The Death of the Smart Shopper
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Aside from that the article seems to completely fail to take notice of the fact that Amazon enjoys a rather extensive monopoly across most of it's operation. Of course the seller will always have more information than you, but if there's a large selection of sellers to choose from, then there's zero incentive for them to use that information _against_ me or to prevent me from having it.
Consumers don't lack savvy, the marketplace lacks options.
Not sure if it's a perfect analogy, but if we compare the Amazon marketplace to a giant flea market, I think the claim that consumers need a reasonably high level of 'savvy' to operate effectively is pretty easy to defend. When there are lots of sellers, lots of noise, and difficulty verifying quality, the consumer will frequently lose out despite the surplus of marketplace options.
Your own example proves the point. Flea markets might be cheap to run for the owner, but would people go there by choice if there were a superior alternative?
Well, it depends. Walmart's quarterly revenue is still higher, though they don't have quite as broad a selection of merchandise.
Most of the well-known brands (e.g. Hamilton, Cuisinart, Betty Crocker in kitchen supplies) were essentially resellers sourcing from the same pool of Chinese manufacturers. Now the Chinese manufacturers are directly selling to consumers and competing with each other, and the business model for these reseller brands is suddenly defunct.
In "non-commodity" products, brands represented a proprietary offering. Think back when a Trinitron CRT TV or monitor commanded a premium price. The label on the box meant it had a unique design and came from factories known for quality output.
In an industry like frying pans, small appliances, midrange electronics, basic modest-quality tools, these days, there is no special sauce. There's no breakthrough tech or unique manufacturing process. The best they can offer is "we curate the OEMs, selecting sensibly, holding to high standards." The brand is a signal of predictably consistent perhaps more than great. Now, that can work to an extent. The Costco Kirkland brand is probably the best example-- they make very little directly, but you know most products are going to be predictably middle-to-above average.
However, as a brand, the "Predictable OEM curation" just as hard to build as a "real manufacturing" brand, but much easier to undermine (how tight is your leash actually?) This is why you're still seeing the same brand names selling can openers and toaster ovens as your Grandma did. They're slowly burning through their original equity-- earned mostly when they were still direct manufacturers. It's still enough to present a headwind for new brands to take their place.
In a way, it's sort of weird that what we ended up with was the EQFFDN "psuedo-brand". Whoever is doing that marketing is creating an abstraction with no value. It conveys neither "directly quality manufacturing" nor "predictable curation" If they went to full transparency-- selling "Guangzhou Industrial Iron Forge #23" brand frying pans-- that at least restores the idea of "we at least know that they're using the same factory that at one time produced a product I was satisfied with."
Also, it's too much work for most manufacturers and vendors who are essentially selling low-end "flea market" items that they themselves wouldn't purchase. AliExpress and drop shippers on Amazon, eBay, and Etsy are guilty of pushing low-end items with barely / no concern for regulatory standards. I mean, have you seen the flaws in the USB deathdapters sold in the US and the "shower heaters" and "baby water heater" sold to South America that expose live wires.
Then PE came in and brought in MBA optimizers who realized they could have lower production costs by using overseas supplies. The quality obviously dropped as part of cost cutting.
Now we don’t have middlemen brands, but a lot of the direct from the Chinese mfg products have safety issues. Brands serve as a backdrop who can be sued, and as such have become a bit of the quality control that isn’t available when buying direct.
I, for one, have become a lot more brand conscious. For example, when I know a PE firm buys a company, that “brand value” almost immediately drops to zero for me. But when I know a company produces high quality and reliable goods, I’ll buy because I know somewhere there’s a person looking at preserving that value and doesn’t want to kill my dog or cat or child.
Some market places seem to have things worked out though. I have been stung buying car parts from ebay a few times: wrong parts, badly described parts, lying about what they actually had in stock. etc. to the point where I stopped buying car parts there except for a couple of vendors I trust.
Rockauto seem to have it worked out. All the part equivalents laid out in price order, cross referenced properly with OEM part numbers and honesty about stock levels.
Just stop shopping where the experience is bad. If what you want is on aliexpress then ironically they seem to do a better job of policing vendors than amazon or ebay do.