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.