Amazon battles counterfeit masks, $400 hand sanitizer amid virus panic
wsj.com
wsj.com
https://time.com/4918626/money-germs-microbes-dirty/
* Antibiotic-resistant bacteria
* Cocaine
* Heroin
* Pet DNA
etc. So, the way the $400 hand sanitizer works is by making you let go of all your filthy, filthy money.
It’s best to launder the money prior to using it.
You were right.
Sure given the scale there can always be a few bad apples but some of the stuff is clearly fake and stays up for ages.
Doesn't seem like they perfected automated tracking yet. This screams manual human review of video footage -- seems like they are still collecting data for a future ML model.
Because of the novelty of the store, and because it's on my way to work, I routinely go the store, and I've never noticed a discrepancy between the push notification and the emailed receipt.
I have no specific knowledge why the receipt email is delayed, but I suspect a more mundane reason, like they're batching payments, in case of multiple trips in-and-out.
I don't use the Amazon Go app. I use the Go option within the regular Amazon app. I get no email and no status change within the app for over 1 hour.
Also, I'm really not that convinced that they have mastered picking up various fruit and vegetables and the bakery items I chose. Those things don't use RFID and from what I could tell their system must be vision-based online here.
Edit: My friend was with me and used the Amazon Go app and also didn't receive any message or receipt until an hour later. This has been a frequent occurrence at this store.
I agree, it smells human review. Models probably produce a list and human gives the greenlight.
Buy 95% ethanol (from hardware/paint department, or maybe Everclear booze if in US) or isopropyl alcohol (hardware/paint department).
Buy Glycerin (Chemist, or I found it cheap at Indian goods store, probably other places).
IMHO the Hydrogen peroxide can be safely skipped if you can’t easily find it.
Maybe also get some hand cream (frequent use of hand sanitiser will screw your skin).
Oh man... without very careful fractional distillation, random Home Depot paint thinner, fireplace fuel isn't a good idea at all. For use on hands, it must be food or cosmetics grade.
Maybe some aloe vera would be better than hand cream, which would leave less of an unpleasant, oily residue? Also, random hand cream would likely interact with the recipe because they usually include many components.
Please don't get too crazy if you're not a chemist.
This is far from random paint thinner or random mineral-oil-based lighter fluid/accelerant.
For use on your hands the normal home and garden ethanol is sufficiently harmless, and will itself do more damage than any residues. After all, it's made for use in situations where most people don't wear gloves.
The reason the fuel-type is this cheap is that it's taxed much less than the drinking kind. For technical applications they have good reason to keep if clean, safe for traces of impurities. The stuff they use for non-medical hand sanitizer and such should come from the same factory. There isn't much you can do wrong when producing industrial quantities of generic technical ethanol.
I'm sorry if I caused confusion though.
Be careful with this. I checked the denatured alcohol available in the paint section of Home Depot and it said it may contain methanol. Everclear does seem like the next best thing after isopropyl, if it's available in your state.
If you can get cheap high-proof food-grade ethanol that would be best, as methanol can be absorbed through the skin. You could also re-distill the ethanol (may not be legal in your jurisdiction), or find the MSDS to figure out the methanol range.
Now, I can package my own brand, and sell it on the intersection, across from the guy selling a $5 bag of oranges.
$100/bottle of Fresh Dreams Hand Sanitizer
https://qz.com/1815496/ny-forces-prisoners-to-make-hand-sani...
"Incarcerated people tasked to make hand sanitizer to fight coronavirus are banned from using it themselves"
I mean, it's basically 120 proof ethyl alcohol. Of course they aren't allowed to have it. I'm very sympathetic to better prison conditions, but soap should be fine.
Where would they do that? China is still pretty locked down, and I think they're still struggling to supply domestic needs of those items.
It is basically contained in China outside Wuhan already. Wuhan will join in a few weeks.
I think they have, but their efforts are usually spastic and reactive, so they don't do much good.
I remember during the eclipse a few years ago, they told everyone who bought eclipse glasses from them not to use them and refunded their money. There were lots of articles showing most of the ones being sold on Amazon were inadequate or had fake certification markings. Unfortunately, Amazon only took action a few days before the eclipse, after millions were sold and it was almost impossible to find alternatives.
"The company scans billions of price changes a week and has removed 530,000 offers and suspended 2,500 accounts because of coronavirus-related price gouging, he said. The company also removed millions of products that make unsupported claims about the coronavirus"
The only issue here is deceptive advertising.
About 95% of the people in the world who are not on HN.
Average Joe Lunchbucket assumes that the products he buys through Amazon are vetted by Amazon, like at his local store. He has no idea that the stuff he buys are from a thousand different randos.
It's not impossible to get counterfeits, but it's a lot more reliable than marketplace sellers with no real brand to protect.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/03/10/national/japan-...
This has been happening for multiple years with Amazon seemingly doing little about it. I've faced it from both sides, selling and buying.
Selling: Counterfeiters were selling our item. We knew this because we were the manufacturer and only seller of the item. If we weren't selling it, it was counterfeit. In order to prove this, Amazon made us buy the counterfeit item from the other seller, and send in images to prove it. So when we did this, the counterfeit sellers caught on at some point and started simply shipping us random crap instead of the fake product. Then we had NO evidence they were selling a counterfeit item - we didn't have the photos to prove it.
Buying: Recently in the market for a bike air pump, I search Amazon and see no less than 50 listings, all having 4.5-5 star reviews, all the same bike pump, all off-brand sounding names, but all identical. It made it impossible to find what I need/want and also made it impossible to know whether or not these bike pumps were really worth anything at all. I didn't buy anything from Amazon, and that experience has made me question all my purchases from Amazon since. So, as mentioned above, I had meant to cancel my Prime membership - this post reminded me to do so.
I hit up Amazon.com and saw all these crazy markups on hand sanitizer. Eeek! But, I found 1 that was $10. Also from PURELL. Looked like the ones used at gyms. So I added it to my cart. Continued browsing and at checkout it got automatically removed. Subsequent searches revealed just the over priced hand sanitizers. Arrr!
Thanks Amazon!