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When all the stores price match I have no reason to shop online unless I can’t find it in store. Amazon app is used almost exclusively to price match on my phone. Saved $1000’s

I’ll pay more to not drive to a brick and mortar at this point. I don’t want to get in my car and go to Best Buy or Target or whatever and hope they’re stocking what I want, when I know I can get it in two days from Amazon or another online retailer. I’ve been bitten by that too many times. I sometimes miss browsing in person, but I don’t miss wasting my time.

My favorite thing lately is how Lowes and Home Depot will let you look up items on their website, see how many are in stock, and, most importantly, what aisle and bay that item is in. It's usually correct, too.

I'm not going to buy those kinds of items sight unseen (go check out lumber at these places... I've gone through half a lift of pine boards to get a half dozen that are straight enough to use... And even more regular hardware, I want to put my tape on it first). But it's a struggle to find just where slightly oddball stuff might be located, if you don't know, and chances are you won't encounter somebody on staff that knows whst you're asking for and where it is in these gargantuan places.

I have taken advantage of the aisle/bay info with Home Depot. It is quite nice for things I couldn’t otherwise find. It’s not always correct but it’s helpful.

Home centers actually stock things that are hard to buy online efficiently, too. e.g. You cannot buy a large metal rolling tool chest on Amazon at a reasonable price. Husky wins that battle definitively.

Is this submarine advertising? Every major retailer has a listing of in stock items, per store, and will do same day pickup.

So I should do my shopping online and then drive to Best Buy instead of just clicking “place order” and getting the same item at the same price in a day or two? For something I need desperately right now, okay, but for everything else my time saved is worth more than the slightly more instant gratification.

in-person assessment. and yes, quick availability.

You could place the order and pick up in store. You would get the order a couple days faster, and don't have to go find the item in the aisle.

But I’d spend nearly an hour round tripping to Best Buy including commute and checkout. This is not a win for things I don’t need urgently.

I seriously doubt it’s a win for the environment either. It cannot be more efficient for me to drive a vehicle to go pick up a small package than for UPS to put the package on a truck with hundreds of others.

Is "amount of time and dollars spent" the only part of your purchasing decision matrix?

Something to be said for supporting jobs in your community, keeping money in your area, bumping into people you might not have seen as much otherwise, etc. Stores can also be great for discovery. It's a lot easier to play with laptops at Best Buy than it is to research how the keyboard might feel online. In another product category, the local video store (we still have one!!) still beats out online in terms of being able to browse selection; I'll see frequent complaints from Netflix users about not being to find what's on.

> Is "amount of time and dollars spent" the only part of your purchasing decision matrix?

No, but it’s a big part.

> Something to be said for supporting jobs in your community, keeping money in your area,

The comment here was about “major retailers”. If you want to buy from a local mom and pop shop, awesome. There are great reasons to do that. If you’re going to Best Buy, those reasons pretty much evaporate. That money doesn’t stay in the area and the jobs probably aren't better than UPS provides.

> bumping into people you might not have seen as much otherwise

No thanks. People say this because it sounds good and is hard to refute but I don’t care a bit about bumping into people at the store. I bump into someone I care about at a store less than once a year. Interacting with people in a retail store is not generally very rewarding. They’re almost always either salespeople or strangers. People in stores are better referred to as crowds.

> Stores can also be great for discovery. It's a lot easier to play with laptops at Best Buy than it is to research how the keyboard might feel online.

Sure. There are reasons to buy in person and this is a good one. “Need to physically hold to evaluate” is not a common attribute of most of the things I buy, though. And generally free return shipping solves for this when I do need it.

Let's not forget that Amazon Prime has gotten worse with longer delivery periods even when they say it's 2 days. It has been coming later. And this is outside the holidays.

Yup, my 2 dqy shipping is 4 days of handling and 2.5 of shipping. I am lucky if I can order monday and get it by saturday. Its nearly worthless as I tend to order enough for free shipping anyway.

Really? That's not been my anecdotal experience but would be curious to hear if this is a common experience. I have had trouble with Amazon's own courier, but have largely mitigated that issue by asking Amazon customer service to use other couriers.

Its gotten really bad for me and a lot of my friends, lots of prime deliveries on little stuff take 4-5 days, and a lot of items say one day at checkout then a day later when i get the shipping notice, It’s ridiculous. Especially so since i live under 2 miles from an Amazon warehouse.

I get two day deliveries in a single day much more often than in >two days. Late deliveries happen but are very uncommon for me.

This hasn't been true for me, if anything it seems faster these day. I get most 2-day shipped stuff in less than 24 hours.

I’m 35 miles from a fulfillment center in a major metro and I couldn’t get a Prime package sooner than 3 days when I was still using Amazon.

Same, and this just started after the holidays for me, and not sure why. Going on a trip, order new boots guaranteed to arrive the day before i left. Needless to say, I canceled that order the night before my trip at 10pm. And that's like the 5th time this year. They really need to quit calling it a guarantee.

What about amazon's counterfeiting problem?

Note that the price stores generally match is the price 'shipped and sold by Amazon'. So stores shouldn't ever be matching counterfeit prices.

I'm am idiot and misread the comment.

Happens to all of us from time to time! :)

"Shipped and sold by Amazon" doesn't mean jack squat. They use their warehouses to commingle inventory from many individual suppliers.

Amazon does not commingle their inventory. You appear to be confusing 3p sellers and "fulfilled by amazon" with "sold by Amazon".

Recently a bunch of people got fake products sold by Amazon.com themselves. Amazon are commingling their own goods, or have some other significant problems in their supply chain.

People keep repeating this "not Amazon.com!" response but it hasn't been true for at least a year. Go look on /r/boardgames, /r/pcmasterrace, or that dude with the $5K camera that received a literal brick. These people post their invoices that clearly say sold by Amazon.com and people call them liars.

I've received such sold-by-Amazon items as well, but I had assumed it was simple return fraud (customer returns wrong item in a packaging that looks unopened so Amazon puts it back on stock).

Of course I can't know for sure if it was that or comingling.

Amazon definitely puts 3rd-party returns back in stock if it looks like still sellable as new - the seller help site says "We evaluate the condition of each returned item. If we determine that the item is sellable, we will return it to your inventory". So they probably do that for their own items as well.

This is great if you have easy access to a lot of retailers, but this is not always the case. A lot of these stores that price match are in suburbs, whereas I am in the car in the city, and it just doesn't really work for me to try and make the investment to go out there.

If this becomes a wider thing I could see Roku having more of an edge, as it is though it's basically Amazon who has beef with everyone.

I'm pretty happy with my Chromecast despite not having Amazon Prime Video.

If you bought a shield tv, you could have Amazon prime video. They're pretty nice. I'm kind of disappointed in the new model, though. It's nice having a fully functional Android device that can gamestream, use apps that aren't made for tv with the gamepad, and stream video.

It feels almost time to start referring to partnerships rather than companies.

How long before (presuming legislation continues to lag) we have

Apple-Fedex-Disney

Amazon-Ford-Spotify

Google-DHL-Sonos

At the moment Sonos works with Amazon's Alexa, not the other voice cylinders.

The above comment has been down-voted (!?) despite being factual, according to Sonos themselves!

- Sonos and Alexa integration is available as a beta version.

- "Google Home Smart Assistant doesn’t work with your Sonos system natively" ("The Google Assistant will be supported on Sonos One in 2018") [1]

- Sonos has not yet released their implementation of AirPlay 2 which is what Apple's HomePod ecosystem will be relying on. Apparently Apple themselves are not quite ready with AirPlay 2.

[1] https://sonos.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/4251/~/go...

You misunderstood the intent of the parent post. It's not to illustrate which companies are partnering, but to demonstrate the type of partnering we might be likely to see. You are missing the broader commentary, and only commenting on the immaterial, specific example they provided.

That's a well and fine point. However, by being unclear there is no indication that those companies are not partnering. That could be construed as propagating false rumors. It's not just the intent that is important, but how people are likely to perceive it.

I'm happy with that view and will state for the record that they weren't factual partnerships.

The transit companies were also arbitrary.

Nope, I didn't misunderstand the intent. I pointed out the fact that Sonos is not a good example of a company that might partner exclusively or even mostly with Google, due to their "voice-and-cylinder-neutral" business model as well as the already-available integration with Amazon.

The last line is silly. Sonos is not going to align specifically with Google. Because Sonos has a business model that is neutral to other home cylinders and voice assistants, and Amazon Alexa users can already use their Sonos speakers together with Alexa -- but not (yet) with either Google's or Apple's assistants. Sonos is similar to Roku in that sense.

Amazon should be split up soon. Im a believer this is why Alphabet was formed.

I don't know what the internal structure of Amazon looks like, but having more management for different sectors is certainly good.

You're also probably a lot more likely to receive products that aren't counterfeit when ordering from Target/etc. I've pretty much completely stopped using Amazon for that reason. It's just not worth the risk.

I see this come up fairly often, and it baffles me each time. I've probably spent an average of $50+/week on Amazon for the past several years and have never once received a counterfeit item. What items are people buying that are so frequently counterfeit?

I honestly couldn't speak to whether or not many of the items I've bought on Amazon are counterfeit. The example I saw in the article recently was a headphone anchor, and they had copied the packaging. I couldn't tell you, if I bought a headphone anchor, if the packaging looked like crud because it was counterfeit, or because the vendor who made it used cheapy packaging. Could you have bought counterfeit products that work "well enough", and you didn't know it?

I do generally just buy whatever's the cheapest price, and rarely look to see if the brand and seller name are the same (or if there's a seller with the same name as the brand). I'm kinda interested in paying more attention going forward though, so we'll see.

> What items are people buying that are so frequently counterfeit?

This is exactly my question too.

> I've probably spent an average of $50+/week on Amazon for the past several years and have never once received a counterfeit item.

I’ve been averaging >$2k/month for about ten years (combined personal and business purchases) and have never had a counterfeit product, even in categories that others claim have rampant counterfeits.

It’s a bit scattered, but I’ve seen lots of small consumer electronics (headphones, chargers etc) that are clearly counterfeits.

For example this charger is almost certainly fake: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071FZ9XP2/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_rEcN...

I sometimes think that amazon should spin off the retail business as a separate entity from aws and consumer electronics companies.

None of the other businesses survive without AWS profits propping they up.

> I wonder when Alibaba US and EU will open.

Already open. https://www.aliexpress.com/