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Comment by samstave | Hacker News Reader

There was an amazing radio piece a while back about an outfit in NYC of a guy who had a very lucrative Aamazon copy-cat service: it was run by a family of Hassidic(sp?) Jews in (brooklyn?) -- and what they did was have a bunch of them scour Amazon for top rated items - then have their connections do quick knock-off and sell them. it was a fascinating story... Ill see if I can find it.

They were on the early side of this phenom as it was a few years ago...

But this model is with pretty much everything these days Etsy, Amazon, Alibabba-importers etc...

Consumerism is cancer.

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Amazon itself does that with "Amazon's Choice" brand or whatever. They use the stats of top selling items, clone it for cheap, and take all the sales.

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/amazon-i...

After a couple really bad experiences with product quality (think clothing items that don't last after a couple washes) I no longer buy Amazon branded items. It's going to play against them over time if they keep messing up on quality.

So once again, we see that institutional behavior seeps into every aspect of a "society", so Amazon only has itself to blame.

That’s no different from store brands at grocery stores. (And it’s AmazonBasics/Solimo.)

I'm not sure what the family's religion has to do with anything, but I was curious about the spelling and put it in my search bar and it's spelled, 'Hasidic'.

my thoughts too. Wonder if they would have written 'run by a family of christians'

I KNEW people would ask this ; it was a major aspect of the story for some reason. They kept making reference to how these "ultra orthodox jews in brooklyn" were doing some revolutionary marketing/profiteering on the interenet/amazon specifically and how they were making a fortune doing so...

It was _fundamental_ to whomever wrote the piece...

So I mentioned it here.

Sorry I failed your "anti-semetic triggers" - FFS.

Well, to be fair, if "these scammers are ultra orthodox Jews" was central to the piece "for some reason", the author might've been a tad on the antisemitic side. At least your (in this context overstated and seemingly unnecessary) mention of their religion makes it sound like it.

He specifically mentioned Brooklyn though, so to me that sounds more like starting the story with a general feeling of the place.

Basically! this was the take-away

SET THE SCENE: "What you may think of sleepy hassidic brooklyn as a religious enclave -check out these guys with curls making a killing on amazon knock-offs.!"

>At least your (in this context overstated and seemingly unnecessary) mention of their religion makes it sound like it.

I interpreted the comment differently to you. To me, it appeared that the GP was merely trying to give all the details he remembered from the story. Each additional detail helps when trying to find a decade(s) old story on google or similar.

When reporting descriptions of people, the more detail, the better. Withholding things like race, religion, etc in an effort to be more PC results in a less accurate description.

If you failed to clarify in your original post, it really does look like it's not material to the story: we don't have the context so reasonably people are going to ask why you even brought it up. No need to get so indignant about it.

I am pretty sure I remember the article was about Adorama and B&H selling gray-market import photography goods over mail order and having racist practices or something, not about selling on Amazon.

Well, I distrust Amazon for anything electrical or buy my electronics and optics from the fine folks at B&H Photo, which is owned by a (Satmar) Hasidic family. Sure, that means I can’t shop on Saturdays and have a much deeper knowledge of the Jewish high holidays calendar than I’d normally care to develop, but I don’t worry about a counterfeit battery blowing up in my face or a SSD upgrade for my computer being a 16GB flash card fraudulently reprogrammed to advertise itself to my computer as a 1TB one.

> Well, I distrust Amazon for anything electrical

I learned this the hard way when I received a counterfeit playstation controller, straight from the "Sony" store. For some reason, none of my reviews, even the positive ones, have posted since that one, which included pictures of a teardown.

Did it damage your playstation?

It was wireless and never connected to the machine, so I'm not sure it was capable of damage. But it also didn't have much of a chance since it would only stay connected for about 30 seconds, after pairing.

Even B&H was susceptible to knock-off batteries. Somewhere in the supply chain, fake batteries were introduced, but not found until sold to customers. B&H actually handled this in the only sane way vs the Amazon shrug of the shoulders.

Supply chain attacks are real and even reputable vendors are susceptible. The difference is how the vendors react with their customers that separates the good vendor from the bad vendor.

The difference is Amazon only pretends to care, and only cares about enough plausible deniability to deflect lawsuits (the courts are catching on and this no longer works). Their practice of stickerless commingled inventory ensures that even buying from Amazon itself is no guarantee of not getting a counterfeit product.

You seem to be pretty generous in saying Amazon pretends. I thought they gave up all connotations of giving a shit long ago

> what the family's religion has to do with anything,

Back in the 1980s, NYC shops noticeably run by Hasidic jewish folk were famous for having the best deals in cameras and hifi.

It was not just local, there was a good amount of mail order business, and a large advertising footprint. I think it faded out in internet e-commerce boom, but for older shoppers the association may be relevant.

I remember 47th Street Photo was a big one.

Some of it still exists. B&H photo is a very large jewish owned electronics business out of New York. They have some of the best high end electronics selection available online and last time I checked they are closed on the sabbath.

>> Checkout is unavailable while we observe Shabbat. Please come back when checkout reopens at 9:45 pm ET Sat Jul 23

Yep. One of the few reasons to go to Times Square at that time.

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