] which they acquired in 2018 with (I assume) Amazon Pharmacy launching on top of their licenses in 2020
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PillPack
>Good rule of thumb is that if it goes on or in your body do not buy it from Amazon.
If I do that, I always make sure I'm buying from the seller and not a reseller or distributor; I meant to say no other party besides the Seller and Amazon.
If it ships from Amazon, you can still run the risk that you get a counterfeit item since Amazon will co-mingle the inventory. Safer to only buy from the seller and is shipped by the seller.
Good point! But it's very rare to see Seller shipping the product, as Amazon likes to control the inventory itself. Also, I believe Amazon encourages sellers to ship the products to their warehouses for faster delivery to customers, and they'd cover all the costs within their 15% fees.
Where's the best value & quality for that sort of stuff? It's insane what some sites charge for seemingly simple supplements.
I recommend now.
https://www.nowfoods.com/
(no affiliation)
If Costco has what you want, it's decent value and a pretty good source.
Vitacost.com has worked well for me.
When I tried to buy quercetin from Vitacost recently, they dropped a second, unwanted item into my cart. I noped right out of there. Turns out they were acquired by notorious lawbreakers Kroger.
https://lawyerinc.com/biggest-kroger-lawsuits-in-company-his...
Needless to say, take this sort of advice with a grain of salt.
I know it's not a very popular cause these days, but "Democracy" seems like a real reason too.
You mean the system of government in which political power is vested in the people who freely elect representatives? Not sure how it applies.
Not sure either. Even Bezos' Washington Post has been pretty critical of the current administration.
Bezos personally blocked the WaPo editorial board from endorsing Kamala resulting in multiple resignations and a 10% loss in subscribers. A paper that adopted the tag line “Democracy Dies in Darkness” bending the knee to an authoritarian who committed election fraud would be hilarious if it weren’t so depressing.
But we shouldn’t be surprised that these liberal journalism outfits consistently fail the public. The same thing happened in Germany in the 20s and 30s with Ullstein. And in Italy with their liberal papers. And with the Times running cover for Hitler’s regime under Ochs.
It's his paper. Not great, but by definition still not anti-democratic.
I would consider the capture of journalist outfits by billionaire capitalists who kowtow to authoritarians to be an erosion of our democracy. They call it the fourth estate for a reason.
I bought a book. A literal book. And it was wrong size, wrong paper, printed on a 5 degree skew including the cover. It should have been from Simon and Schulster, but despite Sold and Shipped, it just wasn’t.
It’s all fake. Every bit of it.
[dead]
> https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00DJUK8HS/ref=ask_ql_qh_d...
PreserVision -> I've never heard about that brand, so I would have never bought it. What was the reason behind your purchase decision?
I’m having trouble finding alternatives. Do I really have to go to four or five different websites to buy my supplements.
I've switched to iHerb for my supplements about a month ago after reading a handful of stories about non-genuine supplements being sold on Amazon. It's been a good experience so far, even next-day (sometimes 2-day) deliveries. And the search/discovery on their website is superior.
[dead]
Um. Exactly how many supplements do you need?
I don’t mind sharing in the interest of discussion:
600mg tongkat Move free advanced 3 pills 1700mcg l-5 methyltetrahydrofolate Zinc picolinate 22mg Taurine 3g Copper 2 mg Selenium K2 mk7 45 mcg Creatine monohydrate Magnesium as needed Sunbathing for vitamin d
Going for general health/longevity, joint health, and fighting high homocysteine (mthfr homozygous)
Why is that any of your business?
I think the earlier person made it everyone's business, when they posted on a discussion forum about it.
What makes anything another person's business? They asked a question out of curiosity and were replied to.
have you tried a physical pharmacy
My rule is anything that goes on or in my body, I don't buy form Amazon for that reason.
Is clothing really that big of a risk?
Depends how much confidence you have that it wasn't soaked in something nasty that doesn't easily wash out.
I ordered replacement earpads from Amazon for one of my headphones. Ended up developing a rash around my ears. So it's not just about clothing, and, yes, you should be concerned.
Dangerous material being in contact of your skin all day and night long does seem risky
How do you know what cannot be faked? Is shipped and sold by Amazon enough?
All products can be faked, but I thing that GP means "cannot be faked without being obvious". Obvious fakes are not as much of a problem since Amazon has a pretty good return policy.
In the "cannot be faked" category, you can have:
- products so cheap that making a fake wouldn't make sense. for example an unbranded glass jar won't be faked because anything that looks like a glass jar but isn't a glass jar will be more expensive than a glass jar.
- products too complex and/or too low margin to be worth faking. For example, you will probably never find a fake desktop printer, as even the most simple printers are hard to make and sold at a low margin, maybe even at a loss. However, consumables are (very) high margin and you will find fakes, lots of them.
- products that have effective anti-counterfeiting systems. For example, Nintendo Switch games.
I understood fake as physically harmful.
It is, people are being ridiculous. The third party stuff is where the fraud is.
No, that is not correct or at least it has not been. Amazon was said to intermingle the inventory in the warehouses, mixing third party products with those shipped and sold by Amazon. So that gave you zero protection.
I read that they made internal changes to tag shippings properly to reduce the risk of that behaviour, but am not sure it is true or has been effective.
Has this co-mingling of sold by Amazon ever actually been documented at any scale beyond “extremely rare stock/pick” mistake? I am of course aware of the option for manufacturers to enable this for their registered products on FBA - and it may not have been optional at one point in time.
When I researched this a while ago I was unable to come up with much compelling evidence that it was an actual thing. It certainly has not happened to me over thousands of purchases - or anyone I know for that matter. Of course a fake could have been so good none of us could tell, but I do actually attempt to inspect carefully.
I have found counterfeit items from other web stores not on Amazon so it’s not like my detection skills are zero. Third party marketplace of course is different.
Heck, even Costco sent me an unsolicited refund for a counterfeit item they unknowingly sold me - so supply chain issues are bound to happen.
I don’t want to defend Amazon too much here, but this one is almost at urban legend status to me. Likely happened at limited scale some time ago, but it’s strange everyone says it’s endemic but no one IRL I know across probably tens of thousands of purchases has noticed it.
I don't think Amazon has ever outright admitted that they do, but Amazon's own terms give them the right to commingle their inventory with those of third party sellers.
F-4 Storage
We will provide storage services as described in these FBA Service Terms once we confirm receipt of delivery. We will keep electronic records that track inventory of Units by identifying the number of Units stored in any fulfillment center. We will not be required to physically mark or segregate Units from other inventory units (e.g., products with the same Amazon standard identification number) owned by us, our Affiliates or third parties in the applicable fulfillment center(s).
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/help/hub/reference/external...
That combined with years and years of anecdotal reports of this happening certainly suggests a "where there's smoke there's fire" situation to me.
Right, that’s FBA. I’m talking about sold by Amazon. I’m specifically talking about a case where a sold by Amazon item came from co-mingled inventory from a FBA seller.
I also know from direct second party experience (I also personally saw the terms) that at least at a certain level of “brand” you can decline this option with Amazon for your registered product skus/ASIN even for FBA. I don’t know if this is offered to everyone though - I know it went through some sort of “deal reg” process in the one case I saw. I imagine this came through some sort of lawsuit or threats of one for a major brand at some point - but that is speculation on my part.
> I’m specifically talking about a case where a sold by Amazon item came from co-mingled inventory from a FBA seller.
The FBA terms I quoted specifically say that Amazon can co-mingle FBA inventory with their own (if the FBA seller doesn't opt out of "virtual tracking").
> The FBA terms I quoted specifically say that Amazon can co-mingle FBA inventory with their own (if the FBA seller doesn't opt out of "virtual tracking").
The wording in the quote explicitly states that an FBA unit can be substituted by owned by Amazon unit or other FBA units. But the wording is not clear whether SBA (Sold By Amazon) unit can be substituted by an FBA inventory. The terms covering Amazon's "first party inventory" (SBA, a.k.a. Amazon retail) are internal to Amazon and are not shared, AFAIK. But i can be wrong :-)
> The wording in the quote explicitly states that an FBA unit can be substituted by owned by Amazon unit or other FBA units. But the wording is not clear whether SBA (Sold By Amazon) unit can be substituted by an FBA inventory.
It would have to go both ways. If there are 10 FBA and 10 SBA units in the inventory, and Amazon decides to fill an FBA order with an SBA unit for operational reasons, now there are 10 FBA and 9 SBA units in inventory but the FBA seller only owns 9 units. That 10th FBA unit eventually has to go somewhere. The only options are that it fulfills an SBA order or Amazon forces the FBA seller to buy the SBA unit that Amazon shipped for the FBA order. As far as I know the latter does not happen.
But that has to go in both directions, necessarily. If they are not marked, as the terms say, they can't fulfill FBA from SBA but not SBA from FBA. It's all one big pile.
> It's all one big pile.
I don't believe this to be true. SBA in theory has it's own "pile" that they can of course use to substitute with a FBA third party seller if they deem it cheaper as they are confident that they are substituting like for like.
Given how FBA items are labeled differently (the Amazon required ASIN sticker) than SBA I can't recall a time I've received a third party item when buying direct from Amazon. I also can't really say with any certainty it does not or did not happen, but it was not obvious at least.
I've also seen contracts the explicitly forbid the co-mingling for brands that sell direct to Amazon. By necessity these would need to be under different piles on the backend - and it's easy to see different ASINs for the same SKU by searching for common big brand items. There will be a SBA listing, and then many other listings gaming the qty/size of the item that are FBA. An item that comes in the same size and packaging often is listed twice (or more) times with one being SBA and the rest third party.
It's definitely clear as mud, but I think the "sold by amazon/fulfilled by amazon" being co-mingled is largely urban legend. It's all speculation like this thread here, and very few verifiable facts when you dig into any of the reporting/social media accounts. I'm 100% sure it happens by mistake and very well may have happened as routine business in the past, but these days I cannot come up with an example that shows this happening on any scale.
I have absolutely bought multiple hard drives that were "shipped & sold by amazon" which turned out to be fake/counterfeit in some way. The serial numbers did not verify on the manufacturer's website either and they were completely DOA.
Was it “Sold by Amazon” or a third party marketplace seller?
It doesn't matter. Amazon co-mingles product they sourced themselves with product from all the marketplace sellers. They also resell returns, which could have been swapped with something else.
> Amazon needs to be stopped, and legislation will not do so. Only its loyal consumers – who keep the beast alive – can do that by taking their money elsewhere.
We've (my wife and I) tried to stop using Amazon. But recently, I've run into issues where I need particular specialized bits and pieces (e.g. just today, a low profile 4" HVAC 90 degree elbow) that are only available via Amazon. A variation is where the item is available from one or two other places, but at a 10x markup.
We need to convince vendors to also avoid Amazon, and that may be even more of a difficult sell (no pun intended).
ps. Amazon employee #2, and I approve this message.
The other problem are people doing price arbitrage. You find the item on eBay and think to yourself, "cool, I'd rather patronize a small business" - but as it turns out, the item is drop-shipped from Amazon, Walmart, or the like.
This got me the other day, and it had me cracking up, they just put my shipping address and and checked out from Walmart. $5 lesson that Walmart actually sold what i wanted and i should have checked there first.
Yep, had this happen to me a couple of months ago, for a bike component. Incredibly annoying, since they still marked up from the Amazon price!
I recently had something very similar happened to me, and then the seller accidentally sent me another weirdly expensive item by mistake. Unfortunately it's a large heavy part from a ride lawn mower
Just got hit by hustler university
Thank you for your perspective, I 100% agree.
I just read your Vox article and the comment "We exist with multiple hats" really resonated with me. I find it difficult to interact with a lot of people in tech because they too often seem to be overly dogmatic and unable to consider that other valid perspectives can and do exist... and that they might not know everything.
Sometimes I just want to say to those people, "I want to live in your world, where everything is black and white and you have all the answers in your pocket. It sounds comfortable and easy."
Cancelling Prime seems to have a big natural impact. I heard stories about how much order volume goes up after someone joins Prime, and it seems the opposite is true as well. I cancelled my membership when they started charging extra for ad-free video. It just felt so cheap and petty, since I was already paying for Prime. This was just the straw the broke the camel's back. I was already pretty fed up with Amazon due to being sent counterfeit products, used or open box items being sold as new, the push to leave retail packaging on my porch, all the fake reviews, the inability to find quality items via their search, the site being overrun with low quality garbage being resold from AliExpress for 10x the price, the concern for the future of my local stores, wishlists no longer supporting external links or simply ideas, etc, etc, etc.
I still do make the occasional order out of laziness or a lack of other options. However, I looked up all my orders from the lifetime of my account and charted them a couple weeks ago. After 6 years of year-over-year order increase, and a 17+ year overall uptrend in orders... they fell off a cliff once I cancelled. My orders fell by 60% the year after I cancelled Prime, and it's on pace to drop even further this year. I even did all my Christmas shopping last year without any Amazon orders, while previous years were 100% Amazon.
Going down to 0 can be hard, but even big drops in orders will have an impact. And if that money goes to other retailers, and demand grows, they can invest in more inventory and a wider array of goods that people need. Any percentage shift away from Amazon is progress, especially in done my the masses.
I'd encourage everyone to dump their Prime membership. If you order more than $35 you can still get free shipping (you just have to be explicit in selecting it and be vigilant during checkout to avoid the multiple traps to try and get you to sign back up... lots of dark patterns). Shipping times are a little more unpredictable. Sometimes it still only takes 1-2 days, while other times it seems to take a week or two. Most things aren't urgent. If they are, I try to find them locally.
I've also tried to stop obsessing about finding the "best" whatever it is I'm looking for. When online, there are a lot of traps, but one of the things I expect retail stores to do is make sure they are carrying quality products they'd stand behind. They don't want returns or to get a reputation for selling junk. I was getting a toaster a while back and instead of spending hours researching online, I just went to a store I frequent, looked at the 5 options they had, and picked the one I liked the best. Hours of time saved, and the toaster works fine. I expect I'll have it for many years to come.
Try Aliexpress, you can cut out the middleman.
> ps. Amazon employee #2,
wow, that must have been quite an interesting experience. Do you have any anecdotes that you were willing to share about the experience. Thanks
I've discussed it to death here on HN. Sort of over doing that anymore. I was only there for 14 months before getting out to become a stay at home parent.
I would love to avoid Amazon, and indeed I would love to support local retailers, but more often than not it is simply impossible. The only way I can find out if a local vendor carries an item I'm interested in, and if they have it in stock, is to physically go there. The amount of time that requires is orders of magnitude more than what it takes to order the item on Amazon, where I am all but guaranteed that it will be available.
It is astonishing to me that brick-and-mortar retailers have not banded together to put an on-line front-end onto their stock. It would technically straightforward (albeit not trivial) to build a web site as easy to use as Amazon, but with guaranteed same-day or next-day delivery via a partner like doordash, and with more reliable quality because local vendors have more of an incentive to vet their suppliers. I would love to use a service like that, but AFAICT it doesn't exist.
Someone here, please build this. I will be your first customer.
The other thing is local retailers have cut back on all specialty items because they expect people to buy those items online.
The problem is that buying specialized things actually makes sense to do online. But online buying has the problem that an average online retailer gives no guarantee that they will fulfill an order faithfully (I still remember trying to order shoe from Target online and getting ... a used masked and I assume others remember online "burn" as well) so Amazon has a key position of online guarantor. As a "natural monopoly", one might imagine such a role would be regulated but not in the present climate, ha ha ha.
Some stores do have their stock available online. I know Home Depot does. The website tells you what aisle the item is in, which rack in that aisle, and how many they have.
I've also seen where stores won't have it at the store I have selected, but it will also check the stock of nearby stores to tell me of one of those other stores have it.
It's not ubiquitous yet, but I'm seeing it more and more. I've also found with things like Apple Pay that checkout on random online stores is just as fast and easy as Amazon, which is quite nice.
You seem to forget that you can call nearly any local retailer and they will check their inventory for you and often even set it aside for you. A phone call does not require orders of magnitude more time than an online order and you can build a friendly connection in your community that way, too.
I'll show my ass on this, but calling someone is absolutely an order of magnitude more effort than checking online. Anytime I have to put in an order via phone or place a reservation, I do a mental check of if I actually care enough to not just go with something else. There's a social battery cost associated with it, even higher than talking to someone in person.
For a lot of random things, like... say, a suction cup thingy that mounts my smartphone to a car dashboard, I have no idea which stores are likely to sell such things, and they could have a wide discrepancy in prices. I can type into Amazon and see a list of products and prices, but if I want to buy one at a local retailer I might have to call three or four stores before finding someone who carries the thing I'm looking for. It would be really nice to have a search engine that can search products across brick-and-mortar retailers.
>... a suction cup thingy that mounts my smartphone to a car dashboard.
Try your local phone store. Most carriers have brick and mortar locations.
So for another example, I wanted to get a stainless steel pasta strainer. I checked four different kitchen/cooking stores and the ones that had them them only had ones that were too deep, and they were all priced as ridiculously luxurious items, over $90. Then I checked a local hardware store and they had exactly what I wanted and it was only $12. I only thought of that place because I passed it on the way home and was desperate.
Sure, sometimes things take a bit of work and might not be instantaneous or easy. It all boils down to whether or not one values immense convenience over not supporting Amazon.
Right, this is why I'm suggesting it would be awesome if someone were to make a retail search engine, so we could have both at the same time.
How is patronizing your "local phone store" better than just going to Amazon?
My hardware store is locally own and carries phone mounts. I realize this is an outlier though.
Similar to the other response, I have locally-owned options in my area that sell them. I'd imagine many areas do.
Beyond that, if it's a national carrier brick-and-mortar spot, it could be argued that it's a case of the lesser of two evils.
I honestly wish this were the case for 80% of the calls I make to local stores. Most people they have working the phones do not care about the inventory and will just say they're out of stock or don't know if there are any on the shelves. This goes double for requesting a special item from a store that would normally carry it, but doesn't. They put the order into their "system" and then it disappears, never to be heard from again.
Calling retail stores to do anything other than to see if they're open or, in the case of restaurants, get a reservation is just wasting time. At least for the retailers that I've communicated with.
> A phone call does not require orders of magnitude more time than an online order and you can build a friendly connection in your community that way, too.
Your username suggests otherwise
Will they do this outside businesshours?
I fear it's too late for this. For any category of item, pretty much all the stuff you buy from Amazon or elsewhere online generally comes from the same few factories in China. Any other potential suppliers probably went out of business years ago, are too expensive, or are too small or local to work with.
You could open a brick and mortar store tomorrow but you'd be selling the exact same products that come from the same factories as Amazon.
In Japan, the Yodobashi Camera chain has a web interface tied to their huge retail stores. The page for each product [1, for example] has a link to a list of stores where it is in stock [2]. If you’re in a hurry and near one of those stores, you can have it held for pickup later that day. If not, you can have it delivered.
I buy a lot from Amazon Japan as well, and I haven’t had the problems with shoddy or counterfeit products that others have reported. I don’t know if that’s just my luck or if Amazon Japan screens its suppliers better. But it’s nice to have strong competitors to Amazon in online shopping. In addition to Yodobashi, there are Rakuten, Yahoo Japan, Bic Camera, and Yamada Denki for a wide range of products, as well as Kinokuniya, Maruzen Junkudo, Sanseido, and others for books.
[1] https://www.yodobashi.com/product/100000001004349962/
[2] https://www.yodobashi.com/ec/product/stock/10000000100434996...
I've been hoping someone would build the same thing. Even without delivery, I'd love to be able to search for products across multiple stores through a web interface and see their availability in a map view, with price and in-stock status. I would be happy to go to the store and buy it, as long as I only need to make one trip and I know it will be in stock and at a certain price.
I worked on this, it was called Milo.com. we had crazy scraping and xml/csv feed ingestion. It was a terribly difficult business because most retailers hated us. ebay bought it and eventually killed it.
Why did retailers hate you? Wouldn’t they want a solution that brings people to their store because you listed their product as being there and available?
That's what I'd hope as well. But maybe they didn't like it because it makes price competition too transparent?
That's a big part of it, yes. Retailers take advantage of information assymetry after all. While you're in Best buy, you may pay more than online to walk out with an item, but would you pay more if you could instantly confirm it's at Walmart next door for $20 less? Maybe not.
Funnily enough though Best Buy loved us and provided real time data via API and daily CSV data dumps just for us. They were like that, along with Toys R Us and AutoZone. Most others hated us, including Guitar Center after we accidentally DDOSed their web site with our scrapers.
Huh! Well thank you for your efforts! When was that? Do you think it would be possible to build it again?
> via a partner like doordash
I do technical consulting for small food companies
This is an immediate non-starter for most local retail businesses because of the steep (25+%) transaction fees Doordash and other consumer last-mile providers charge, and the razor-thin margins of many retail stores
To be clear I agree with your proposal overall and suspect this particular challenge is surmountable, but it's very difficult to get it right, and either way relying on another parasitic platform won't be the answer
It must be cheaper than UPS/FedEx for some items, because Home Depot and Lowes have started using DoorDash and other similar services for 'shipping'. I'm sure they batch up the orders and get discounted rates, but that seems to be their preferred method for items that exist in a store within 20 miles and can't be shipped directly from the manufacturer.
It
In my country (and this might be very specific to my city), one of the drugstore chains partnered with Uber, so you get deliveries within a few hours at a cheaper rate compared to other last-mile delivery options, probably by allocating drivers in off-peak hours.
Doordash (Wolt) does this in parts of Europe already.
Wolt is great. I’m in Cyprus currently and Wolt feels so much nicer to use than DoorDash, UberEats, etc. Much of it’s the user interface which feels a bit like Waze back in the day and without all the gimmicky ads and in your face junk. Bummer to hear DoorDash owns them.
That you can do groceries, order flowers, drinks, or dinner makes it great for dates.
Downside is that apparently Wolt charges stores something like a €250 fee a month. It’s ridiculous how much any of these services charge small businesses.
I hope automated drone delivery becomes a thing and make it easier to bring up competitors.
Doordash (Wolt) does this in parts of Europe already
i mean, you could call them up
A good first step is not paying for Prime.
It's like $140 annually now... and if you're mostly just buying things and not watching their content, it's a nice speed bump to just accumulate items in the cart until you hit the minimum free shipping and only order then.
When you occasionally do for some reason need an instant item, you can pay the shipping then. It's kinda like for most people, having a second or third car is much more expensive than just renting one when you actually need it.
That said, I am close to a Costco so that's where I get most of my bulk items - the Amazon stuff tends to be more discretionary.
Especially since the base Prime Video has ads now, so that aspect of your prime membership is useless.
That’s the key.
Amazon is very convenient when needing something one off. But we are not going to renew Prime and slowly ween off it.
Still looking for alternatives though, Costco is okay, but when you want something asap, you need either to drive to stores or pay for same day delivery and tips.
Home Depot seems to delivering some stuff for free the next day (and occasionally the same day.) And they can always have the product ready for pickup in front. Sometimes its so hard to find stuff in their store. Even some of the delivery charges feel lower than before.
I've always found the location pretty accurate on the home depot site (which works fine on mobile browsers) for items I'm looking for.
None of these are good arguments to convince the average person to not use Amazon (or any other service provided by a megacorp). A better argument (well, maybe not as of May 2025) is that most crap on Amazon is available for 1/5 the price from websites like Aliexpress. Nothing on Amazon is sold for less than ~8 dollars, meanwhile you can buy the exact same product from Aliexpress for less than a dollar.
I feel like the author is undermining their own complaint in regards to Rekognition. Anyone can just sign up for an AWS account and start using the service, pretty much the same as anything else AWS sells. Then in response to specific bad behavior by US police departments Amazon cut off their access, a practice they've kept up to this day.
Amazon could have quietly (or loudly in 2025) lifted the ban at any point in the last five years to much nothing in the terms of pushback.
Myself I can't stand the media blitz that tries to talk up Prime Day every year.
I like hunting for bargains as much as anybody, I love checking out the used games at Gamestop or items on clearance at Best Buy, not least the reuse center at Ithaca where I might find a cassette or Video CD deck with karaoke features or a minidisc player.
Prime Day seems to be just a waste of time. I don't see any attractive prices on anything I want to buy. So many web sites scour Amazon for good deals and can't find any. It's a snoozer.
It's because Amazon buyers are used to Amazon prices.
It's literally been a decade or more since Prime Day, or Amazon in general, had the best prices online.
I’ve often seen items selling in physical stores (like a UV tooth whitening kit) for $40 and at Amazon for $65.
Fun fact: if you click on Amazon affiliate link, anything you put in your cart in the next 24 hours counts towards that affiliate once you hit purchase on that cart
I wish our local postage carrier was more efficient. Amazon provides next day delivery, whilst other online stores dispatch your purchase within 2-3 days and the package arrives is a further 2-5 days.
Your local postage carrier doesn’t build massive warehouses filled with items that people who have to pee in bottle grab off of shelves.
Some of you may die... and that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make!
I noped out of Prime a long time ago when it became clear they were training the population to treat all their purchases as instant gratification impulse buys.
That’s a bit interesting. Do you have similar ideas about commercial air travel?
No, because taking a week out of my life to go by train instead of plane is impractical. Making myself wait a few extra business days for my books to arrive is not. I apologize if you had a better point you were trying to make and I missed it.
The point might have been that booking travel online is now fairly easy and seamless, to the point where people might impulse book international vacations when they might otherwise have stayed close to home.
Sure, I'm not a fan of the environmental footprint of casual air travel, but offsetting that there are positive effects of the world having become smaller. My subscription to Prime would only be an unnecessary convenience.
How much of your spending requires instant gratification?
Presumably nothing they buy from Amazon.
If they wanted instant gratification, they'd buy it from a local store and get it immediately rather than having to wait a couple days.
Stupid Best Buy had to have a 5090 in stock and available for me to purchase within one hour. Otherwise I'd probably willing to run me 3080 into the ground. For some reason Amazon next day delivery doesn't check my "instant gratification" box, but I'm a sucker for hour availability.
Quite a bit, I usually try not to buy anything other than groceries, but when I need something I usually really need it because something has either broken or a sudden need has arisen. That said I do try to get it locally first.
It can be about predictability as well. If Amazon says two days, it is usually two days. I arrange the purchase for a day when I don't work or work a short shift. If it is a valuable product that requires someone to receive the parcel, I don't have to deal with shippers who force people to use a pickup point that is a 15 minute drive away. (I don't drive, so that is usually problematic.) At the end of the day, in my case, it is more about receiving the product than getting it right away.
All of my restaurant purchases for sure.
Am I missing something, the article randomly says: "For context, the US federal government spent $53 million on public education in 2022." and links to: https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti... which says K-12 schools spend $857.2 billion.
The federal government is distinct from state or local governments. The numbers still might not be consistent (it says “[t]he federal government provides 13.6% of funding for public K-12 education”, which would be more than $53MM) but the page you linked draws that distinction too. State and local funds make up the difference.
You didn't miss anything, the author of the piece was just wrong. They either screwed up the math or didn't read their own link correctly, or both. Moreover, it is trivial to search for the US Dept of Education's budget for 2022 and fact check this.
It's also cited as evidence that Amazon is now more powerful than the US Government which is just factually fucking false. It really is a different breed of person that thinks some millions of dollars > sovereign power. It's like, yeah, they lobby, but they also have people lobbying against them, including near-competitors. The dynamic is not as simple as spend some $X millions of dollars and get some amount of equivalent benefit. You lobby because an entity with sovereign power can trivially destroy your business.
US Dept of Ed has a $238B budget in 2024. I think much of that is at the collegiate level, but $53M is almost certainly wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Ed...
Yeah that bit seems wrong. I agree with the overall sentiment of the article, but that is off.
I guess, but Amazon gets me stuff tomorrow or the next day, reliably, week in and week out. Yeah, I could find this stuff elsewhere on the internet. But not for Tuesday delivery. And not without opening another account. Also, right now, often only by paying a tariff-adjacent fee to cover the import costs of the vendors that didn't have the foresight to pre-stock imports like Amazon did.
People who want to write stuff like this really need to reckon with the fact that Amazon is and remains the superior product, and by a very significant degree.
They're not winning because they "hate democracy" or are "full-stop evil" or whatever. They're winning because they're the best.
And that's kind of an issue. Amazon effectively has a monopoly in this space, and competing at a similar level just is not possible anymore. And Amazon is so big that, even when you have a better product and service, it can buy you off¹.
¹: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Souq_(company)
This is the reality.
I have moved anything I don’t need quickly off Amazon as much as reasonably possible, and I do avoid some things from Amazon as well, but for too many things they’re the cheapest and fastest option, or the 2nd cheapest and fastest option.
Also if I think there is a reasonably high chance I’ll return an item, I also go through Amazon, because they haven’t once in 20 years I’ve been using them giving me an issue, charged a restocking fee etc.
Other online shops simply don’t match enough of these Amazon value prop to sway me over
My take is that Walmart.com comes pretty close. When I was driving through Pennsylvania two weeks back I saw a huge Walmart.com warehouse right next to an Amazon warehouse. The last mile delivery service of the two seems close to identical (though Walmart+ disingenuously offers "free" delivery from my local store that expect you to tip the driver. [1])
Amazon often costs 5 cents less and you might find that all the issues of Bocci the Rock are at Amazon and one is missing from Walmart, but Walmart is taking the fight to them.
For photography stuff in particular, I buy from B&H, Adorama or direct from vendors such as Red River Paper. Often the prices are better than Amazon and the service is much better (e.g. the owner of the later has schooled me on details of papers and printing that most people couldn't imagine)
[1] Not against giving the tip, just against saying I don't like the comparison against free shipping from other vendors.
If the idea is to avoid Amazon on any sort of ethical basis (including monopolistic practices and squeezing suppliers etc) Walmart is no different. You could change any issue you have with Amazon and replace it with Walmart and they all still apply, sans the peeing in bottles of delivery drivers
At least as a shopper my feelings about Walmart are pretty mixed.
That time I needed a game camera immediately and AMZN said 5 days I got it at 7am the next day at Walmart. Most of the bread at the bakery is that awful stuff people accuse of being “ultra-processed food” but they have something like the Vollkornbrot you see in German Bäckerei that is 100% honest and delicious to my taste. The pharmacist there is a real eager beaver who never fails to tell me something I didn’t know about a medicine I take and that’s not easy. On the other hand I ride the bus with someone who used to work there who says it was a shit place to work.
Walmart didn’t have a representative sitting behind Trump at his inauguration and even if it’s evil it’s better to have two evil competitors than one evil monopoly.
FWIW, my suspicion is that people motivated by "Amazon is full-stop evil and an enemy of Civil Rights, Human Rights, Workers, Small Businesses, and Democracy"[1] would be even less motivated to shop at the temple of Sam Walton.
But even so, I just checked and of the last 12 items in my Amazon purchase history, Walmart.com loses on every one of them before shipping is included. They're not really in the game absent externalities like location or specific product.
[1] Not hyperbole: those are the sections in the linked article!
I have my own grievances with Amazon, not least that 2 day shipping became 5 day shipping without warning during the pandemic although I know they had infrastructure in my area because for years I saw their delivery van going around on Sunday. I felt it was really unfair because if I have to wait 5 days for something to arrive I am inclined to go get it at Target or another store in town if I can.
Since then I’ve taken them up on offers of a free month of Prime or a week for $2 which is attractive if it gets me free shipping on a purchase. Now I get the same service as everyone else but if they wanted to be a loyal customer hey should have treated me as if they wanted to impress me as an earlier.
Notably Walmart has a + service which is a little cheaper than Prime but doesn’t have the video and other benefits that I’m indifferent too. I agree with the direction of that guy’s critiques of Amazon but not the magnitude but I’m a strange case in that I’m an amateur political scientist who works as a software dev with real political scientists that I have to be deferential to.
Walmart+ has the basic Paramount+ included fwiw
Canceling my Prime account mainly meant I bought less stuff overall. A win for my wallet and the planet in the end. I need zero friction in my life for healthy eating and exercise, not for buying crap from a Chinese brand of the week (Glorf, Qerdu, Plund or whatever).
> Canceling my Prime account mainly meant I bought less stuff overall.
Which sounds like an agreement with my point, no? Buying stuff without Amazon was in aggregate "more expensive" for you in the broader sense of value that includes effort/experience/whatever. So you didn't.
And, bravo? I'm all for efficiency and reasonable asceticism, and likely agree with you about the general consumerist bent of our society.
All I'm saying is that constitutes an argument in FAVOR of Amazon as a retailer product, and not an indictment.
"They're winning because they're the best."
They are also actively preventing other marketplaces from being better. For example, for exclusive audiobooks on audible, the producers are paid 40% but only 25% for non-exclusive ones.
Amazon enables us to buy lots of things we just wouldn't if there was just a little bit more of friction. I'm not sure it's an overall positive that they have next day delivery. We'd definitely be better overall if Amazon didn't undermine smaller shops using discounts only they can afford long term.
This statement is not an attack on your character or being just a broad generalization.
The biggest addiction of the modern era is convenience. Once people have it, it is very difficult to give up. We are all addicted to this, we aren't running this site via the letters column in a newspaper, because of convenience. But it also means we tend to ignore the negatives of said services.
Your point of them winning because they're the best, that can also be true. But because of that and the convenience addiction they provide, we let them get away with all the other stuff.
I'm not saying this is an excuse to use Amazon, I have never used it. I am just saying it is a hard hurdle for some to overcome.
Humans survived up until about 20 years ago without free 2-day shipping. You'll be fine.
Or you could compromise your morals for convenience, I guess.
It's not free. It's baked into the price.
It's baked into the price, but I can buy a free shipping item cheaper from Amazon than what the shipping alone would cost, if I just went to FedEx/UPS myself.
The author reeks of self importance and what he thinks is moral superiorioty. Was too hard to read.
To the point of the post, Amazon engages in lawful tactics to conquer the retail market. Consumers are incentivelzed to get the best value out of their money. If you want change legislation is needed. Your approach of shaming people for using their services isn't scalable. And I also don't agree with plenty of the premises in your article but it doesn't matter.
Related: Reasons not to buy from Amazon - https://www.stallman.org/amazon.html
I can almost always find a small company - often thing-i-want.com that has just as good deals and they provide useful advice about which version is best - often I have bought the more expensive version for those reasons. (I think for the better though I rarely buy enough of anything to have an informed opinion on relative merit)
When I lived in the US, I tried to order stuff from Amazon as less as possible. The problem was the lack of decent urban areas and public transport. Going to a shop in my city where they had the same thing which I wanted would take the better part of a day.
One of the people I follow on tiktok suggested abstaining from shopping from large corporations for Lent except for sundays. I tried it and ended up finding out some things about myself I did not realize, which I guess is kind of the point.
Would you consider Target or Walmart more ethical? Or better at policing counterfeits?
Strangely enough, yes to both (at least for in store purchases). And I find neither company particularly ethical.
They have a tighter control on their supply chain and don't have a truly open "market" where anyone can sell crap (or stolen crap).
A lot of this comes down to limited stocking and shelf space. Amazon effectively has unlimited storage space. Hence their ability to show off 6000 drop shipping products which are actually the same product.
Walmart and Target, on the other hand, have to be somewhat judicious because shelf space is limited. They can't have a row of the same products under different labels. And if what they choose to sell has quality problems they get hit harder for it. They take the loss for the unsold counterfeit goods. Amazon, by their nature, sees minimal hits when products are determined to be counterfeit. That usually just means they blacklist a seller. They are hardly impacted.
Also, funnily enough, it's why I don't worry about counterfeits at Wholefoods even though it's parent company is Amazon.
What you said is true for their physical locations, but both Target and Walmart implemented Amazon-style marketplaces a while back, and my impression is that there's very little oversight or quality control. Even less than on Amazon.
I'm pretty sure they don't co-mingle though. So if you make sure you're buying from Walmart or Target and not some other party you should be getting the same items that are in the stores.
Yes, it's on you to identify if the seller is Target or a third party. It's listed on the product page, but if you didnt know that there were third party items, you would probably just assume you were buying from Target/Walmart.
Happened to me a month ago when purchasing an item for my wife from walmart website. Ended up being 3rd party, slow delivery, and counterfeit item upon arrival. An issue i’ve actually never had with amazon.
Mostly social reasons here but there are also practical reasons even for those who don't care about any of this stuff.
Amazon is becoming more and more like AliExpress and Temu. They can always do it cheaper, but it's very touch and go when it comes to the quality of the merchandise you'll receive.
If that quality isn't a concern for you, Temu and AliExpress can give you similar quality for much less. Take a screenshot of the item on Amazon with Google Lens and use the image search on either of these platforms to get the item even cheaper.
For LPs specifically: it's much better than paying import fees now that preorders are instant with RSS alerts. Also AWS Science/Dev Program Training is nice. Supplement labels can be cross-referenced elsewhere. Just use Nootropics Depot, Science Bio, Cosmic Nootropics,iHerb, Syntharise, etcetera. All legal/not iillicit.
Many commenter's here saying they cannot avoid Amazon. I am not here to deny their reality, but I have a different story
I have avoided Amazon since ~2004 when I accidentally bought two box sets (double clicked) and there was no way to undo one. Clearly a Dark Pattern. Fuckers
I have succeeded. I always find another source for everything (mostly books, some small electronics).
I am not in the USA, I am in the South Pacific, a long way away however you measure it (except we speak English, mostly, here too). I have to wonder if that is a reason? Yet we use the same Internet
I started avoiding Amazon because they dishonestly ripped me off 20 years ago. I would start to avoid them today because they are evil
I refuse to boycott Amazon, but I do try other sites and local places first, but I'm not going to to a 100% boycott that doesn't really prove much; I just don't run to Amazon first to get stuff.
I agree wholeheartedly with everything said, fine sentiments, well said
But I am unsure that this will convince anyone not already convinced.
We need good political messaging to bring them, them all, down and to get economic freedom
As someone who is very personally interested in the intersection between different political opinions, I really like how this article side-stepped individual issues to present the argument that Amazon is bad as a whole. “Ok, you don’t connect with BLM? Let’s talk about something else.” I find very, very often that conservatives & liberals are talking past each other and cannot even understand why the other side is making the argument they are. This is the first time in a while I’ve seen that side-step motion applied productively.
I agree with the authors conclusion about Amazon, but even if you don’t, you should think about how polarized the nation is and what political issues we can try to coalesce on.
It felt pretty insulting to me. It had the smug, sarcastic, holier-than-thou kind of flavor to it—"there are only 3 ways to think about things, I already know more than you do about who you are and what you believe, you must be one of THAT tribe of one-dimensional dummies, here's YOUR flavor that I've so generously dumbed down for you."
Kind of like the "didactic" voice that the young men on YouTube use when they're cosplaying documentarians or newscasters.
It works better for authors who genuinely know what they're talking about--but in most cases, the closer you look at something, the more complexity you notice, and the less breezily confident you are about it. So often, it's like this—"reheated nachos," do the kids call it? A big sassy omnibus "take" of "takes," more than, like, facts and analysis? All building up to a meaningless language-of-empowerment call to action?
Mm, I could see someone deeply invested in and knowledgeable about politics feeling this way. But I think it’s an uncharitable read. I don’t think the average layman would bristle so hard at this.
What facts is the author not presenting?
Regardless of what one thinks about Amazon, one's actions have approximately zero effect on it.
Even if one controlled, 10, 100, 1,000, 10,000, or 100,000 people and commanded them to not use Amazon, it would have little effect.
If someone opts to stay away from Amazon, they should at least do it with clear eyes: they are doing it to feel something and will not actually affect the company.
I've been a vegetarian for 30 years. Big beef is still raging despite all the Hindus and abstainers. Doesn't mean I'll grill a burger and chow down. It would be great if suddenly the world woke up and thought about consequences of what they do in a myriad of things. It will never happen, but acting unaware when you are aware is something you have to live with. Some people think morals are divine, but I guess some people think of them as "feelings".
It would have a big effect on the alternatives though.
I do it not for the feelings but just to avoid hypocrisy.
I hate to be this guy, really, but did you consider that hypocrisy and anti-hypocrisy is basically what OP meant by "feelings" since they are based on (mostly self) perceptions? (Have you ever pointed out hypocrisy to someone? They are quick to tell you why you're wrong - it's absolutely about self justification not external judgement)
I don't understand the point you're making. Someone is living according to their principles and we're playing games with semantics as if "feelings" is a bad word? Okay, you win, it "feels" better to satisfy one's values.
If those principles don't make a difference on the world around you then it's not bad but it is quite limited. It's fine to do things that don't make a difference, but it's important to keep perspective.
In particular, if you have an urge to make a difference on a regular basis, that's a great urge, but you need to make sure you don't fall into the trap of doing something that feels good but has negligible effect and thinking the job is done.
It's weird to see soviet style apathy propagandists become so common on the internet, even on HN.
If you think I'm advocating for apathy then you're badly misreading my post.
Do you give this same lecture to everyone who's in line to vote on election day?
On the contrary, voting is one of those things that has an actual measure-able outcome. It's extremely reliable in its quantitative effects.
I don't really get this. The things I've chosen not to get from Amazon are similarly measurable in dollars or other units. Not that I think I'm going to win you over, but I don't understand this argument.
For the sake of mind melding I'll give it one more shot, but don't mind if we just don't connect on this issue at this time.
OP says stopping Amazon purchases have near zero effect, but might make you feel better, you said you don't do it for feelings but instead to avoid hypocrisy. My 1st comment was directed ONLY at the hypocrisy statement.
Hypocrisy is not a quantifiable thing, and is actually ONLY about how two decisions are interpreted. What is hypocrisy to one person is not to another. So it's subjective. Yet your subjective analysis of your own actions takes precedent, justifying your decision to avoid Amazon. Fine. The term I use for "subjective analysis that forms a most-likely-post-hoc justification for an action" is feeling. It feels right to do it is all we can really say about that. This is important and good and unassailable. It's morals and character. Good stuff definitely but not quantifiable.
As for the rest of the stuff about voting. Taking one dollar from Amazon is quantifiable, but we don't know how many dollars are required to make them change. It comes down to how the board or CEO or analysis or market feels about Amazons p/e or profit. So, not helpful. Will cutting another 100$ out of Amazons profits bring us closer to a change? What will that change look like? How much more do we have to cut to create a change? Are there better or worse changes if we cut more now vs more later vs quickly vs gradually? Etc etc.
Unlike voting which has a very precise decision point and an exact measure of progress towards that decision point for each vote cast. Perfectly quantifiable.
He pretty much hits the nail on the head as far as describing modern-day political and social movements. It's about doing the bare minimum to make oneself feel better and to be able to brand oneself as an activist.
It seems like all the real-deal movements and protests died out or were neutralized by the late '70s.
https://archive.ph/ThMlo
"Do you think police have too much funding?" No.
"For context, the US federal government spent $53 million on public education in 2022" Hilarious, the federal government probably spent more on photocopiers for the department of education in 2022 than that.
Honestly I hate Amazon because they are a mega corp that just gets bigger and bigger. But on the other hand they are just the best online store hands down. I ordered an electric toothbrush yesterday at 23:30 and it arrived today at 15:30 - that's just amazing. Also returning stuff is hassle-free and they often are the cheapest.
I tried using Otto for some time but it just cannot compare. Sure. I could also shop from multiple shops but that is kinda waste of time. Amazon is a real one-stop shop.
Why do you hate mega corps getting bigger and bigger if they provide good service?
As they get bigger competing with them becomes harder and harder as their overhead per transaction reduces due to volume. Eventually they become the only choice. I feel like with Amazon this is nearly the case. Many local brick-and-mortar stores that would have existed in the early 200's are non-existent today. Even chains like RadioShack and Circuit City are gone. This leaves the next alternative to be slower and more expensive online stores that struggle to compete.
The only standard I hold Amazon to is if they can get me the things I want in the fastest time. Until someone does that better, I have no reasons not to use Amazon.
This behavior works in a competitive, monopoly averse economy. In the US, this means you will eventuy have no alternative to Amazon.
I've been thinking about the poor quality and availability of Communist goods in the 1980s. I think about the bread lines every time I shop at Costco. What happened to make us so complacent?
This behavior has been working for me for over a decade. Not sure what you’re talking about.
I understand hyperbole is a useful rhetorical device, but it's very hard for me to take anyone who uses it seriously or trust anything they say at all.
And it really doesn't help develop trust when the citations used to support one's points directly contradicts them (like that bit about Amazon providing real-time surveillance from Ring doorbells to police without owners' knowledge - the one and only thing I decided to read the source for which said quite the opposite).
It's a shame too since I'm sure the author had some good points, but I have neither the time nor energy to research every single claim made to see which ones aren't bullshit.
It’s right there in the second paragraph of the WaPo(!) story that Ring owners opt in and can decline to share data.
Does Rekognition perform poorly? Maybe it does, but it’s a best effort service, not a police officer in a box. That AWS was shamed into not selling it to law enforcement doesn’t mean law enforcement won’t have access to facial recognition, only that the vendor they choose isn’t capable of being embarrassed by bad PR.
Yes. That made me scratch my head. It also says explicitly that no real-time feeds were available. It appears the program just let police contact owners to request video. Never mind that program was discontinued last year.
I can only assume the author didn't think anyone would read the links they provided.
My favorite part:
"Amazon only stopped for PR reasons at the start of the George Floyd protests, and even then they only issued a “one-year moratorium.” This has since been extended indefinitely, but frankly that doesn’t matter."
So he's... blaming them... for doing what he wishes they would do?
This honestly may as well have been a paid ad by Amazon. It served as a reminder for me that Prime Day is coming up. That reminder was followed up with several extremely weak arguments that Amazon is the pinnacle of evil. Also felt like it was written largely by AI
Many of the things the author accuses Amazon of doing are troubling, but the logic the author used in the Chris Brown music buying example to tie it all together shows of a lack of distinction between types of cooperation with evil.
When an act has both a potentially good and bad effect Philosophers like to distinguish the morality of this act of "cooperating with evil" by analyzing the degrees to which your cooperation is:
Each of these dimensions should be taken into consideration because without such analysis one can easily become scrupulous about every act that one does that may have unintended side effects. This is how you get people who say things like "there is no such thing as ethical consumption in capitalism" and other extreme statements that would otherwise force you to be a monk in a desert lest your acts accidentally create harm.To learn more about this principle of double effect:
https://thinkingthoughtout.com/2021/01/24/cooperation-with-e...
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/double-effect/
It’s like some Soviet-style retailer where everyone is supposed to shop for everything. It’s about as contrary to competitive capitalism as a company can be. I signed off two years ago and haven’t missed it for a minute - though you should make your own decisions, as with everything.
I don't think you have the slightest idea of what a Soviet style retailer is.
Standing in line for 2 hours to buy milk with my grandma is a childhood memory that's burned into my brain.
Yes agreed! Not that aspect. Rather, the single, state-run seller.
Who do you think this store belonged to.
What about AWS
Amazon manipulates your product searches. When you search for a product, it will push a few select brands and you won’t get past that, except you deliberately search for a specific brand. So it will limit your options. But it will give you the illusion to show you a large amount of various brands.
Searching for a product category on Google won‘t allow you to find a big number of brands either. Because they will push certain products as well.
So be aware that these platforms will limit your options.
But I admit that Amazon has a very polished UX. It‘s a one-stop shop, returns are handled very generously, and you don’t need to visit a dozen sites to get various products.
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Trains are shaped like penis, bus is shape like penis, skyscraper is shape like penis, rocket is shape like penis, now Amazon logo is shape like penis? Why are all Americans always looking everywhere for shape like penis. Every time.
"Hello, American, look at this pencil"
"Pencil?! Shaped like penis!"
"Hello, American, look at your hands"
"Oh my god! That is five penises a hand!"
Constantly searching for penis everywhere. Is there reason for this? It is not as common elsewhere, but American is always constantly searching for penis. If not provided, American will construct it out of household objects. Desperate for penis, American will find it even in intangible objects like logo.
I guess people want what they can't have, and Americans are shielded from body parts since birth.
If not penises... https://velvetshark.com/ai-company-logos-that-look-like-butt...
Ha! Good reference. Look at perplexity logo. It is fan of rectangular slats with line in middle. To American this is "butthole". Can only imagine that in USA, people are like duck with strangely corkscrewing genitals. Fan shaped butthole is for insertion of Torx T6 bit perhaps, to fulfill local slang of "screwing".
Yeah and once you notice that you can't unsee it.
It's not enough to be against Amazon. You need to be against everyone who - sells tech to the gov, - undercuts prices, - exploits employees, - lobbies for regulation.
Not to mention the real reason we hate Jeff Bezos. Because you wouldn't like it if I mentioned it.
I give up. What's the real reason you hate Bezos?
Why are partial solutions unacceptable?