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Comment by evmar | Hacker News Reader

To me the real lesson of this post is something about analysis paralysis and losing financial perspective.

The majority of the options appear somewhere around $1-$2 per oz and it appears a typical bottle is around 10oz, so the difference here in the pricing is somewhere around $10. Worrying about this problem for more than about 10 minutes loses all the money you'd "save" by ensuring you're on the cheap end of that spread.

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Not everyone makes $60/hr or values their time that highly. $10 has made a difference to my life, at the right time.

Sure, one shouldn't actually spend that much time picking which lotion to buy. But perhaps one should just shop elsewhere; and I think that's the point of this post. Amazon has become so full of counterfeits, confusing options, over priced third party sellers, etc., that for something like personal care products, most people these days would likely have a much higher quality experience starting off at drugstore.com or target.

Author here - this is perfectly true. I, perhaps ineffectively, tried to cover that briefly in the conclusion - basically I am worried about dealing with this sort of thing when I become a father in a few months. Expenses will rise, my wife's salary will fall, and time for doing this sort of research will be hard to find.

If you combine your story with the stories of counterfeit items sold by third parties on Amazon, you'll pretty much just never buy certain items from Amazon ever again.

I even found reviews for _counterfeit diapers_ on top of this problem of 10000 types of packaging for the same diaper and so now I just buy all my diapers and my prenatal vitamins from Costco.

Sure, if you only bought a single item once, but when you have a shopping cart full and a repeated purchases over the year, $10 here and $10 there can easily add up over the year. The article is clearly just highlighting the wider problem using a single product as an example.

That depends entirely on your income level. Someone unemployed will be well severed by trading his time for savings.

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