My goal has now shifted to identify the thinnest intermediary between my dollars and the person doing the labor for the product/service I'm paying for.
Etsy is certainly _bad_, but getting to Amazon levels is a whole other animal.
Recently a nice wooden piece from a shop in Germany and an address sign for my yard from some place in the Midwest.
For some things you do see endless shops selling cheap Chinese imports.
"Only" here is incorrect. I posit every public company's primary concern is stock price. But certain behaviors and values align with driving that stock price up and for Amazon it's Customer Obsession. And they are not obsessed with it because they love you, it's because they love your repeat business. But that obsession means your happiness and their stock price are aligned, for now.
I pushed Purchase on Amazon one day and was opening the package 36 minutes later. I can barely drive down to a gas station, get a coke and come back in that time. But I wanted a particular, random item one morning and was setting it up within the hour without leaving my seat. Ebay and Walmart and Local shop can't do that.
I support leaving out of principle, that's laudable. But it won't be because they aren't good at delivering CX.
But they're not maximizing repeat customers, they're maximizing repeat customers multiplied by product fees. (roughly)
They would prefer 100M customers paying $4 a product over 250M customers paying $1 a product.
They keep driving up product fees more and more, reducing how happy the buying experience is.
After spending close to 6 months and countless phone calls trying to get a refund processed the bad experience is outweighing the good for me.
The entire experience on the unhappy path is so obnoxiously dreadful i don’t purchase anything on Amazon over an amount I’d be fine just losing. Even though 99% of my orders have been absolutely fine.
That doesn’t sound like being customer focused or obsessed at all.
Not to mention that finding previous orders via email is much, much faster than going through their website.
Best Buy, Microcenter, B&H, Walmart all do better. They just don't have the range or sometimes do not respect my tax forms.
I am an hour drive from a larger town with a big box store like Walmart. The Best Buy closed. The closest thing nearby is something called Tractor Supply. They put out a big sign each year saying "We Have Chicks!!!" which means they have baby chickens, ducks and turkeys. They are super cute.
We're in rural Vermont, but not particularly remote. Amazon is the same for us, with a minimum 1 week quoted delivery time. And it's not because it actually takes that long to get to us, since Walmart is reliably 2 day. Prime used to be 2 day delivery, like Walmart still is. Amazon has just decided to deprioritize rural northeastern delivery, and just don't ship it out for several days. Even random Ebay sellers using USPS are typically faster. This doesn't make Amazon useless, but it's definitely not my preferred place to buy from anymore.
> They put out a big sign each year saying "We Have Chicks!!!" which means they have baby chickens, ducks and turkeys.
They also sell bees in season, although I think you might have to preorder.
This is why I'm so bullish on Shopify. It increasingly is getting network effects (Shop.app) and people are starting to become even more brand loyal than before. Even Chinese companies are creating strong brand categories at a fraction of US counterparts and selling direct on Shopify to (e.g. Anker, Fnirsi, Fanttik, etc.)
wrt to article insight, Benedicts Evans has been mentioning Ads being the major profit driver at Amazon in his newsletter since 2-3 years ago.
Amused so many people here seem to be pushing etsy. I saw the same supposedly hand-made mugs on sale by hundreds of people on etsy a few years ago.
I'm happy to wait 3 more days, and have inaccurate delivery estimates, in order to get what I actually want.
It also spurred me to move most of stuff off of AWS, which is saving me money now too! The cloud ecosystem has grown in the past 10 years, and I hadn't shopped around, and was missing out on better experience that cost far less.
There is no single website that offers similar solution where my payment is saved and I can just buy and forget.
Only thing I’ve successfully replaced is grocery shopping.
The most common issue for me is what happened when I bought a custom dog bowl, thinking the ceramic was made by the seller. Later stumbled upon something similar and realized it was just an off the shelf bowl and the dog’s name had been painted on. That not worth nothing, and it was still probably nicer than what I could’ve gotten on Amazon, and maybe I should’ve asked before buying. But there’s just a lot of that, “make a quick buck” type of stuff and it’s not always obvious.
I didn't downvote you - and I agree with the sentiment that Whole Foods is also Amazon - but the meta complaining isn't beneficial to the conversation.
For the past decade Etsy has been a rebranded Temu/Ali Express. There's almost nothing local, or original, or worth anything on it.
All large online shopping services converge onto the same Amazon model.
They originally broke through and defined themselves by insisting that vendors only sell original cottage-crafted work, but gave up on that requirement years ago and the sincere low-volume, low-margin crafters can't compete with high-volume, high-margin importers in either advertising spend or in the etsy-profiting metrics that drive algorithmic discovery.
One day shipping is fast, but I can run to the store in 15 minutes. Can't beat that.
There are still lots of good reasons to shop local, but I’m not sure speed is the best reason.
(no affiliation, I just love the company and how they treat their employees and customers, strong value for price paid imho)
I live in central nyc, been only a few times to a Costco, and had no idea they even do any shipping! I assumed that part of all those good prices is the smaller selection, large minimum quantities, and that you have to get yourself there with a car to get it in person.
You can find yourself a nice laptop for cheap. "It's got a cop CPU, an i5 10th gen. It's got cop RAM, cop SSD, cop 12v power input."
I am sorry, but I will not buy 20 cents water at $2.
Yes, all of us who are not wealthy must have an upper limit to what we can support, and maybe 25% is over your limit, but please don't ignorantly accuse them of ripping you off when you clearly know nothing of the costs of vastly different scales of business.
There has been a lot of consolidation in this space. Part of that means that independent webstores closed up and moved exclusively to Amazon. If they did not close up shop, they now use Shop/Shopify or a similar SaaS, which streamlines sign-ups, sign-ins, and checkouts, for better or worse. All the better if you've got PayPal or Apple/Google Pay.
I've noticed that a lot of "click and mortar" stores have really abysmal product on their physical shelves. Like, it's discontinued, or all the wrong sizes, subtly defective, or just undesirable. It's like their stores are kind of dumping grounds, and it makes sense, because the sort of person in 2026 who gets in a car, and shops in a store, and grabs stuff uncritically off the shelf is not your most discerning or astute shopper.
Target's shopping experience remains better than most. Their stores include everyday needs like groceries and medicine, so I can meet a lot of my needs by dropping in. Furthermore, their app-based shopping (marketplace) is pretty good too, so if I need housewares delivered or something, or I need to look up something and find it right now, in-store, their app is right there. And their shopping carts now have little dedicated slots to drop in your smartphone next to the cupholders.
The best online shopping is Office Depot/OfficeMAX. They've shrunk their retail footprint, but their online store is still a non-marketplace, and really good for buying the kinds of things they sell. That includes some non-intuitive buys, like you can find kitchen supplies, because they stock many breakrooms for small/medium businesses. Good place for electronics and accessories and art supplies, even if you are just comparison-shopping. Their delivery is rapid and often just comes from the nearest store!
Meanwhile with other platforms it takes up to a week, the delivery timeframe is 08:00 to 21:00, I then have to wait for the delivery person to call me because they can never find my front door. And if I happen to be on the toilet when they ring the package is delivered to a parcel point ten kilometers away. So I have to rent a car to go pickup my package.
Amazon has absolutely nailed the delivery here. They looked at how people struggle with online orders and streamlined it completely. It’s such a blessing not to have to deal with delivery drivers anymore.
If Amazon charged €10 extra per package I would still order with them.
eg. wanted to purchase a FIio KA17 DAC - amazon price £150, asked an llm for an alternative, found for £120 from a decent small audiovisual real store, ordered, delivered within 3 days.
Have found you can save money for purchases from cosmetics to garden fertilizer and grass seed to audiovisual and IT equipment.
Am I getting old? I feel like a dinosaur still Googling things.
Having to add "reddit" to get genuine results was already a meme 3 years back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrFv1O4dbqY&pp=ygUXZ29vZ2xlI...
…you've got to figure that Google is just as disgusting as Amazon in the ads/search dept.
LLMs seem positively naive in that regard. Just, you know, simply suggesting what their subsumption of the internet suggests.
(For now anyway.)
I know Amazon often isn't the lowest price anymore, but that's okay with me as long as their customer service is great.
I spend a good four months every year in Poland and Austria, and there’s really nowhere in the world except China that offers consumers as much choice and availability as the U.S. does.
This is true, although I find it interesting that so many people then gravitate to Costco, where consumer choice in a given category is deliberately restricted to one or two product variations selected by the head office.
Also, you don't have to shop at Costco exclusively, you still have all the other options available. Costco is just a good default if you're not looking for something specific.
Meanwhile in Europe I spend many evening on internet forums and Facebook groups doing research trying to find a part that will work with my car, then finding someone willing to sell it and finally using Google Translate getting someone to ship it to my foreign (to them) country. I even had to resort to proxies just to get car parts from Eastern to Western Europe.
They're not mutually exclusive, two things can be had at the same time.
Wish to live in your reality tho, where I can buy a dozen different brands of hot dogs while visiting the doctor for elevated blood pressure without needing to take out a payment plan on klarna.
However if you live in a historical city center where your address is the equivalent of “That small door if you go up two stairs behind the old tavern” then package deliveries plain suck. Especially since you don’t have the “village postmen” anymore. You have ten delivery companies and none of them have fixed routes.
I always choose delivery to the convenience shop on the opposite corner. It's open late, and picking up a parcel takes about a minute.
Shopping at Amazon perpetuates the monopolization and consolidation of players in the economy. That means less competition. That means less incentive to improve the value they provide.
Seems pretty clear to me that shopping with Amazon makes things worse for everyone in the long run.