Hacker News Reader

Comment by moolcool | Hacker News Reader

It runs deeper than just everything being an ad. It's also completely flooded with rebadged junk from dropshippers. A few weeks ago, I was looking for a new whetstone, and this is what I got when I searched Amazon

https://i.imgur.com/1Utp2dF.png

The results keep going like that. You see constant repetition of the exact same units with slightly different branding, often with the same stock photography, repeated for page after page. It used to be that you could count on Amazon to give you pretty solid results when you wanted something. It was great, it really took the fuss out of shopping when you didn't have to do 10 google searches when you needed to buy a USB cable or something. Now Amazon is nothing more than AliExpress with faster shipping. Shame.

View on HN

> Now Amazon is nothing more than AliExpress with faster shipping. Shame.

This.

Once i realized what was taking place on amazon I simply moved to AliExpress. I mean if i am going to get something from there anyhow i might as well save the middleman fees and take the hit on shipping.

I canceled my prime membership a while ago as well. I don't see how amazon can continue to simply be a front end for AliExpress for long. Wont most simply avoid the added fees and go to Ali directly?

But even their shipping (with Prime too!) is getting slower and slower. Prime's selling point used to be free 2 day shipping. Shipping is still "free" but many items take 4 days (or more now).

Do you live in a city?

There are times i still use amazon and i actually bought a few items on Tuesday.

Amazon's delivery date is friday? Want to guess where amazon's distribution warehouse is? A few blocks away from me.

The point you are attempting to make is unclear. If the distribution hub is within walking distance from me, why does it take days to ship?

I am sure your congressman gets same day or next day shipping in DC, though.

You’re assuming that the product you ordered is at that warehouse. It probably isn’t. They can’t store all products at all locations. Even if that distribution center ends up being the shipment origination site, the product still probably had to move within the Amazon network. Some of those things will move within the Amazon network, some with external (trackable) carriers (UPS/FedEx). And some things has restrictions on the method of transport. If there is a lithium battery anywhere in the device, it travels by ground.

Also — if you’re in the US, today is a holiday and nothing will move. So today and yesterday had/has limited movement between distribution centers. And as we get closer to Christmas, the entire network will start to approach saturation.

There are many reasons why things don’t always ship as fast as you’d like them to.

Speaking of assumptions lets review yours for a moment.

1) I am not assuming the products are from different warehouses. I know this for a fact. Look at my other post and i stated one item is being shipped from a warehouse ~120 KM away. I will guess the rest is from the local warehouse? Once amazon updates the shipping details (probably friday AM) it will show me where it came from..

2) I'm in Canada and it is not a holiday here so it is unclear why "today and yesterday had/has limited movement between distribution centers."

3) Amazon Canada rarely uses other carriers anymore. I cant tell you when the last time anyone i know received something that didnt use their own in-house shipping service so you cant really blame "UPS/Fedex"

A few months ago I ordered a dongle from Amazon to attach a floppy drive to a modern computer via USB. For some reason this weird, niche little thing was eligible for Amazon Essentials same day delivery. Apparently every Amazon warehouse has a dusty box of these things in the corner that they're still trying to unload?

Amazon quotes delivery times up to two weeks for me for prime now.

And it doesn’t even ship (UPS) until a few days before the delivery date. And they still don’t do a good job combining orders.

Delivery has never been faster for me. Most things arrive in less than a day now.

But some things do take longer. I guess it depends on stock levels.

The issue isnt just stock levels, it is stock levels at a specific distribution hub.

As i posted i ordered a few items on tuesday and delivery will be friday.

One of the items tracking details shows me that it is being shipped from a city ~ 120KM away yet there is a massive 1,000,000 square foot hub within waking distance from me??

Tracking hasn't updated to show me where the rest of the stuff is being shipped from so i can speak to the entire order.

This gets to the CORE issue with amazon. Because i no longer have prime my stuff is almost intentionally held back to encourage me to get prime?

It will not surprise me at all to see that when shipping is finally updated the other items on my list come from the local hub.

Not all hubs hold all items and because of this your shipping times can fluctuate.

Agreed - live in London, and often receive things within 12 hours of purchase.

Anecdotal, but I haven't noticed this in the UK. Pretty much everything I order from Amazon still arrives within 24 hours, and I live in the countryside (albeit in the southeast so still not far from London.)

OTOH I still notice the problem that other people have mentioned - that practically everything on Amazon these days is the same repackaged Chinese dropshipped garbage. Which is one reason I shop on Amazon far less than I used to.

I've never managed to connect with America tales of the length of shipping. Almost (99%) everything I order from amazon arrives when it says, most of which is next day. I live in the country, but like most UK citizens fairly close to a major trunk road (10 miles or so).

Of course I'm sure things are different if you live on Mull or Fair Isle, but for the vast majority of us it seems reliable

The quality of what you get from amazon is of course somewhat different.

I live in the Seattle area, so Amazon shipping is pretty fast and accurate, but there have been a few times when things were shipped but they apparently just disappeared in transit. One time it was a car part and it got close enough that it was on a truck from the city 20 miles north of here, then it just dropped off the radar and they refunded my money.

Then every once in a while you get something that takes a month to deliver, comes in a package covered with customs stamps, and is roughly the size and shape of what was ordered but wrong. I ordered a titanium tube one time - think the dimensions of a reusable drinking straw - and after a month got a solid titanium rod. "Mail it back and we'll give you a refund." There's a bit of unfair asymmetry there, friend, since you're mailing stuff to the US all day and I wouldn't have the faintest clue how to send something to China, and I'm guessing it's going to cost far more than the thing I'm returning.

But I'm an addict and I don't see myself cancelling Prime any time soon.

The difference between the US and the UK is size and the sheer remoteness of some places, even small cities. Unless you've been there, it's hard to grasp.

I've driven around large parts of the western US and there's a LOT of empty space. I don't know how many shipping centers Amazon has in the UK, but I am about 99.999% sure that there's areas of the US larger than all of the British Isle that are served by a single warehouse and shipping center.

So the variability in the US is going to be very high. Some places that happen to be near a shipping center, or two, will have consistent on-time delivery. Other places that are distant from one, and may have a high mountain pass that's dicey in winter or closed because of wildfires in the summer between them and that single center, are going to have problems.

According to this about 50 in the UK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Amazon_locations#Unite...

I took a week off work once and walked from one side of England to the other, it was awesome. That would get me almost to the neighboring city where I’m from in the western US.

Hadrian's wall?

There's a high degree of bias in who we hear from too, I think. Most European countries have a grand total of zero Amazon depots, so there are plenty of European countries where the delivery is not fast either, but I rarely see people from those countries talking about it for whatever reason. I'm guessing in large part because those countries also does not have a local Amazon site, so it feels less surprising because if you order from Amazon you're unambiguously ordering from abroad, with different expectations.

Sure, but given that the majority of people in America, especially the ones I see complaining about amazon, are going to be living within an hour or so of a major city -- San Francisco, Seatle, Austin, New York, LA, I'm not sure how the difficulties of delivering to Hyder, AK or Las Vegas, NM factor in.

I think what many people outside North America fail to grasp is the size of north America.

To give you an idea:

I live just outside Toronto (Ontario, Canada) and if i want to drive east to the next province (Quebec) it will take me 4 hours to cover the 450 KM. If i want to go to the next province to the west (Manitoba) It will take me 20 hours to cover the 2,000 KM. So to cut across Ontario you are looking at something like 2,450 KM

This is just my province of Ontario. The other provinces are not as large, but the country is vast when looking at Europe.

Using google maps, i can drive from the south (footbridge) to the north (ChargePlace,Scotland) and this ~ 1,200 KM?

In the case of my very simple order, one item is being shipped from 120KM away?

How often do you order something simple and one of the distribution hubs is 120KM away from you? There is a massive 1 million square foot hub a few blocks away but i guess it isnt big enough to hold what i wanted?

I hope this provides some context for you.

HaH, exactly.

25 years ago, I lived in a city of Rijeka. You could start from Croatia; enter & drive through entire country of Slovenia; enter into Italy and go shopping into Trieste, two countries over - in 75km.

Now I'm in the Greater Toronto Area, and my best friend lives about the same distance, officially in the same city or metro.

There's just over two thousand kilometers between the capitals of two neighbouring provinces in Canada (Winnipeg & Toronto). Or you could go through dozen countries, with all of their states and provinces in Europe for same distance (e.g. Geneva to Istanbul or similar).

Distances are vastly different and people's attitude toward them as well - what is daily commute in GTA used to be a yearly vacation pilgrimage in my childhood :)

> what is daily commute in GTA used to be a yearly vacation pilgrimage in my childhood :)

This is something Europeans also overlook.

I use to commute to Toronto every day. 100KM return trip daily, 500KM a week...

I think Most Europeans would be surprised to know we have a train system which basically travels back and forth from Hamilton to Oshawa all day long.. 127KM one way. Basically the Width of England at the more narrow part and yet we consider this a "greater Toronto area" train system.

People in Toronto dont think about how there are countries which would fit in this distance, Europeans dont think about how a daily passenger train service would cross the country dozens and dozens of times each day.

100km return, or 30 miles each way, that's not far at all. I used to drive 50 miles/80km each way into London 4 days a week when I worked in an office. My wife still does a 100km return trip to work. I have colleagues that commute 7 days in 14 on a 250km round trip into West London.

Your 127km one way train is about the same as the new Reading-Shenfield Cross London service which runs 6 times an hour 18 hours a day (well will do from next year), and less than the 160km Bedford-Brighton Thameslink service. It's pretty much the "Greater London Area", although that term is of course steeped in politics. The Paris RER D line is 190km and runs 466 trains a day, and is a "greater Paris area" train system

The Greater Toronto Area has broadly the same population as the Frankfurt Rhine-Main area, but is only half the area.

The "Slovenia is only 75km wide" claim is meaningless. Greenwich, CT to Oakland NJ is 75km and crosses the entire state of New York, a state with 10 times the population of Slovenia.

Indeed talking about New Jersey and Slovenia, they're a similar size, but NJ has about 5 times the population of Slovenia.

If something works for Slovenia, why doesn't it work for New Jersey?

So why is Toronto so small compared with Europe?

It's not a Geography problem, the challenges of serving the tiny number of people that like in rural North Dakota are a cruch to hide America's other infrastructure failings.

> "Greater London Area", although that term is of course steeped in politics.

Is it? What's politicised about this term? "Greater London" and "Greater London area" have pretty clear definitions; I'm not aware of anything that's controversial about it.

Greater London has a clear area defined [0], but the boundaries themselves were politically set. Look at say Surbiton, you contiguous sets of houses, some in Greater London, some not in Greater London (Say Beechwood Close). In fact I think this [1] house the Greater London boundary runs down the party wall between the two sides of the same semi. Jay Forman has a 9 minute video on the subject [2]

The contiguous Greater London Built Up Area [3] extends well beyond the boundary of Greater London (Bracknell, Gravesend, Harlow), yet doesn't include parts of Greater London (New Addington for example)

The London Commuter Belt is somewhat woolly [4], but certainly includes places like Slough and Maidenhead, Sevenoaks and Tunbridge Wells, Harlow and Southend.

Significant numbers of people additionally commute on high frequency (4tph or more) trains from places like Oxford, Milton Keynes, Basingstoke, Ashford into Zone 1 45 minutes or less.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_London

[1] https://goo.gl/maps/2Zh9tuQnQoPyrnjC7

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAusbJmRB0c

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_London_Built-up_Area

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_metropolitan_area

It's just the distances involved. Amazon UK can get everything from any warehouse in the UK to your local depot for last mile delivery overnight, if not faster.

In the US unless you air freight ($$$) it you cannot rely on getting stock from warehouse A (say in NY) to warehouse K (say near LA) overnight. This then means you have to keep a lot more "duplicate" inventory sitting around various places as you cannot just in time move it, which is also extremely expensive.

I imagine the reports of shipping delays in the US are caused by Amazon intentionally trying to reduce the amount of inventory on hand and/or using less air freight.

This is also happening in Europe now on an EU scale. Often something takes a couple days because it goes from Germany to Spain or something. They don't say that's the reason but you can tell from the stickers on the products. I guess they don't do this anymore for the UK though because of all the customs hassles since Brexit.

I've not noticed a major difference in the UK from before Brexit. Some products would come from elsewhere in Europe but most would be local then too. London alone has several Amazon depots, so lots of things are same day delivery here.

Maybe it's down to competition - for lots of products I'd go elsewhere if they didn't offer at least next day delivery.

>even their shipping (with Prime too!) is getting slower

Not only that. Try searching while in Incognito Mode and you'll see the same products, sold by Amazon.com, without Prime, for a few bucks cheaper than when you're logged in and seeing them with "free" Prime shipping.

Thanks for validating my assumption, I encountered this twice and thought I was taking crazy pills. I don't even shop on Amazon much, like once or twice a year...

Does this only happen with an active Prime membership? I tested a few search queries and didn’t see the inconsistencies you’re describing.

I assume so, since I have a Prime membership and it knows this when I'm logged in.

That might depend on where you live. I nearly always get next-day or 2-day shipping. There are exceptions, but for central Austin, it's pretty good.

This is heavily dependent on location. I receive almost everything in two days or less. It is extremely common to get things the next day or even the same day. I'm in the Chicago suburbs.

> Shipping is still "free" but many items take 4 days (or more now).

I've had the opposite experience. Everything comes within 1 day. Some items even come within 12 hours (overnight shipping delivering at 7am)

Where I live (a summerhouse in a small county seat in mountains) - Walmart, Bestbuy, Homedepot and others ship faster and usually for free even for small orders.

Walmart also provides all-paper packaging (they seem to have worked hard on developing it) - so you can burn / recycle packaging without say peeling off stuck plastic tape first.

The only pro of amazon is that you can contact them months after the purchase and still get a free replacement/refund. With aliexpress I doubt they'd refund you even if you received a bag of dirt instead of your product

AliExpress also has strong buyer protections, which you would have seen had you ever ordered from there. You have to confirm delivery for every order else the seller doesn't get the money.

Half the time I order something from AliExpress, it's worthless junk that isn't what I wanted or way out of spec, and the confirmation thing you're talking about was a lot more limited than you're implying

To be fair, though, said worthless junk was like 1/5th the price it'd be in the USA, so it was still worth the gamble

the only major issue I have with AliExpress is how hard they make it to log in

In my experience, Ali Express is absolutely 100% a buyers market, in every single way. I've bought random junk with a somewhat long fulfillment time, and contacted the seller just to politely ask about a time frame without in any way indicating dissatisfaction, and received groveling responses begging me to not open a dispute with Ali.

AliExpress hasn't fully replaced Amazon for me yet. But I definitely shop at AliExpress more often now. I don't care if shipping takes longer. It's pennies compared to Amazon, which makes a difference when the quality of the items are a mystery. And for name brand items, I just use Costco, Target, and Best Buy unless Amazon has a better sale.

And even that is not guaranteed. Lost of secondary sellers on their 'marketplace'. I order lipton tea a week ago and it's still not shipped.

I don't remember how this is called, something like a honeymoon period. Most of the web love bombed us with unsustainable (loss leaders like) offers until they got everybody hooked and now they rely on habit, laziness and reduced competition. It's somehow quite a shame.

> I don't remember how this is called, something like a honeymoon period.

I think you mean "blatant worldwide market manipulation"?

Dumping products until the competition is bankrupt and then using your monopoly to crush the consumers is a practice as old as commerce.

> Now Amazon is nothing more than AliExpress with faster shipping. Shame.

On Alibaba, you get business background info, whether it's a manufacturer or a reseller, a picture of the factory, info about whether someone checked out the factory, what certifications the product has, and how long it takes them to respond to inquiries. Amazon doesn't have any of that.

On Alibaba, search for "outlet strip". You can check "Verified supplier", "trade assurance" and "UL certified" to filter out the junk. Some good low-priced outlet strips show up. Amazon doesn't have any of that.

Alibaba is supposed to be B2B, but many items have a minimum order size of 1 or 2. If Alibaba had a "who retails this" link for products sold only in large quantities, they'd be more useful than Amazon. Often you can look on Aliexpress for the matching item.

I’m curious, do you actually trust those certifications? I’m wary of the validity of them, but don’t know how to verify if they’re authentic. Thinking mostly of UL certification.

You can check the UL number on a product and get the certification info and company info. This is harder than it used to be on the UL site. You have to register for a free account.

Unless there’s some kind of third-party checking process, that only means that their seller forms have those extra fields.

And you can get a long-term relationship with a seller, because you know that the product you got was actually delivered by them.

If you shop at Whole Foods Prime pays for itself.

The ones that bother me the most are the re-purposed catalog entries. They will have 2,000 reviews, solid 4.7 score, but when you look at the reviews, half of the reviews are for a different item. If there are any out of place reviews I avoid it. Practically, it means sorting by highest reviews gives junk first. I don't know if it's a matter of not monitoring, not caring, or not being able to keep up. The fact that there isn't an easy and obvious way to report a listing and review / listing shift is apparently permitted means they aren't trying to keep up.

Highly recommend Shapton stones and buying them from Lee Valley

https://www.leevalley.com/en-us/tools/shapton-sharpening-sto...

I had a look at those, but I ended up going with the KDS 1000/6000. I'm still new to using it, but it works great!

For the record, so does the "KUNQUN" (ie. gibberish) brand whetstone I bought on Amazon a few years ago.

I have the shapton 12,000, and I'm actually pretty disappointed, but thise lee valley prices are better than what i paid at woodcraft.

The other thing I noticed is that these thousands of identical products have seemingly randomly generated all-caps brand names like BHHSRE, VHYXZY, XIOU, DAUGHE, JXMOX, LANMU, IBERLS, GMJYC… (yes, these are all actual brands I’ve seen on Amazon). It’s like someone is randomly generating millions of brand/product combinations to deliberately flood Amazon.

It may already exist, but I want to create a simple regex-based browser plugin that suppresses Amazon search results if the product name or seller contains 4-7 consecutive capitalized letters. Call it LESSAMZNSPAM or something.

It exists already, as a uBlockOrigin rules generator: https://letsblock.it/filters/amazon-products

You just need to write the regexp.

Interestingly enough that's cheaper on Amazon than AliExpress:

https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256802919678760.html

^ You have to click on the 1000/6000 grit to see the price of $26.53.

Pretty much everything people buy is cheap Chinese crap anyhow.

It's 12.33$ for me https://i.imgur.com/hWyQ466.png

You're not looking at the full kit ones.

Interestingly enough though it shows me $16.70 for just the stone. Maybe they're doing some price discrimination or you're shipping to a cheaper place.

You used to be able to filter for just things sold by Amazon, but that vanished some time ago. Not that a “fulfilled by amazon” filter would do much these days because of how much of other sellers stock there is commingled in their warehouses. Same for the “prime” filter that is present if you subscribe to that, it filters out a lot of junk but far from all of it.

Filter by seller is still available

I see options to filter by brand including a separate “out brands” option, but that isn't the same unless I'm looking for a specific brand rather than “just not cheap & grotty drop-shipped crap thankyouverymuch”.

The usefulness of the brand filter seems to vary greatly by product. For instance when searching for SATA SSDs it only offers “Seagate, Crucial, Western Digital, Samsung”.

I "just" had to select a few random other filters like "New" and the product category and suddenly the seller filter magically appeared.

The search function was always capricious like that, from the get-go. Presumably there's method to that madness.

It's usually hidden, so much that I've captured the query string parameter that represents its filter for my country's Amazon.

Fortunately there are few marketplace sellers, so it doesn't annoy me so much compared to Amazon US.

Here in Spain it definitely isn't.

There's lots of these scams where they sell some non-branded goods with lots of reviews (with videos) from paid SNS influencers. Sometimes they may sell something completely else but change the listing completely (becomes obvious from the reviews again). When you see a lot of similar listing for the same product or from same store, it's giant red flag to not buy it.

Sometimes these goods may be good, but often or not they are low quality, have obvious defects or break down after few weeks / months of use.

And they don’t care about the paid reviews either. I contacted them saying a seller mailed me offering $50 cash via PayPal for a 5 star review. The chat agent replied with the “contact seller” link since I was unhappy. They had no interest in the photo of the bribe sent to me. I don’t even know why the seller has my contact info since the item was shipped by Amazon.

Did you know you can get an 11 Terabyte hard drive for $90 on Amazon? Wow:

https://www.amazon.com/External-Portable-11000GB-Compatible-...

(Um, yeah. And look at the reviews.)

Some more examples, I recently needed new hair dryer as my old one started throwing spars This "SALONIA" hair dryer is being pushed by paid influencers in japan, however based on the few critical reviews and their pictures, it does not look like the quality is good https://www.amazon.co.jp/-/en/SALONIA-Speedy-Negative-Lightw...

Then there is this shady one with multiple amazon listings, similarly bait and switch, reviews are odd https://www.amazon.co.jp/-/en/dp/B0BJPWNZQQ https://www.amazon.co.jp/-/en/dp/B0BJDVZLYC https://www.amazon.co.jp/-/en/dp/B0BBB77M9C https://www.amazon.co.jp/-/en/dp/B0BJQ8MBMB

The products may actually be somewhat decent, but based on the tactics involved and the shady reviews, I wouldn't put my money on something that can shock you or burn your house down, so I eventually just went with reputable panasonic one.

Niche items are pretty much a miss on Amazon. I buy a lot of things on Amazon but as a hobbyist cook and knife collector something like whetstones are much better purchased at a specialty retailer. I trust a shop like japaneseknifeimports.com a lot more than Amazon. These shops cater to the community and the mutual success of the community and the businesses are important.

That's true, but the problem I mention persists with a lot of normal searches too. Like search for a 3.5mm cable, a USB C dock, or a power bank. You'll get a whole lot of cheap garbage from oddball brands.

And random components… you’ll have better luck on eBay. Need a P key for you random laptop keyboard, 1000 5mm LEDs or usb-a cable, male on both ends, straight and right-angle? Gonna have better luck on eBay.

And then the actually unique stuff. I’m buying odd lots of used postage stamps. I’m sure as a seller doing one-offs, even if it’s a common item, eBay is the way to go.

Amazon has improved a lot, but eBay still king on that.

I was looking for earphones and same products were repeated on 900 pages, with 20 to 25 entries listed per page. The odds of finding a useful product in this ocean of repetition is then about 0.1%. I must have clicked for 30 minutes to see the extent of invasion. It was so exhausting and dispiriting that since then (8 months ago), I have not visited Amazon anymore.

Not sure about the faster shipping.

Maybe if you live in a town with a Cheesecake Factory (tracer for retail competition) you get two day shipping with Prime but if you live a little further out, two day shipping probably went out during the pandemic. This is not about the feasibility of AMZN offering it to you because it is frequently unavailable in the same zip code as their warehouse.

Every other retailer seems to get me things in two days or less but I get packages from Japan faster than from the AMZN warehouse that is a 3 hour drive away. They must be spending the money they saving on shipping on Alexa or something.

I had roughly the same experience looking for diamond pads for my block on amazon.

I ended up giving up and went and built my own two-wheel wet diamond grinding machine.

Bonus: I can cut rocks as well as sharpen my knives down to 1/8 micron.

I was about to say when I saw the end of your comment, that looks very much like the AliExpress experience. You get cheap stuff, but you gamble on them being a fake.

AliExpress isn't even cheap for what you're actually getting, but it is cheaper than Amazon if you're dumpster diving.

The reason I say it isn't cheap is because when I ignore the fake labels and look at actual goods delivered equivalents can be bought locally for similar price (sometimes cheaper, sometimes more expensive) without insane wait time and with warrenty.

For spare / repair parts aliexpress unfortunately is still the heaven. Sure you have to be really careful who you order from, but sadly the modern world hates selling spare parts and loves e-waste (especially for smartphones, it used to be different before ...).

Or eBay. I’m offloading a bunch of random bike parts, and yeah, somebody out there needs a Shimano XYZ-123 that was last built in 1994 (and doesn’t care to figure out the modern replacement).

Depends what you are buying. You can often find things which are perfectly fine quality but too niche for westerners to sell near cost, like electrical and plastic components, basic tools, cables, etc.

This case isn't even fake-- it's stuff that's either unbranded, or with a new brand made up from whole cloth.

I don’t see why you wouldn’t just spend the $21.99 and get the Amazon’s Choice one and be done with it? It’s like you’re looking to be annoyed in a situation that you could be done with in 5 minutes.

That’s actually one of the worst parts of this. Amazon’s choice is one of the bad ones.

> I was looking for a new whetstone

The King whetstone on the bottom right is legit if you want to freehand. However, I recommend something like an Edge Pro if you have quality chefs knives, etc.

I actually had a Lansky kit, but I found it really fiddly and awkward to use. I practiced for a while on a crappy old knife, but after getting the hang of it, I'm much happier using a proper whetstone.

That King whetstone is good, I have it and use it.

I trust this comment more than 100% of Amazon reviews. Go figure.

Yeah, King for entry level is great, Suehiro Cerax is a mid level upgrade to it.

IMO 6000 is too fine for majority of Western kitchen knifes and most non-expensive Japanese knifes. I would go with 1000 and 3000-4000.

I was just going to say the same thing. IIRC it's Japanese.

I ended up getting the KDS 1000/6000. I don't know enough about sharpening to have an informed opinion, but I can say that it works fantastic for me.

This comment is why I still use Amazon, even though it has indeed become a catalogue where 90% of the listed products are junk. Because that other 10% are legit brands, and when you want the legit brand, it's still very convenient and often* cheaper than other retailers. You just have to wade through the crap to find the real stuff.

(*I said _often_, meaning I concede that it is sometimes actually not cheaper: please resist the urge to provide counter-examples, I know of their pricing trickery!)

But Amazon commingles inventory, so how do you know you are receiving the branded item you want and not a counterfeit item that another seller sent to Amazon?

That’s why I stopped buying things that matter from them, but Walmart Best Buy and home depot are chasing the same profits allowing “market place sellers” - we need to hold these stores liable and accountable for everything sold on the site.

I usually check things when they arrive pretty throughly no matter who I buy from and I hate how I have to waste my time doing it

I dunno, I’ve never had a problem with counterfeit products on Amazon. I avoid third party sellers though (even if “fulfilled by Amazon”) so that’s probably why. Buying direct from Amazon hasn’t resulted in anything fishy for me yet.

Amazon's business model has shifted from selling goods to consumers to selling consumers to anonymous Chinese manufacturers.

When did you do the query for that screenshot? If it was today the delivery dates seem a bit short for dropshipping

Dropshipping is probably the wrong word, since I think the actual fulfillment is happening in North America

Reply on news.ycombinator.com