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Comment by jmainguy | Hacker News Reader

Yeah I would never buy anything electronic, or anything to consume or put on my body from amazon.

If you actually want cheap highly reproducable electronics amazon is fine. It is alibaba but twice as expensive for an order of magnitude reduction in shipping speed.

With a functional return policy!

I do not like Amazon for many reasons (treating employees being the main). However I bought crapload of electronics there for personal use and for my business and it was fine either right from the start or was refunded / replaced without problems even when not being fulfilled by Amazon.

This works poorly when you buy something like an SD card, store something you care about on it, and then try to read it back off the card later.

Not to defend counterfeits products, but I wouldn't trust even the best SD card on earth to store something I care about.

For an SD card, “store something you care about” will very often mean photos or video. You have no choice but to trust the SD card for the time it takes you to get to your computer where you can dump the contents into something more reliable.

High end cameras usually have dual card slots to help deal with this, but even that won’t help when the failure mode is trying to write past the cards’ actual physical capacity, because the counterfeit advertise more storage than what’s actually there.

“Care about” could even just mean wanting the thing to provide at least, say, two nines of reliability. If my Raspberry Pi stops working after 2 years because the SD card failed, fine. If it stops working after 1 day because the SD card falsifies its capacity, I have zero nines and I’m not happy.

It just generally works poorly without large amounts of luck. Lots of counterfeit or garbage goods will work okay at first but wear out quickly or just be dangerous to operate due to cheap parts.

Is Amazon really that bad to work for? I had two roommates who were warehouse managers, and they didn't really seem to dislike their jobs much.

I think the parent refers to news about some packaging workers being mistreated, forming unions, and then those workers and unions being ignored and sidestepped.

Stuff like that https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2021/10/25/a-hard-hit...

They employ over a million people. There’s going to be a pretty wide range of experiences.

I worked for AWS, it was one of the best jobs I’ve had and the only one in decades where I could leave the office, not think about work at all until I came back in, and not feel the slightest bit guilty or anxious about that. I know others have had a very different AWS experience.

Also anecdotally, I’d always chat to the facilities team/janitors at if they were in the kitchen while I was having lunch. All of them also worked shifts at the distribution center that opened up nearby. Their only complaint was they couldn’t get enough shifts there. It paid better than cleaning the kitchens in the corporate offices. Again, no doubt there’s a wide range of experiences.

Yeah people enjoy bashing it like second mcdonald, but simple truth is a lot of people around the world enjoy working there compared to other corporations.

Is it a dream job since your childhood? Hardly, but they are fine. I have one friend back home in eastern europe, basically full time categorizing new items added on marketplace for couple of years. Clear promotion paths (he was promoted 3x so far IIRC), perks, he wanted to switch to full WFH anywhere and he could easily, no push to return to offices after covid heights. He had tons of opportunities to change job but he is content with where he is.

The EU has a minimum level of labour laws not present in the US federation.

>"I had two roommates who were warehouse managers"

Try packaging workers instead and see what happens

Even if you buy it from the manufacture's official Amazon store?

Thanks to Amazon comingling inventory, you can buy something from one seller and have it fulfilled from the inventory of another. There's no protection from fakes and counterfeits. Even the reviews aren't enough to be sure.

That's not necessarily true in the context of the parent comment.

It only applies to deliveries directly from Amazon and drop shipping sellers, but Amazon is essentially a marketplace and the original sellers don't have to co-mingle.

You're completely safe from co-mingleing if you're actually buying through Amazon from the original manufacturer and the article information says something like "sold and delivered by TheOriginalManufacturer"

By the way (since I see this a lot, and I've thought the same thing before), it's commingling, not co-mingling.

Only if the original manufacturer does the shipping, which is not always true. If it says "prime" it's warehoused by Amazon, original manufacturer or not, and subject to commingling.

Yes, that's why I explicitly said that the article information has to include

> "sold and delivered by TheOriginalManufacturer"

It's commingled if it says "sold by TheOriginalManufacturer, delivered by Amazon"

It's a pretty small line next to the price.

(Prime delivery tag isn't an indicator btw, sellers can get prime certified and still handle their own shipping.)

https://sell.amazon.com/programs/seller-fulfilled-prime

This is not correct. All that means is that the inventory is stored and fulfilled from Amazon’s warehouses. Commingled is a (minority) subset of that.

Right, i was imprecise with that and should've said "commingling is only an option if the delivery is fulfilled by Amazon". The rest of my comment was entirely on point though.

Kinda a stretch to say it's a minority though. There wouldn't be such an issue with counterfeit articles from Amazon if it wasn't the norm

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