Comment by problems | Hacker News Reader

Comment by problems | Hacker News Reader

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Local stores (Active Electronics, Canada Computers) have comparable prices to online and often even beat Newegg prices - even without shipping. And even when they're a bit more, I'll pay an extra $20 to have that graphics card today and know I can return it if it's DoA without a hassle.

Of course there are exceptions and extreme price differences where it's worth it to go online, but if it's within 10% or 15%, or sufficiently cheap in general, I'll probably take a store. Shipping often involves going out of my way to pick something up because no one is at my house during the day and even the local post service decides to drop things off in the next town over. Often I have to wait an extra day just for it to show up there and go through a huge hassle to pick something up.

Of course with more obscure stuff or a large price difference, you'll choose online, but in my experience that's surprisingly rare - I shop everything major I buy around and with smaller stuff it just makes more sense to go local. I order IEMs and some electronic components, things I can predict needing in advance direct from China for price and that's about it. I've never placed an amazon order in my life, their prices and selection just aren't competitive in my experience - but I suspect mostly that's because Amazon Canada is a lot worse than Amazon US.

You must have a really unique situation, or maybe things are really weird in Canada.

Where I am, I live in a small town about an hour from a major metro area. The only shopping where I am is a super-Walmart. If I want to buy anything that Walmart doesn't sell, it's a minimum 30-minute drive to the nearest commercial district, and that's over a bridge that I have to pay $4.50 to go back home on. In the other direction (no bridge, no tolls), it's a minimum 40 minutes to that town, and the traffic there is terrible so it's a minimum 50 minutes to the shopping district. Both these districts just have the basic retail chain stores that every such place in the US has (except for hh Gregg which was in both locations, but just went out of business).

So, for me to get anything "locally" means a minimum of 1.5 hours in driving and running around.

You seem to have some weird problems with shipping. For me, I order stuff and if I'm not home, they leave it on my doorstep. There's no theft here that I've ever heard of. As for your "huge hassle", it sounds like you have some really serious problems with your postal service there. Over here, the USPS works great, and Fedex/UPS work fine too for the most part. The only time I've heard of people having to go to some other town to pick something up is when they live in an extremely rural area where there's no residential delivery.

Now, for an alternate view, I also have a girlfriend who lives in the metro area, about 1 hour away from me. She lives in a big high-rise condo, and is less than 2 miles from a quaint "old town" area with local shops, plus lots of typical big-box shops in other directions. This is one of the largest metro areas in the US (I'm guessing #5-7 by population), so there's certainly no shortage of shopping. Shipping is easy for her too: the staff at the front desk takes packages for the building residents. But they take a LOT of packages (many are frequently piled up in the front lobby when I visit; I even saw a mattress there one day); people in that building buy a LOT of stuff online. Why? Simple: time. Even though she's in the city, driving to some random place, even on that side of the metro area, is still a good 20 minutes in my experience, if not more, because of traffic and having to stop at so many red lights. You're not going to be able to get anything without spending at least an hour of your time driving there, dealing with parking, picking it out (assuming they even have it), and driving back. Why waste all that time when you can just get it with a few clicks and pick it up in a couple days when you come home?

Yeah, I can definitely see using it more if I were out of town or if the couriers actually bothered delivering things instead of trying once and dropping it at their warehouse because signature is required on everything - or the federal postal service which drops things up the road, beside a shit load of shopping and has a location only inside of a drug store, where no one works the postal counter and I spend 15 minutes waiting around sometimes.

Maybe I just have bad luck, but as is, ordering online is way more hassle and I only do it for absolute extremes.

Yeah, it really sounds like you have a bad situation because of shipping. It's the opposite for me, and I'm not exactly in a big metropolis here either (just a small town). It couldn't be any easier: stuff is sitting on my doorstep when I come home. Sometimes I meet the mail lady on Saturdays when she drives through my driveway to drop a box off at the door.

I have heard some horror stories from other Americans though in other regions, where they live in someplace so rural that Fedex/UPS don't even deliver without an extra charge (or at all) and they have to pick up their USPS mail at some other town's post office. But that's what you get when you live in an extremely remote place. For people living in or even remotely near any city of any size, receiving packages doesn't seem to be a huge problem here in general. People do complain about getting packages requiring a signature when they're at work, but IME most deliveries from online sellers do not require this, only particularly high-dollar ones.

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