Technology

It sounds like you went to several physical stores and when their stock on hand was not sufficient you concluded your only option was Amazon. What about the rest of the internet?

I’ve been deeply hooked on Amazon for a long time and trying to wean myself off of it for a variety of reasons. The most helpful thing in this, I’ve found, is Apple Pay.

I happen to use an iPhone and Apple Pay is easy. It is increasingly accepted everywhere, making any online store a one-click purchase. Maybe for you it would be PayPal or Google Pay but whatever your preference is, these payment services have come a long way.

For years I was stuck on Amazon because of the convenience. I am not ashamed - convenience is a real benefit when life is busy. And I had everything set up on Amazon, and they had most things available in their search.

But Google Shopping also has almost everything in the world available and most or all the retailers there accept Apple Pay. So now I just do that. It works just as easily.

You can even search on Amazon and then take note of the name of the seller and search the internet for them and then buy direct. Most have websites because Amazon fees eat into their profits. They would rather sell direct. And easy payment services plus ecommerce platforms like Shopify and Square make it easier than ever.

Amazon is becoming a cesspool of Chinese scams these days. I am tempted to say that I still prefer Amazon because the returns are easy but the fact is that I have HAD to return a lot of things to Amazon because they were not what I thought I was buying or they were just absolute shit quality or arrived broken.

So the point remains: you have alternatives. Use them. If you want physical stores, that’s another matter entirely and I agree those are getting fewer and worse. But Amazon doesn’t always beat them on price. You should check every time and you might be surprised. I was in my local CVS and I saw they had the exact LED bulbs I needed to buy but I thought they’d be too expensive there so I checked Amazon on the spot. CVS beat them by a couple of dollars. So check every time!

You really think that in 2024 - a time when not even school children are expected to print out reports because everything is submitted digitally - the fact that photo printer paper not being ubiquitous reflects literally anything other than we've mostly moved past paper as a society?

I'm not saying reddit is better - it clearly is not - but ask yourselves why Lemmy is so absolutely shit at applying Occam's Razor to their own biases?

Amazon is a place where you have to deal with fake items and getting fraudulent returns shipped to you as new. Your reward for this is maybe a 5% discount.

Brick and mortar will always be more expensive and there are always cheaper options than Target. I used to love Fry's but they are no more.

So the way it’s ruining those markets is by making more goods available at lower prices?

There are other online shops besides Amazon. I find an alternative for almost everything that I order and it's not more expensive. And finding the right product inside Amazon is so exhausting nowadays that it's not more work to compare different web shops.

It's hard to compete when you're basically a warehouse and your market is the literal population of the internet.

Yeah, microcenter, even if it's the only computer/electronics store for 100 miles, can still only hold so much, and they only reach people in/around their city at most. It's not like people are crossing state lines to get to a computer store.... Unless you live on the border of your state, I suppose.

Amazon has, at the very least, dozens of warehouses across the country that can deliver whatever it is you want with remarkable efficiency because postal/parcel services have been systematically improving over the past 50+ years.

I'm not saying I'm a fan of Amazon, but bluntly, is it really surprising, in the slightest, that Amazon can out price everyone else?

I’m surprised there’s so few mentions of AWS in this thread. It’s a huge profit centre for the company and a large portion of the internet is now running off of it. AWS is basically the internet’s landlord now, and the profits generated from being the most popular cloud service provider globally are probably why they can afford to invest so heavily into their logistics infrastructure and retail that people are more familiar with.

It would help if you went to the right stores first. Try Office Max, Staples, Office Depot, etc.

Check Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox by Lina Khan (FTC). A very detailed review of how Amazon is a monopoly and how they dodge antitrust legislation.

My last post being unclear. Amazon has about as much a strangle hold on the tech sector as Walmart has on retail. They don't. You get the product you paid for. AWS is no different.

I recently wanted to get a pre-workout, I looked it up on Amazon and then I went to the company site to just order directly from there. It was like $10 cheaper on Amazon because of free shipping and subscribe & save.

You were looking for office supplies: did you check an office supply store?