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Comment by alister | Hacker News Reader

Along with counterfeits, another issue that makes shopping unpleasant is that many products are superfically different but underneath are the same thing. You can see this most clearly in a retail store when the products are side by side. Walmart might have 30 kinds of wall clocks with wood vs plastic frame, with or without Roman numerals, but the actual clock mechanism on the back is the same cheap black box. Home Depot has dozens of kitchen exhaust hoods with well-known brand names, but it looks to me like the internals (fan/filter/exhaust parts) are all made by the same company. A pharmacy gives the illusion of hundreds of different cold medicines, painkillers, and antacids, but it's the same few drugs packaged in hundreds of different ways.

I don't know the solution to this. I wish there were some way to signal when stuff is 90% to 99% identical to cut down on pointless duplicate products and/or to make comparisons easier.

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Fun aside, if you buy a cheap wall clock from a big box store, you can often swap out the clock movement with a vastly superior one for very little money. A nice Seiko movement with a sweep second hand can be had for under $20.

But why would you want a nice movement on a cardboard clock? At that point you spend another few dollars for a nicer package.

Is the cheap quartz movement that it comes with insufficiently accurate?

Accuracy is mostly fine in my experience, but the battery life is often poor and they tend to be relatively loud. I like quiet, so the noise is more than enough reason to swap the movement when easy imho.

I have a $12 Ikea clock that looks rather like a Swiss train clock (not exactly of course) and which keeps nearly perfect time and runs for over a year on one battery.

It is miles better than the $5 Ikea clock, but I see no reason to pay more since the $12 one looks good and runs perfectly well.

One year on a battery is nothing to be proud of :)

Ya, but what kind of battery?

If you care about an alkaline battery powered item, it's in your interests to change the batteries once a year --- it's the easiest way to avoid battery leakage.

But how do you that Seiko movement you're buying isn't counterfeit?

Not trying to be snarky, genuinely interested: what are the advantages of the superior movement?

It lasts forever

Reading the sales data: no tick sounds. Presumably less drift as well.

That most people do not care about the quality of the movement is why Wal-Mart has lots of shells with the same movements.

The gears are manufactured to better tolerances. This means they make a lot less noise. A cheap movement can be heard across the room, a Seiko is silent.

Because the parts fit better, there is less friction. Less of a load on the motor means the battery lasts much longer in a Seiko.

They also keep time better.

A great deal of their reputation is based on their ability to produce precise quartz movements, ostensibly resistant to temperature changes, etc.

>This means they make a lot less noise. A cheap movement can be heard across the room,

I laughed out loud as I can hear my alarm clock ticking 8ft away thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk quite loudly. You can actually hear it from the living room if the TV is off, perhaps I should look into something made a bit better.

The solution is to buy local. That gives the Home Depot guy an opportunity to tell you, “you know, the internals are all the same”, and the pharmacists lady can say “the generic Tylenol/Advil is called this”.

What town do you live in where big chain store employees are knowledgeable and have worked there for longer than a few months?

I live in Canada and all the old guys working at Home Depot seem like they know their crap, although their knowledge is often dated - I get the impression they're ex-contractors.

The solution starts with manually verifying products. I'm not convinced that it's impossible for Amazon or other stores to have a quality verification system where they have people hired specifically for this purpose. Maybe even a third party could specifically do this. You don't have to do it for every single item, just do it once whenever someone wants to list a product on the platform. Whenever reviews start complain about bogus products, investigate, and if they changed the product from the last time you verified it, remove them from the platform for a period of time.

some hunch tells me this would put them out of business

Why do you think that? I think they would just pass the slightly increased cost on to vendors and/or customers.

That's currently what they do I'm pretty sure. It seems they'd need something more, because sellers appear to be too ingenious.

This isn't the best source, but the claims are there: https://blog.aboutamazon.com/company-news/product-safety-and...

Only difference from what OP suggested is it doesn't seem they manually look at all initial listing. Apart from that it seems they claim having exactly the described system by OP in place.

I work for a company that produces ingestible goods. Having worked for Amazon previously, I knew select brands were allowed to be “gated”, that is, only be sold by authorized resellers. Imagine my surprise when Amazon repeatedly denied us the ability to gate our brand. As a consumer, I’d like to know that an ingestible good comes from a reputable source - more so than a Coach purse. The whole experience really shot Bezos’ “customer centricity” principle in the rear for me.

Amazon could greatly improve its counterfeit issue by giving manufacturers more control over their brand. That, to me, is the root of the issue.

Almost every water heater sold at big box home improvement retailers is manufactured by the same company in Tennessee.

There is some truth to this sentiment. I think part of it comes from the "race to the bottom" for low prices which fosters disposable consumables (even for durable goods) and leaves you with monopolies / oligopolies after the dust settles.

> A pharmacy gives the illusion of hundreds of different cold medicines, painkillers, and antacids, but it's the same few drugs packaged in hundreds of different ways.

Technically no. Event generics have different excipients and excipients give them a slightly different profile.

I’ve compared them a few times. They rarely differ in more than a couple ingredients. Even so CVS for example sells what as far as I can tell is identical, generic cough syrup in a green or orange box depending if you prefer Delsym or Robitussin.

Ingredients are not identical even if they look the same on a label. Juste like flour, you have hundreds of different qualities of it.

Sure, but barring extensive evidence about the differences between them, how is one supposed to select?

It's that competition that brings down prices. If there was only one unique brand per product, they'd charge much more.

This isn't about the number of brands, but about confusing marketing, which in many ways is bad for true competition, because it confuses the buyer.

What kind of confusing marketing? Clocks are decorative products, having several different designs with same mechanism isn't just logical but also market working as it should. This way you can choose the clock that fits your preference and fits into your living space.

I don't quite understand this rant - it's like complaining there's toomany different paintings to choose to put on the wall.

An analogy would be not being able to browse by painter.

This is basically a rant against industry standardization.

More like rant against dressing standardized components a thousand different ways to make it seem there's more options than there are.

What standardization could enable, in a better world, is customizability - the ability to cheaply compose standard parts and some dressing on top to match a particular demand of an individual customer. Instead, we get common customizations prebaked and deployed on the market in a shotgun fashion. It's extremely wasteful, and a reflection of the fact that matter is too cheap these days.

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