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Comment by bluntfang | Hacker News Reader

>The streets are filled with people carrying shopping bags, every day of the week.

anecdotes are great, but why don't you search for the numbers of brick and motor retail sales vs online sales?

About 9-to-1 in just about every industry.

Retail isn’t growing, but it still accounts for 80-90% of sales in almost every industry. Online sales will probably overtake brick and mortar… in 5 to 10 years—in the US.

Amazon is big, but only really in he US. And only certain verticals. And only typically among affluent urban households.

That’s why their stock has always been so high. Amazon has, and still has, massive growth potential. When you get everything from Amazon you assume everyone else does. But the reality is that you (and I) are an extreme minority.

You forget how many people pay cash in the US. And how many people international have shit or extremely poor/expensive mail service. And how >3 billion or so people live in countries with import tariffs that are 40% or more. And while internet access is prevalent, buying everyday items online is not. It’s really easy to lose sight of how the vast majority live when you live in an urban area and work at a technically progressive company.

I've actually become concerned enough about Amazon's utter unwillingness to address their counterfeit product problem that we've stopped buying food, makeup, sunblock, lotion, or anything that uses electricity on Amazon.

See also just this year their recall of eclipse glasses.

After four tries to get name brand and working batteries for my car remote on Amazon, I gave up and purchased them at a local hardware store. It wasn't as convenient as Amazon, but it was a lot more convenient than Amazon allowing scum to sell repackaged no-name crap instead of the particular batteries I needed over and over again...

You will only have this problem if you buy from the amazon market place. If you restrict your search to seller=amazon I would expect you to be pretty safe.

I only wish this were true.

We needed a refrigerator water filter a month back. So I head to amazon and look at different products available, including cheaper. Didnt like the reviews for the 3rd party and went the samsung filter. And I see what they offer is retail price.

I read the reviews and I see a trend on the comments "counterfeit", "counterfeit", and "not real product". And that was from Amazon, on a verified product's line.

So I went to Lowes. They had them in stock for the same price. Except with 0 chance of counterfeit.

Buying a water filter for my fridge from Amazon was a terrible experience. Everything was mislabeled, obviously counterfeit, or had terrible reviews. Buying from home depot was much easier.

On the flip side it is near impossible to buy standard cylinder filters at retail establishments because they are all Hawking proprietary systems.

I don't think this is true anymore. I'm sure most items in Amazon's inventory are commingled with third-party sellers using FBA.

I'm sure this is helps Amazon with logistics, but it also makes it difficult to catch counterfeit goods.

That sounds like a horrendous idea. How could amazon possibly think it made sense to do that?

Because the losses from the fraud (that's bound to happen) are less than the cost incurred by having separate inventories.

I hope they include the loss of trust from the customers to whom this happens in this cost of fraud.

There are always new sheeple waiting to have their lives enriched by ordering groceries on Amazon Prime...

Only for certain categories. Rule of thumb is that if it’s a commodity-like product, proceed with caution.

How does one do that? Is there a filter you can use somewhere? I really hate Amazon's inability to filter.

When you search for something, once you selected on the left which part of store, you can select at the bottom left the seller.

When I ordered replacement batteries for my phone I bought them from LGs website at triple the price. Amazon had them cheaper but I had already gotten burned ordering replacements from them. The counterfeits were labeled as LG batteries for my phone. They would read fully charged but the phone wouldn't actually turn on with them installed. Also the date code on the battery didn't match what was printed on the packaging.

It's made me pretty leery of ordering anything from Amazon.

> After four tries to get name brand and working batteries for my car remote on Amazon...

Is there something wrong with the AmazonBasics brand? I’ve never had problems with them.

For items shipped from Amazon warehouses you basically need a brand only available through Amazon - AmazonBasics, Anker, etc. because there's really no room for counterfeiting there, though I think Anker products are now showing up elsewhere which may now mean they get hit with counterfeits from third party "FBA" as well.

These days I'll absolutely check elsewhere before making a purchase, and I'll pay a bit of a premium to either buy from a different store or to get items shipped from the seller instead of from Amazon.

Remember to fill for refund "this item doesn't match the description" every time this happens to you.

Online retail in China has a 25% share of all sales, around 2.5x higher than the US, and still growing rapidly, and this in a country with 3x the population of the US.

Brick and mortar retail in China has also been pretty dysfunctional and never really developed completely like it did in the west (every mall having the same set of stores like every movie theater having the same set of movies). Then you have the state owned department stores that never really figured out what to do once their monopoly was broken.

> When you get everything from Amazon you assume everyone else does. But the reality is that you (and I) are an extreme minority.

Sounds about right.

For the rest of the world Amazon is at best a bookstore that is actually just a middlemen for other online retailers. This doesn't even register in any real estate decision.

I'll never understand Amazon's domination in the US.

Its like everyone not Bezos chose to completely ignore the internet.

Free shipping. Most other retailers still don’t offer it and if they do, there are absurd limits like you have to spend $100.

Hell, Borders had Amazon running their website at one point.

I can only imagine Bezos had to leave the room during negotiations because he was laughing too hard.

Possibly. It was an incredibly stupid move. I was a manager at Borders during its mid-90s rise, and I told them at that time that Amazon was going to eat their lunch. They didn't believe it and didn't listen. While Amazon was focusing on developing their supply chain and getting consumers accustomed to buying online, Borders was building massive stores everywhere that couldn't turn a profit. They were also going into debt to do this. They were simultaneously not conservative enough (finances) and not innovative enough (the Internet).

Unless you know what you are buying and have a sense of what quality you are buying, its impossible to buy online.

There is a reason why most people get a touch and feel of things at places like Target and then buy it online.

In India where large retailers like Target are absent and people have no way of getting the 'look and feel', the trend is its getting very hard to sell things, unless you throw impossible discounts at customers.

Unless you know what you are buying and have a sense of what quality you are buying, its impossible to buy online

That's what Borders upper management said in the mid-90s and at the company's peak, and they were wrong. Showrooming didn't make people buy elsewhere when Amazon had the lower price, either.

Retail isn’t growing, but it still accounts for 80-90% of sales in almost every industry. Online sales will probably overtake brick and mortar… in 5 to 10 years—in the US. Amazon is big, but only really in he US. And only certain verticals. And only typically among affluent urban households.

You’re describing why online will badly damage NYC retail, which is the context of this conversation.

Retail's margins are tiny, so even losing 10% of sales can be catastrophic, especially if a business is surviving on loans.

Which is just another form of 'rent', renting money. Working to further enrich the capital holders.

Its not an anecdote. Have you spent any time in NYC?

Why do I need to search for numbers comparing brick and mortar vs online? Of course online retail is growing faster than brick and mortar but the topic here is New York City which is an outlier. NYC is a shopping destination for US, international and tri-state area tourists.

People come to NYC specifically so they can shop along the retail corridors of Broadway in Midtown, Soho, Nolita and the Meat Packing Districts, The Flatiron and many others. It's seen as an experience since you can walk, shop and see landmarks like Rockefeller Center, The Empire State building, Grand Central while you do so.

https://therealdeal.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Manhattan...

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