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Comment by dkhenry | Hacker News Reader

I am happy the parts company is ditching Amazon, but its so much more important for us consumers to ditch amazon. I have cut my amazon purchases down to only 16 total items this year so far ( down from ~50 in 2020 ) and I am now only ordering from Amazon as a last option when I cant find what I want anywhere else. That brief glimpse of the Amazon future where all stores are shut down, and we can only ever buy things online, and everyone is an amazon serf was such a wakeup call as to what we were heading towards. I just hope enough people can jump ship to keep a functioning non amazon centric supply chain.

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> I am happy the parts company is ditching Amazon, but its so much more important for us consumers to ditch amazon.

Conversely, maybe it's important for both big and small businesses to realize that investing in your online presence and building out a high-quality local delivery network is much more important than the high-rent place on Main Street?

A lot of the reasons I buy on Amazon are that it offers a much more pleasant experience. In fact, if you go to the manufacturers' sites for a lot of the products Amazon sells, they have a slow checkout process, scammy discount codes and email signup incentives, and generally optimize for consumer lock-in rather than getting the product to the consumer quickly. Imagine Google if it had popped up a discount code for "Get 200 searches at 15% off!" every time you searched for something, and think of how successful they would be if they did that.

As for a lot of small-time local shops I know, they seem to place an unduly high value on prime real estate, and their websites are at the level of “My nephew says he knows Dreamweaver”.

In summary, I am not super surprised they are being beaten out by Amazon, and it is unclear to me as to why I should subsidize their bad web design and reluctance to invest in building a consumer-friendly online experience.

Thankfully you are not the only person to realize this and a multi-billion dollar industry sprung up to help independent retailers compete. A Shopify website has a customer experience similar to Amazon. The real issue is Amazon has so much market capture that most people don't even look for independent retailers. In fact even suggesting that you can go other places online gets a bunch of push back from people insisting that nothing can compete, and that somehow it's moral to ignore all externalities in the name of pure market efficiency.

Maybe I am looking in the wrong places, but precisely zero of my local retailers have anything that looks like a Shopify storefront. And it's about the tools (Shopify is a great one), but also about the attitude. Amazon has the attitude of “get the thing to the customer, immediately”. Most of the other places have an attitude of “we want to build a long-lasting relationship with you, the consumer”. Hence they ignore fast deliveries and push coupons and loyalty programs and crowded stores.

Ironically, this leads to a place where the only long-lasting relationship the customer ends up having is with Amazon, which is a pretty shitty company.

> somehow it's moral to ignore all externalities in the name of pure market efficiency

I am not saying that, or I don't think I am anyway. I think the retailers are not taking the externality of reduced attention span in a serious way like Google or Amazon. The technology totally exists for a local retailer to get my location, and deliver a product to me with 3 clicks in under an hour.

And yet, apart from food delivery startups (that are not local, and simulate such an experience via a layer), few actual goods retailers (say, my local hardware store) have invested in building such an experience. I can't recall any of them having the courage to at least test out a pilot program with such an experience.

Either way, I do try to support my local retailers as much as I can; and my usage of Amazon has seen a slow but steady drop-off over the last 3 years. But that's mainly due to the fact that Amazon makes

> Amazon has the attitude of “get the thing to the customer, immediately”. Most of the other places have an attitude of “we want to build a long-lasting relationship with you, the consumer”.

Sometimes that long-lasting relationship is what ends up paying dividends in better service, though. I'm by no means unwilling to shop around, but I have been a long-time customer at my LBS and will always look to them first. I crashed in a weekend cross race two years ago and bent my rear brake rotor when the rider behind me rode over it. My LBS didn't have my rotor in stock, but they called around and found when at another shop in the US and had it shipped up before the weekly Tues night series. That's for a lowly low-category masters racer.

When you have a personal relationship with a business, it is possible for them to pull out all the stops when it matters.

At its peak point of customer experience value (which Amazon has definitely past), Amazon was great because it was generally easy to find a good set of options for whatever you were looking to buy, in one place/one search.

Now, it’s full of fake/cheap crap with manipulated reviews and “sponsored” search results. Before it was good about exposing useful data (e.g.: “others who searched for x eventually bought y” and other similar features. That’s all but gone now. You only see what is useful to Amazon for you to see.

So, my question is, where do I go to find that same general search function for shopping? It’s not google. I’m not sure it exists but it’s needed. (Or anyone have a link?)

In the UK we had shops that sold everything -- Argos has done catalogue shopping for decades. Sainsburys, a major supermarket, owns them, and does delivery.

Amazon makes it trivial to buy pretty much anything I want and get it the next day. Sainsburys sells the same stuff between themselves and argos, yet they failed miserably at competing. They could have worked with companies like royal mail and leverage their logistics expertise to compete, but they failed miserably to even realise why I shop at amazon.

I'm not some 1970s afficiando going out to a high street to buy something in person, it's very unlikely I need something right then and can't wait for 24 hours for someone to bring it to me. I have better things to do with my time.

It's not the mega conglomerates they are putting out of business. It's the bike stores, the hobby shops, the clothing boutiques. In the US with the purchase of Whole Foods, they are also moving more into groceries and everything else. After experiencing not being able at all to go to a high street and buy things and forcing everything to be online, I realized just how bad the experience is, and decided if I had to choose between the two I would choose the physical experience.

Once you do that you start to realize just how much of the consumer goods world Amazon has already put out of business. I live in silicon valley and there is no where I can go for electronics any more. My last amazon purchase was getting some 2.5A fuses because every store that would sell them locally has closed ( either before the pandemic, or because of it ). I tried to buy a video card, and the local computer equipment retailer literally couldn't get allocated any stock from the manufacturers, somehow Amazon managed to get first dibs on supply. I don't like that world, and I don't want to live in it.

An auto parts store or Ace Hardware should stock fuses.

They should, but they weren't auto fuses, and Ace Hardware didn't sell them either. They were really small and specific to small electronics ( in this case a Honeywell desk fan that had a fuse in the plug ) Fry's would have had them, but Fry's is no more, and there isn't any other store like that anymore.

There's always DigiKey if you need something like that, which also happens to have a parametric search that's actually useful.

For your example, from the fuses search page (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/fuses/139) you can apply the 2.5A, fuse type "Cartridge, Glass", mounting type "Holder" and still have a wide variety of options starting at $0.25 per fuse. No free shipping though.

But fast delivery on par with or better than Amazon in most cases.

This is really a bad example. What value do electronics shops add to a neighborhood? Maybe if you need something asap. Remember Radio Shack selling you phone chargers for $40? Do you miss them too?

I love local businesses in my neighborhood but only if they add value. Theaters, cafes, grocery shops, restaurants, book stores with cafe/events, places for kids, etc. Not an expensive electronics shop that I might visit once a year.

What there should be is a local store that stocks everything (rather than having to choose between one of 50 different specialised stores), and rather than self service from walking around the store, you simply ask the shopkeep to bring you what you want.

And then instead of having to go to that store, the shopkeep could even send someone to bring you the goods. It would be like the olden days.

> After experiencing not being able at all to go to a high street and buy things and forcing everything to be online, I realized just how bad the experience is

I have rarely been to a high street to buy stuff (rather than say a cafe or haircut) for 10 years. Imagine having to traipse somewhere, then actually walk around looking at random things on shelves hoping to find what you want?

I have been to large out of town shops like B&Q on occasion, the experience is better than a local hardware store, but still massively inferior to shopping online.

I was at Argos between 2012 and 2013. Fresh out of university. At one point during my time there, for around five or six weeks, me and another graduate were the only front end developers on the entire Argos website. At that stage I don't think I knew the difference between margin and padding in CSS just to give you an idea of our level.

It was truly chaotic. The amount of money they wasted on Accenture consultants should be criminal. I know it's a cliche to say money is wasted on consultants, but really, no work happened. A lot of energy was expended but nothing was built or created.

I was in a newly formed "innovation hub" which had a lot of very talented people but we were blocked from doing anything by internal and external staff at every turn.

One time we tried to have a QA environment set up so that we could demo and test our work. We were told it would take _9 months_ to provision a server for us. We were a team of about 20 in expensive central London office space and we didn't have an environment to test our work. It took about 8 hours to do a deploy to production, so if something was broken the BEST CASE scenario was it would take 8 hours to fix. I never saw the best case scenario.

The most talented and motivated staff in the innovation hub slowly left after we were told that the pace of change had to be "glacial".

Argos never stood a chance of competing against Amazon.

> it's very unlikely I need something right then and can't wait for 24 hours for someone to bring it to me.

Interesting how quickly things we did fine without become needs.

This is classic Prisoner's Dilemma. No one wants to defect (boycott). In the end we all lose.

20 years ago I used to spend 2 hours a week walking round a supermarket. I haven't done that for 15 years. That's 100 hours a year and 1000 miles of driving that I don't need to do.

If a lightbulb blows, I could get in the car, drive to the local shop, find one which will do (but probably not the right one), and drive home, or I could just go click-clikc and get on with the gardening safe in the knowlege that someone else will bring a replacement to me tomorrow.

These are good things. I would like an alternative to amazon (like argos or whatever), but they just don't get it. Royal mail has had an amazing delivery network throughout the UK for decades, delivering mail and parcels next day from Lerwick to Hugh Town, from a random shack on a road 30 miles from Inverness to a central London office. It's such a shame that this wasn't utilised to provide competition to amazon, because old people like the idea of a "high street" and living like the 1950s.

I've installed the apps for Argos, Curry's, Cex, John Lewis, and a few others on my phone including food, clothing and toiletries suppliers. If they don't have what I'm after then I may revert to Amazon if necessary. I'm also trying to ditch the "must buy now" impulse that Amazon has thrived on, and going to local physical shops instead.

Amazon's supply and logistics are way superior to their competitors, and their app usually is too. This does introduce a bit of friction when making the switch, including a slightly higher price sometimes. However, all in all, it's still worth doing.

It took them a while to wake up, but I think Argos is better now. You can collect from stores, get it delivered, sometimes even same-day delivery. I value having a store nearby. I trust them far more for commodity products (chargers, accessories, etc) than venturing into the Wild West of Amazon sellers and reviews. I also feel I have more recourse if something goes wrong.

(And no I don’t work for Argos!)

My wakeup moment was when I realized that Fulfill by Amazon + co-mingling means you had no idea what you got - whether it was a return, fake product of random Chinese dropship, or random other item (miscategorized).

At that point, you might as well buy from Aliexpress and cut out the middleman (for stuff you want from China).

Or drastically cut down purchases (which is what I chose).

As somebody who has purchased a lot of things from both Ali Express, there is a massive difference between Ali Express and Amazon.

To me, Ali Express is great for simple items that are practically fungible commodities, where workmanship and build quality aren't that impactful, and you can afford to wait a long time for it to arrive, and you can afford to receive some nontrivial percentages of those things and they turn out to be substandard or broken or substantially different than what was pictured. No matter the co-mingling issue, the same cannot be said of Amazon.

Amazon is turning into the fast shipping version of Ali Express. More and more fake / manipulated reviews and a sea of pseudo-English garbled brand names slapped on what looks like identical goods are making it exactly the experience you described, just shipped quicker. Ordering from Amazon is now a definite risk, and commingling is only a small part of that.

I feel like we have very different buying strategies on Amazon which is what leads to our differing opinion. I never use Amazon for product discovery. It's ... not great. I always research what I want independently and then go to Amazon to make the final purchase knowing exactly what I want. They're basically just a delivery network for me and on that front they're so far ahead of everyone else it's not even funny.

I use both modes, but I see what you're saying. (More in a minute) but suffice to say, Amazon used to be good for discovery. It isn't now...

Still, I hear you – and I get your strategy for, say, athletic shoes or a new TV or maybe even a small electric appliance for the kitchen. But what about the space where there isn't a great set of discovery resources?

For example - I needed a desk lamp recently. I didn't have a lot to spend, but I thought $30-50 should be sufficient. There isn't dominant name brand in this space, AFAIK (sure, I could go to IKEA, I guess) – but it's also not a space to find many reviews on sites like wire cutter, or some gear mag, or specialized niche community on reddit, etc. etc.

So - I gambled on a well reviewed lamp on amazon... and it died within a few months - shorting and killing USB power supplies in minutes. So, I started over - and picked a different but equally arbitrary brand in about the same price range... and we'll see. But how do I research that sort of thing? I can't afford to go through these every few months...

I keep telling myself I'm going to do this, but it becomes a huge pain in the ass. First I half to find a half dozen vendors to buy stuff from, because I like multifaceted projects, but no one else stocks all the pieces I need. Then I have to manage accounts across 6 different vendors, and put my credit card info in 6 different places.

Then once I've ordered, I have to track 6 different packages. If anything goes wrong, I have to track down which vendor, and how to contact them, and hope that they have a good policy of fixing things like this.

What we need is a replacement for Amazon. Federation could solve a lot of my pain points. Just give me an interface like Amazon that is connecting to hundreds or thousands of stores, where the orders are just dispatched to the store you ordered from. It doesn't fix shipping speeds, but it does give me:

a) a sane way to order from multiple stores

b) an easy means of tracking what I've ordered from all the stores

c) an easy way of tracking the shipping for packages I've ordered

d) a single point of entry when I know I want to buy something

Amazon cornered the market, not on prices, but on convenience. If we want them to stop being so dominant, that's where you want to kick them.

I to have also been avoiding Amazon, and mostly just ordering stuff directly from companies.

Most of whom use Shopify, it doesn't do all of what your suggesting but shopifys "Shop" app seems to handle the tracking part pretty okay.

Ebay is somewhat like this. Though I don't think it meets all your requirements.

I like Amazon and online shopping; won't ditch any time soon and don't think it's important for people to do so.

The local businesses I was worried about going under were restaurants and others in the food/service industry(would lump experience in there as well; the zoo, botanical garden, museums, and etc).

> don't think it's important for people to do so

Is that because you don't believe in the negative externalities or because you think they're worth the convenience?

The narrative I hear is that Amazon is destroying businesses. The issue I have is that this isn’t really true. Here’s an anecdote.

I drive 20 minutes to the mall. After finding parking and getting into a shoe store, there’s no one really there to help me. Once they get around to me, they don’t have my size. And it’s also apparent the person working there has no interest in helping. Whether they have my size or whether I found what I was looking for is basically not their problem. So I drive at least 40 minutes round trip, plus the hassle of parking, finding the store in the mall, and waiting on someone to help me.

Now my time is valuable. I lost my time. I paid for gas. I also put miles on my car. And depending on the day, I also had to deal with traffic.

IMO businesses refuse to compete. If Amazon is doing it better than them, then hats off to Amazon. If a business is doing better than Amazon, then I’ll go with that business.

IMO the “negative externalities” puts blame on Amazon while pretending like these other stores even try to compete.

Btw this binary view of the world where Amazon is bad and others are good (or vice versa) seems to be a very American thing.

I don't know about you but I am also not bound to Amazon, a few years ago some stores actually started putting some work into their website, offered free shipping on order over 50$, etc... and I went back almost naturally.

These threads of Amazon-bashing always read like something out of parallel universe, I should go have a worse shopping experience because of some "greater" objective of opposing Amazon?

For me the sticking point is returns. Amazon makes it so easy to return stuff when other companies make you pay for your own shipping back that I'm way more willing to take a risk on something when it's on Amazon.

That too! I once received the wrong item from Hudson's Bay (Canadian everything store, think Sears) and not only had to physically go back to the store to get a refund because they wanted 8$ in shipping to let me send it back, they would not reimburse the shipping cost even after admitting that it was 100% their fault that they sent me the wrong item.

I don't want a future dominated by mega-corp with 99% market share but traditional retail need to get their shit together at some point.

> Btw this binary view of the world where Amazon is bad and others are good (or vice versa) seems to be a very American thing.

It's not.

In France it's the same thing. But the "Amazon is bad" is not really about destroying businesses (since it was done decades ago by malls, now cities are just banks, insurances and clothing crapshops like Zara) but about the fact that they are not paying taxes and they provide awful work conditions to people.

So you tend to be considered as someone who doesn't care if you buy at Amazon. (But we're still waiting for proof that companies trying to compete with Amazon don't act the same way).

Similar story in the UK.

People are sick and tired of Amazon deriving huge profits out of the UK market ($17.5 billion in 2019) and paying just a minuscule amount of tax on those UK sales (£6.3 million in 2019) using a mixture of clever accounting techniques (not available to other businesses) and funnelling profit out via subsidiaries in low tax jurisdictions (Luxembourg).

Interesting example, because shoes are one of the few things I will not order on-line.

Shoes fall in the category "things I want to physically try before buying". And that category of things does not work with on-line shopping.

I just buy a few sizes and return the ones that don't fit. Obviously this means I have to shop at places that offer to ship returns back for free or have a local store close I could drive to but I like the experience better than going to a store honestly.

It depends on the negative externalities. I will specifically address destroying jobs though.

In general, there is no standing in the way of progress that improves efficiency and gives consumers what they want. Interestingly, there seems to be an overlap between the crowd that says we need to hold business accountable for packaging waste and those who believe if they virtue signal hard enough Amazon will disappear and everyone will flock back to inconvenient, higher priced shopping.. Going against the general consumer demand grain typically ends up niche. But I digress.

Amazon(and other online retailers) are destroying lots of low skill jobs, but that's true for most major gains in the efficiency of producing a product. Usually this is associated with automation, but this shift touches many aspects of the logistics providing a shopping experience to consumers. This is a good thing to me as it will ultimately increase our GDP and standard of living. Resources, particular labor, are freed up to work on other stuff. Over 600k small businesses are created every year. There are millions more small business than there were a decade ago. These efficiency gains create a TON of potential.

I think that's good, so what of the net negative in raw job numbers? People without jobs. Well, weren't we at "full employment" pre-pandemic? In any case, I'm a big fan of tackling that with job re-training. We do a really poor job of that in the USA compared to other countries.

But there are a number of solutions to different negative externalities that aren't swimming upstream against consumer trends. Unionization failed but it could happen. That could help address some of the workplace issues. The government can trust bust.

I don't view this as a binary choice. Different people seem to have different pet grievances with Amazon. Some of them I agree with, some I don't(like Amazon doesn't pay taxes, which is a sound bite to me; ya basic), but generally I believe boycotting Amazon(and other online retailers) isn't really going to affect real change.

And I believe its exploitive of everyone in the supply chain, from manufacturers to delivery drivers, and has led to the vast centralization of an overwhelmingly large portion of our economy into the hands of corporation with no accountability.

Furthermore I am very convinced it makes the lives of everyone, except the tiny minority that are actively exploiting everyone else, much worse. Good jobs are lost, supply chains are made fragile, and monopolistic tendencies are encouraged. I would rather the inconvenience of shopping around than encourage a world with a private entity as the sole source of all consumer goods.

Yeah, but we are never going to stop that behavior by individuals choosing not to shop at Amazon. As an individual, my only two choices are to shop at Amazon and get the benefits and Amazon still exists, or don’t shop there and don’t get the benefits and Amazon still exists. Amazon is not going to care if they lose my business. The only person who suffers is me.

If we think Amazon business practices are immoral, we need to make them illegal.

And therein lies the main problem with that line of thinking in today's political landscape - when politicians are effectively funded by the large companies that have seemingly unlimited money and power, that will never happen, so where exactly will this new law come from?

I believe thats exactly how we stop that, by choosing not to shop at Amazon. The government is ( theoretically ) an expression of the will of the people, if the will of the people is to exploit others for their own benefit, the government will reflect that. Until we individually decide that our neighbors are important enough to us that we are willing to suffer a little inconvenience nothing will change, but if we are willing to individually suffer a little inconvenience we absolutely can effect any company even one as big as Amazon.

> The government is ( theoretically ) an expression of the will of the people, if the will of the people is to exploit others for their own benefit, the government will reflect that

There is a fundamental difference between stopping an abusive business practice with a vote verse with your wallet. With a vote, your choice is to allow the bad business practice and get the benefit of shopping there, or don't allow the business practice and don't get benefit of shopping there. The choice goes together with the consequences, good or bad.

On the other hand, choosing with your wallet doesn't couple the choice with the consequence. Even if I don't shop there, it is very likely the business will continue. Me losing the benefit of shopping there doesn't cause the business practice to stop necessarily.

Lots of people would be willing to give up shopping there if it meant the business stopped, but not if it doesn't.

My hatred of amazon came from the way they treat their employees (including developers), but especially warehouse employees!! I saw a glimpse of that on PBS documentary Timing your bathroom breaks is super fucked up! I've used them exactly 4 times this year, maybe less than 10 times last year.. Before 2020, I was spending a large part of money on this evil company! I will not use them anymore!!

You have every right not to shop there. Employees also have every right not to work there. As you will see stated here time and time again, private businesses can run their operations any way they wish as long as they are not discriminating against legally protected classes.

That's not true. We have regulations for a reasons, and businesses have to abide by them.

Which regulations does Amazon violate in their warehouses?

The question OP suggested was "given that sometimes we regulate, should we also regulate against some amazom practices we deem bad".

And yet, we have a minimum wage, maximum hours allowed to work, accident insurance, mandated sick days, mandated vacation days and other things.

If we did not mandate them by law, people could "choose" not to work at places that did not offer the above. However, that choice would probably entail "not having a job at all" which tends to be rather shitty.

My point being "it is voluntary" is not a reasonable excuse for treating lower class workers inhumanely.

That should be followed by a long discussion of what counts as "inhumane treatment". Where there is much room for disagreement still. But I don't think it is defensible to claim "they could quit" when someone else says "these conditions are inhumane and should be stopped".

My hope is that because Amazon sell everything, they sell everything really badly. You get better product descriptions, choice, help etc. on specialist stores, is my experience in Australia, although admittedly the US Amazon is probably a lot better.

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