Shopping Sucks Now

When I was living in the PNW and realized I direly needed gloves, I just hit up a few of the department stores downtown until I found some that met my criteria. Which are probably similar to those of this author, I wanted some that looked cute, had a conductive patch on the finger so I could use my phone without taking them off, would fit on my long hands with long fingernails, and weren’t super expensive gloves designed for arctic expeditions. I could see them in person and make choices based on how their build quality felt.

I think my total time, including the bus rides downtown and back (even though I was probably doing other things downtown on that trip like “working”), was probably less than she spent opening ten thousand different tabs in her search for The Perfect Glove.

And then in a couple years I had to do it again because I could only find one of the gloves when it started to be too cold for bare hands again. It ain’t worth investing a ton of time into picking gloves or umbrellas or other things that tend to get lost or separated.

Shopping for physical goods on the Internet sucks.

Sorry, but I just can't get on board with this point of view.

Shopping has always sucked. Badly. Going to the shops has to be one of the single most annoying and unpleasant day to day experiences I deal with[1].

If you live anywhere even remotely populous when you visit the shops there are people milling around just ####ing everywhere. Dithering, dawdling, standing around chatting at every choke point in the aisles, demonstrating a spectacular lack of spatial awareness - but, honestly, who can blame them when the entire environment is so overstimulating and overcrowded?

And after all this there's a damn good chance you're not going to find what you want anyway.

I dare anyone to visit a department store in a city for half an hour on a Saturday and come out afterwards without having entertained a single murderous thought.

But nowadays I can do a bit of research online, which might be quick or might take a while depending on what I want, find exactly what I want, find somewhere that sells it (generally not Amazon because I just don't trust them that much these days), and either order it for delivery, or click and collect (very handy at places like Screwfix, Toolstation, and B&Q).

It's just way less stressful and way more pleasant. I mean, still not necessarily the most fun thing in the world, but it makes shopping suck a lot less.

[1] There are clearly far worse problems to have, and this may be a #firstworldproblem, but in terms of the normal humdrum routine of daily life, visiting the shops often really sucks.

That "tyranny of perfect information" begets FOMO. If you'd looked at one more site or one more review you might have discovered a "better" (cheaper, high quality, higher utility) item.

I'd add that's it's worse because the world is flatter. Why should I buy Brand Item when I can get a version from Alibaba for 10-20%? If it truly is comparable, then why pay the markup when the internet lets me cut out the middleman? But then when the version from Alibaba is total crap, there's no recourse. It's not like a local shop with reputation at risk.

So you end up in this world where nothing matters and it's a race to maximize attention. Which means, as a consumer, you have to do your research or risk getting taken for a ride.

> On the first page, there are two different gloves listed, one for $17 and one for $60, that look exactly identical and come in the exact same colors. Both have the same exact star rating (4.5/5) and hundreds of positive reviews.

> I’d love to only spend $17 except there is no way 17-dollar leather gloves won’t be fake and off color and smell of gasoline when they arrive, and after only a few wears the lining will pill or develop holes. I’d love to just buy the $60 gloves except that seems like a pretty large amount of money to spend on non-weatherproof gloves, and how can I, when there are identical $17 gloves right there.

It could also be that the $60 gloves came from the same factory and are exactly identical to the $17 gloves, and if you buy them you're going to get ripped off by at least $43.

I wouldn't say that the problem of shopping is now "perfect information," it's rather a deluge of information liberally peppered with dishonesty and arbitrariness.

Anyone working on a Trader Joes meets Amazon? That curates maybe 1-3 versions of things, largely eliminating paradox of choice.

I guess Costco is kind of a bulk version of that...

Also I've been increasingly interested in just buying things once and having them last a decade+, ideally a lifetime (less waste). But this takes a lot of research. Trader Joes does a good job of curating groceries and I've come to trust their choices. It would be nice to have this for products.

Essentially, "This is the version of X that will last 10+ years."

Something that has been lost is genuine reviews. First you have all the sponsored reviews and then all the equally worthless "I don't know how to use it so it's junk" or "it never arrived" 1 star reviews. And so many "review" sites look like they've been procedurally generated then SEO optimized and filled with ads.

If you're interested in a deeper treatment of these issues check out the 2004 book [1] The Paradox of Choice.

Some interesting notes from follow-up research [2]:

> In a meta‐analysis of 99 observations (N = 7202) reported by prior research, we identify four key factors—choice set complexity, decision task difficulty, preference uncertainty, and decision goal—that moderate the impact of assortment size on choice overload. We further show that each of these four factors has a reliable and significant impact on choice overload, whereby higher levels of decision task difficulty, greater choice set complexity, higher preference uncertainty, and a more prominent, effort‐minimizing goal facilitate choice overload. We also find that four of the measures of choice overload used in prior research—satisfaction/confidence, regret, choice deferral, and switching likelihood—are equally powerful measures of choice overload and can be used interchangeably.

[1] https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780060005696

[2] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1016/j.jcps.2014....

Or stop trying to hyper-optimize?

Buy from a handful of trusted brands; if it doesn't work out, don't buy from them again. Like what people did before all this information was available.

Faced with the situation described in this article many times in recent years, I've come to appreciate the value of the wholesale buyer at traditional retailers.

While obviously there are a variety of incentives involved, the buyer has evaluated a variety of products and found ones that they not only expect to be profitable for them, but that are also something they expect their customers to like and want to buy. Also, it's very unlikely they'll risk selling counterfeits. The majority of Amazon sellers seem to optimize exclusively for profitability, and make up for it by gaming the system with fake reviews and the like.

"Shopping" on Amazon.com is not a good strategy IMO. It's always best to find something you want on another, more specialized site (forum, review aggregator, specialized review site, etc.) and then look for the item you want somewhere online. Amazon, walmart, alibaba et al. are more like UI's for a warehouse for me at this point.

The perfect knowledge she claims to be burdened by is anything but. The actual problem here is imperfection of knowledge. What do you know, when someone tells you a glove is soft? What do you know, when they tell you it's waterproof? What do you know when they tell you it's leather? You know nothing for sure if all you've got to rely on is second-hand hearsay information. You're stuck in Plato's cave, chained to the wall.

Shopping online should be reserved for cases when either you already know most of what you need to know, through first-hand experience, or when you're willing to do the buy-and-return thing a couple times to find out.

I was a Vegan for five years in my twenties ("London's only fat vegan"). And one of the things I liked was that I did not have to think hard about eating out at lunchtime. I could have a jacket potato with beans or I could get all sophisticated and have a jacket potato with hummus.

Lack of choice sucks. Limited sufficient choice makes a simple happy life.

I've started only buying things directly from brands that I trust and have legitimate warranties. I bought 5 pairs of swimming shorts on Amazon last year and all of them have completely fallen apart. I have a pair that I bought from Patagonia that look as good today as they did 6 years ago. I have a 10 year old puffer from them that has been so good to me. It's worth the extra money, if you can afford it, to just buy one nice thing and be done with it.

Imho, the problem is Amazon and how everybody is aping them. Every store is now also a bazaar with infinite combinations of functionally-anonymous brands hawking indistinguishable Chinese plastic.

I want a e-store where somebody has taken an editorial role in curating their crap. I used to be a habitual researcher and I'm completely burned out on the process.

I started riding a motorcycle two springs ago. In that short time I went though six pairs of gloves. Turns out, buying gloves online sucks. Sizing is terrible since the only size is the width of your palm. Fingers too long or too short or different lengths? You are out of luck. Thick fingers or thin fingers? Nope. Glove fits well but has an uncomfortable inner seam? Gotcha again. Love the glove but not the closure system? Oops. Glove fits but you hate the thickness of the material? Material breathes too much or not enough? Manufacturer put logos everywhere?

Yeah, I learned my lesson and buy gloves in person.

This is what branding is all about: you can't really tell but you know brand 'B' hasn't let you down so just choose that again.

Of course then the tail began to wag the cow* and the brand became the point; product value became irrelevant. Still it's probably the least terrible way to choose. I want a USB power brick but brand 'N' doesn't sell something that meets my desires: I'll wait.

* chose cow rather than dog because I doubt farmers used to actually brand (German for "burn") their symbol on their dog.

I know where this article is trying to go, but as someone who rarely shops .. damn is it nice.

I went to Uniqlo in Faneuil Hall here in Boston yesterday. Simply walking into the store is an _experience_. It's in a historic district, surrounded by quick bites and other fun knick knacks, and the store itself is beautiful laid out.

This is where the physical store absolutely destroys the abysmal online experience. Curation and the human experience.

Physical in-store shopping has always been a nightmare for me. Too many people moving in too many random directions, most of them oblivious or actively hostile to those around them. I can feel the waves of frustration and anxiety of everyone around me. I'm one of those people that goes to a store only when they really need something, and I plan it out like a bank heist. Park here, away from everyone else, keep my head down, go this route to get to thing X, see if there is anything there that would remotely work for me, grab it if there is, head directly to the checkout farthest away from the mass of humanity jockeying for position, pay quickly, exit quickly, start to breathe a sigh of relief as I head for the car. I don't know how I got this way, I'm not antisocial in most other contexts, but for me shopping has been a terrible experience and online shopping has been a blessing.

Probably because of my "smash-and-grab" shopping routine, I don't spend much time searching for that Perfect Item. I just buy something that looks reasonable and hope for the best. If I have bought enough of that kind of item to have a brand preference or non-preference, I would take that into account. If I were wanting to buy some gloves, I'd first go to Amazon (sorry) and search for leather gloves or whatever. I'd maybe use the checkboxes on the left to narrow it down. I'd look at maybe four different choices, and pick one. Sometime a day or two later I'd wonder what was in the box, because I would have forgotten about the whole experience already.

My shopping-phobia or whatever it is has conditioned me to not buy too many things, even now where online shopping makes it stress-free. Which is probably a good thing, because I'm always trying to downsize anyway thinking I have too much crap.

> I’d love to only spend $17 except there is no way 17-dollar leather gloves won’t be fake and off color and smell of gasoline when they arrive, and after only a few wears the lining will pill or develop holes. I’d love to just buy the $60 gloves except that seems like a pretty large amount of money to spend on non-weatherproof gloves, and how can I, when there are identical $17 gloves right there.

17, which is too risky, and 60, which isn't 17, which is too risky...

There are probably hundreds of salespeople inside small business abodes in a 20 mile radius who are trained in the diplomacy of breaking out of that loop without making the author feel like a complete idiot.

Not saying a brick-and-mortar is a utopia, but at least the problem of ending up with a 5-star pair of "glarves" goes away.

I do really feel badly for (mostly) young people who have no frame of reference for things other than Amazon and comparison websites. I would probably never go to Amazon for something like gloves (or most other things) because you have no idea what you are going to get. When I do know what I want, the first place I try to buy it from is the company that makes it. If they don't sell it direct, then they will probably tell you who does. If they have their own store on Amazon, I will use that, even if other providers on Amazon are selling it for less.

The silly thing about all of this is when you are buying physical products, they actually exist somewhere.

You can (or at least should be able to) go to a store look at the product, try it on, look at the quality first hand and then buy them.

But we've accepted that it's better to save 25% or 50% so that we can avoid the inconvenience of actual shopping.

Furthermore, there are brands that make good stuff and have good customer service, stick to those brands until they prove to be untrustworthy.

Don't reward Amazon just for building a nice website.

Does the author not have any friends? How hard is it to see a friend or acquaintance wearing gloves and ask them whether or not they like them and where they bought them?

This is a much of a style problem as a choice problem. As a guy in the suburbs I don't give a shit about style, but my hands are basically like ice cubes all winter. So I have two cheap non-matching hats that I shove into my coat pockets and then I put my hands into them inside the pockets. I benefit from the fact that style is irrelevant (for me) and any hat works way better than any glove for my particular case.

Shopping sucks less now. Wider selection and more transparent information means that you can make a better choice today. If the author stops looking for the absolute best item, they'll find that it's a great world for the satisficing consumer.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/satisficing.asp

Shopping doesn't suck. Being picky sucks. If I want gloves I go to the discount store and buy a 5-pack of the nitrile dipped cotton, the half-leather or the insulated rubber ones depending on what I need them for, no existential crisis whatsoever. I suspect the endless options for comparable products that we can access on the internet has made us more picky than we otherwise would be.

Alright, startup idea:

A service that, for a subscription fee, provides product reviews/recommendation lists, plus a concierge "recommend a product for my requirements" service. Maybe throw in basic troubleshooting help as well.

All reviews and recommendations would come from staffers, so it can't be gamed with fake reviews short of bribing someone.

I don't think searching for higher quality longer-lasting products in a sea of disposable short-term-focused products is something we should be so eager to complain about. In other words, this is bad take.

The author comes so close to this realization near the end of the piece when he says: > But isn’t that terrible for the environment?

And never follows up on that statement.

We spend decades of consumerism buying whatever was available with little forethought because either we didn't have a choice, or we didn't really care because it was cheap and got the immediate job done. This resulted in single-use products littering the shelves of most retail outlets because of our focus on instant-gratification.

Wirecutter may make people overthink their purchase experience but at the very least educates people on the pros and cons of different products which is something the market has woefully failed at doing.

First world problem: we've chosen to let the second and third world make stuff for us because we had more important things to do, and then sell the stuff to us via Ali Baba or the 40 thieves, and there's no way to tell which is which.

"Back in the day", I didn't even have the option to buy a USB-chargable hand warmer to keep my cell phone's battery from dying in the cold so I could hike in the winter and be within contact for various reasons. But my options are to buy one USB-chargable hand warmer/charger that will probably work for part of a season before it stops working, and another hand warmer/charger that will probably work for part of a season before it sets my house on fire when I try to charge it, and there's no way to tell which is which.

Barry Schwartz, "The Paradox of Choice"

https://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_the_paradox_of_choi...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice

There are also:

1. The issues with online misrepresentation and fraud.

2. The limited amount of information (far from perfect as TFA asserts) of online shopping. Heck, half the time you cannot even limit a results set to the product you're interested in, rather than a slew of vaguely associated items). Fit, finish, and quality can often only be assessed directly in person.

It'd be great to have an automated shopper that somehow correlates what you buy + like to what (you would buy + like) . In some regards this is what targeted advertising is supposed to do, but most of the time it's just showing me the things I've already bought.

I was telling my boss the other day that I wished there was an AI that I could give a budget, say $100 a month, and it would automatically and incrementally purchase the items I do not have that I would be most likely to enjoy. Maybe it saves up for N months if it's more than my monthly budget etc... Could give manufacturer's a pipeline for stuff (eg, AI declares I'm going to buy item X at $Y in Z months, please make it) ...

I'd just like to add, since nobody else has mentioned -- Hestra. They make extremely high quality gloves that will last you well over a decade.

If you spend time "optimizing" your life according to the Diderot Effect, you'll find these brands that are sitting at the top of their industry, quietly producing excellent products used by people who know exactly what they want.

It can be a dangerous thing to start only using the "best products", but once you start knocking off the low hanging fruit, you can make a noticeable difference in the quality of your life by having products that excel at their job.

I wonder if there is a market for a company that will shop for you, but at scale.

You go and say "I want a pair of black leather gloves, in this size." Check a box or two about your usecase, and give them your price range... and viola. A few minutes later you've got 2-3 to pick from. Even include a "I'm feeling lucky" option.

Though, I imagine even saving people time for things like "I need a hammer" would save people enough time comparison shopping that you could still take a cut and everyone would be happy.

> not being able to pick single objects that work for absolutely everyone (ironically, this criticism comes from outlets that each exist but for the grace of extremely wealthy Silicon Valley benefactors).

It's been a long time since a long-form vice article has really resonated with me. I am happy that we're clearly moving away from a world of a million variations of the same plastic crap to a place where consumers are demanding the right thing.

For finding what particular type or model of random good to buy I’ve become utterly dependent on just adding ‘reddit’ as a search term.

Living in Australia, adding ‘ozbargain’ and ‘whirlpool’ instead to another two searches to follow up completes the trifecta.

I just hope Google never optimises for that because then the content of bad reviews will shift to and overwhelm these sites instead. When a metric starts being the target it ceases to be a good metric.

Shopping online costs everything more except traveling and getting other customers’ opinions.

Amazon search result provides about 10 items per click to next page. In a traditional store you can see hundreds of goods at a glance, plus tons of rich info like smell, size, texture.

For products with standard specs like cable and socket, it’s pretty good to shop online. But for basically everything else, I prefer to travel downtown.

Shopping only sucks if you're in a hurry and even then it's hard to argue that it's gotten worse, just a different set of problems.

The author could just buy whatever gloves are marked as "Amazon's Choice".

Of course, then she is assuming that Amazon has her best interests at heart, and hasn't just chosen whichever product makes them the most money.

But, by shopping at a store with a more limited product selection than Amazon, you are relying on the same assumption. Also, the assumption is almost certainly wrong in all cases.

Online shopping is convenient at least. Why does it need to not suck? Has it ever not sucked?

Buying something without actually holding it in your hands and testing it out will never be an awesome experience. You can't really trust reviews and ratings. But you can usually return stuff and I don't see why the author made such a fuss about returning.

>I’d love to only spend $17 except there is no way 17-dollar leather gloves won’t be fake and off color and smell of gasoline

Being annoyed at my local shops wanting £100 for a wallet I went on ebay a ordered a leather one for £2.25 inc post in 2014 and still in daily use now. The internet is remarkable for shopping in some ways.

JCPenny opened a test store in Hurst TX, and its everything I miss about department stores, its brightly lit, it has a salon and a barbershop, the goods are displayed attractively and in an easy to find way - if all stores were like this one, I'd go shipping more often.

This is the tomato sauce problem. There are too many tomato sauces on most store shelves to ever be satisfied with what you select. You would be happier given how unimportant tomato sauce is relatively in your life, to have but one choice. More choice is not always better.

The best part about going to a speciality retail is getting expert advice (running shop and getting advice on the best running shoes from a runner or best bikes from a biker) wondering if that value add could be usuario to bring online. Open to feedback

It would be nice if we could get a catalog in SQLite or csv format and just search it ourselves then send a list of product numbers and addresses to ship them too.

Most people know excel and could probably prefer this.

Lets see:

1. You have the choice of getting any of the options you want, that are not available in store near you in 2 days sitting at home. 2. You can compare prices on each of those items and choose the price point that best suits you. 3. You have an option to get information from people who have previously owned that item and read their thoughts and reviews. 4. You can order as any many you want, and spend 5 mins preparing a return and 10 - 15 mins returning the item (or, just pay a small fee to get it collected back from your house)

Yet, you choose to drive down to a store, a store which probably doesn't have an online inventory index. Try to find an option you want, don't find it, and now you're mad?

Do you see the hypocrisy?

I really love when writers wrongly mix up economic metaphors.

> what I want is for the world to be small again

In a nut shell, what modern age humanity will desperately wish.

I wonder how digital native kids handle this?

And (I'm looking at you Shopify), VR/AR is not going to solve this.

What’s the acronym for “too long, read it anyway, was terrible”?

Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1036/

It is from 2012 by the way.

Runner's mittens

first world problems

Buying things sucks now. This drives me nuts all the time and is one of many reasons I want a democratically planned economy. In addition to too many choices to meaningfully use, the vast majority of them are trying to essentially trick you into buying them. The drive for each glove (or whatever) manufacturer to increase profits causes them all to buy fake reviews, use cheap materials, imitate the style of the authentic, high quality ones... There is a persistent problem in clothing where whenever a brand gets a reputation for being good and not over-expensive, it is quietly bought out or switches to lower quality material in a year or two to cash in on its reputation. The same thing, of course, happens to the review sites (like the wirecutter) over time... It's hard to imagine the waste of resources that goes into this insane battle over the same purchases.

By contrast, if all the designers, manufacturers, and sellers were working not individually for their own profit, but for a salary (and intrinsic motivation) along consciously, democratically planned lines, we could have a rational and sane number of good quality gloves (etc) to choose from.

As Marx said, "In bourgeois societies the economic fiction prevails, that every one, as a buyer, possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of commodities." What is funny is he said that in about 1850.