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Comment by joana035 | Hacker News Reader

That's the reason why I don't buy anything from Amazon and prefer to pay a bit more to a local store instead.

Yes, and without too much effort one can also just shop online at other retailers (in case one lives way out in a rural area). Maybe free 2-day shipping won't happen at other places, but free shipping and equivalent prices are easy to find.

Yes, that is what I do (buying online but from a more local seller). If it takes 2 or 5 days to delivery doesn't makes much of a difference for me at least, I will have to wait anyway.

I have also stopped buying from Amazon. I rarely got two day delivery from Amazon anyway.

Same here. Between their garbage labor practices and the fact that everything on Amazon had become, well, garbage, it was an easy call to make.

It's been at least 5 years since Amazon has had competitive prices for the things that I buy.

Most of the manufactured items on Amazon are just white label products from Alibaba, and you can buy them cheaper on AliExpress.

Been using Target Staples, and Bestbuy more and while they don’t always have the same items, brand names end up being roughly the same price due to auto price matching and contractual minimum prices.

Only times I’m using amazon is for cheap items no one else will ship. They’ve really just turned into AliExpress.

Same here, but I wonder if Target warehouse employees have been pissing in bottles all along and the news just never picked up on it.

I don't know about the warehouses, but a family member stocked shelves at Target for years, and was paid the minimum wage the whole time. Hours were 1) part time, 2) too inconsistent to allow any other work.

Of course they do. And lots of other awful shit you'll see in this thread - https://twitter.com/BanishedBernie/status/137645587453380198...

There really isn't a company at that scale that doesn't have problems. I rank Target over Amazon simply because I know the products are going to be legit. Most of the time I'm doing curbside pickup there anyways.

And don't forget, Apple was also doing shady stuff: https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/3/21419729/apple-california-...

And with those companies you actually get the brand name item instead of a knock-off!

I felt like I had to remember how to shop other places online as I’ve been making my switch to less Amazon. I’m so tired of finding little business cards in all my orders to review the products. I gave a bad review on a vacuum cleaner, and the seller has been contacting me every few weeks to refund me if I take it down. I sympathize with sellers because I know it’s hard to sell anything less than a five star product on there. The whole system feels so broken these days.

I don't feel bad, those sellers did it to themselves. They gamed the system too hard and that's where they landed.

Not all of the sellers are responsible for the bad behavior, though.

> They’ve really just turned into AliExpress.

For a quick and concrete example of this, do a search on Amazon for "dent puller". You'll get pages and pages of obviously identical suction cups and dent removal kits with obviously randomly generated brand names like "LTGABA" and "QGMZZMF".

To cement this example, do a search for a product like this on Amazon, and then do the same search on Alibaba/AliExpress. Most sellers on Amazon don't even bother changing the stock images from the ones on AliExpress.

It really drives the point home that you're paying premiums to unnecessary middlemen by buying on Amazon.

> Only times I’m using amazon is for cheap items no one else will ship. They’ve really just turned into AliExpress.

I've been impressed with what sellers on Etsy offer when it comes to things that can't be found through AliExpress or domestic retailers.

Do you do this under the assumption that no local store treats employees unfairly?

Certainly not on the scale of Amazon.

We talk about Amazon being able to do distributed systems "at scale" all the time. They also do worker exploitation at scale. There are knock-on effects -- for instance we might look at a mom and pop shop and say, "That's not ok, I won't do the bad thing they do to their employees at my shop." But we'd look at Amazon and say, "Well, if Amazon does it, then surely I can too."

Yes, I also started to pay for shipping overall. (Convenience or Sm. Business Labor) > Shipping Fee.

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