Amazon wants to make people avoid checking prices on items with features like this, and that seriously scares me.
I also started to prefer actual physical stores. I am not dependent on amazons mercy when it comes to returns. Some items I can return for free at Kohls, some items I had to pay shipping and amazon customer service could not tell me WHY. Some representatives told me they no longer work with kohls, some told me "not all items are eligible", yada yada. In other words amazon is not a good company with clear guidelines.
To be honest now that I wrote this I will probably just cancel my membership.
I went out on the weekend to find a replacement for a sink drain stopper lift rod's ball rod part (ours rotted at the end and failed) at my local hardware store. They only sold an entire assembly for $24 (plus whatever ancillary plumbing materials I don't have like putty).
The entire drain assembly would have cost me over an hours work—if I didn't make a mess of anything. The part isn't urgent. Just until we get it we have no sink drain stopper. I was able to find the single part I needed online for less than half the price of the entire assembly, it will arrive on Friday, and replacing that part will take me all of five minutes.
Now if I wanted a replacement assembly, I'd probably shop locally. The same assembly on Amazon ranged from around the same price to $100.
You really want to know what you're looking for! For what it's worth, I'd never consider a dash button, either. But the online shop still suits me for some items. Also quite looking forward to them advertising similar sink parts to me for the next few years...
- Brick-and-mortar retail store: basic necessities. Cheaper for easy-to-find items. Relatively small selection.
- Amazon: Books and other items where selection trumps price, to an extent. I can get all sorts of books on Amazon that I couldn’t at a bookstore. I wouldn’t buy a perishable good on Amazon and they likely don’t have more niche items.
- eBay: Rare or used items. Compared with Amazon, used items are a lot cheaper (compare ‘ThinkPad X220’ on both Amazon and eBay). The largest selection comes from eBay, but it is also the most variable in quality.
I noticed the following trend: 98% of my shopping is done at brick-and-mortar stores (mostly groceries). 1.5% comes from Amazon. The remaining .5% from eBay is usually just what I can’t find from Amazon.
Mine diverges a bit. Because of the hours I work and the fact that I don't have a car, Amazon is more convenient even for a lot of small items.
So for us Amazon us probably closer to 20%.
eBay is maybe 0.0005%. I'm fortunate there's a reasonably priced local dealer for used/refurb computers. One who even has been dealing in Macs for ~15 years!
Come to think of it—most of our shopping at all comes from groceries. I can't bring myself to use any of those delivery services or pre-set meal services. I like to select my vegetables and meat myself as I grew up learning how to do.
Basically I’d never be able to trust I was getting a fair price at the instant I pushed the button.
I use camelcamelcamel a lot and haven't seen any discrepancy between what I Amazon shows me and what camelcamelcamel alerts. Maybe I'm mostly tracking slightly higher priced items and they're less subject to change?
This meant some items at Costco were expensive relative to what you could find elsewhere on sale, but it also meant it was phenomenally useful to figure out what items other retails were making obscene amounts of profit on.
If your assertions are correct, then competition is unnecessary since costco or any company would have the appropriate price/quality ratios. So we should only have 1 monopoly in every industry.
What's the point of having other large warehouse retailers when Cost is going to have the right price/quality? It's just redundant and wasteful.
I also know all of their net income comes from membership fees, which means the margins for their products is likely going into essentials (I haven't heard of their organization indulging on lavish pay and parties and whatnot).
Of course, as a buyer, it is in my interest to have multiple vendors around to keep them competing. Unfortunately, I don't have the resources to go to other wholesalers also. However, technology does tend to reward the most efficient with all of the gains, so we seem to be inevitably going towards a future with fewer competitors and at most 2 or 3 businesses dominating each field. I don't know how to solve that problem, since as a buyer, I greatly benefit from the conveniences the efficiencies of scale afford me, but I know in the long term, the tables can turn and the seller can gain power over the buyer.
Price transparency seems to be a part of why they are discontinuing Dash buttons. Amazon here is recommending users swap to Alexa voice devices (and suggests many Dash users already have), which has a voice flow for checking the price before buying.
Not that Amazon is the most trustworthy company in all respects, but this announcement certainly isn't because Amazon wanting to make people avoid checking item prices.
To be honest I'd still buy one just to tinker with it and see how far I can customize it to do something else, but Amazon wouldn't benefit from it so they'd have an incentive to block people from doing so.
the main deal breaker with the current setup is that the price might shoot up unexpectedly, but this could be fixed with the ability to set a price limit when you configure the device (eg, don't spend more than $5 on a pack of paper towels).