Amazon Prime Day Is Dystopian | Hacker News Reader

Amazon Prime Day Is Dystopian

theatlantic.com

I don't know about Dystopian but I'd say that the deals are 'crap'.

I like buying stuff and looking for bargains as much as anyone, but I can spend hours looking through Prime Day deals and not find anything I want or find anything that has a significant discount.

I was an early adopter of Prime and, looking back, the first time I felt dissatisfied with Amazon was shortly after I joined Prime. Already they were starting to take me for granted.

Back in the 2000s Amazon was a breath of fresh air. If I wanted to buy a quality cordless phone I could buy Vtech (p00p) at Staples or buy quality brands like Plantronics on Amazon.

What you see now is that trash from China dominates Amazon and Ebay and crowds out quality projects. I learned the hard way that if you're buying a thermal printer, a "4 inch" thermal printer is a quality thermal printer made to US standards if not made in the US, and a "100 mm" thermal printer will have blown the print head long before the software for printing has been completed.

See an obviously fraudulent product listing?

AMZN will tell you they don't want to hear about unless you got scammed.

The more I think about it, the more I think about cancelling Prime.

It used to be the quick shipping was real, but now sometimes they tell me it will ship in 1 or 2 days but I really wait 8. That lie matters because I would have driven to the store if I knew I'd have to wait 8 days.

Then there is Prime Video. It seems I am the only one, but often I find out about a movie and want to watch it and will pay to do so -- my satisfaction with the paid video-on-demand service is excellent. With Prime Video I get to watch what Jeff Bezos wants me to watch; and I don't kid myself that I am watching what I want to watch.

i cancelled my prime subscription recently for this exact reason. the plethora of fraudulent products/listings is staggering. amazon fresh isnt so bad since that's at least sourced from local stores, but the thought of amazon moving into the pharma space is mildly terrifying to me, should it ever fall prey to similar dynamics as its retail ecosystem.

i just got tired of having to do extensive research on whether a given amazon listing was counterfeit/paid for reviews/used product listed as new/declined manufacturing quality/etc. Id much rather just pay for shipping costs and get a product I know to be legitimate directly from the manufacturer.

The modern rule of the amazon-age internet in my opinion is: no matter how simple or complex a product is, if it is sold online, then it is being counterfeited on amazon.

My family was a bit on the fence about the value of having Prime back when it was cheaper. Then when they jacked up the price, we just canceled it.

Prime doesn't really add enough value for my family. You can still qualify for free shipping when buying stuff on Amazon without it. Most of the other perks were simply not that valuable to us.

I got rid of prime a couple years ago. Between items ineligible for free shipping, and "add on" items, there is almost no value over just making sure I order above the free shipping threshold.

And honestly I find that I use Amazon less and less. Like a lot of the broader internet, it feels like amazon no longer it set up to help me find what I'm looking for, and more like a set of tricks to get me to buy either the wrong thing, or the wrong shipping, or something completely different altogether.

I say all this because I think Amazon's power, like all it's contemporaries, will be self limiting as they become the incumbent that nobody really likes but is still used begrudgingly, and new competitors provide something better.

Amazon UK (despite being the primary & default Amazon outlet for Republic of Ireland customers for the past decade) managed to mess up the 2021 Prime day sales for ROI customers, overcharging them & then refusing to look in to it until a national paper called them out.

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/consumer/amazon-apologises-f...

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