Amazon makes everything you buy more expensive, no matter where you buy it
pluralistic.net
pluralistic.net
At least for where I live (New Jersey) this is completely untrue. Uber fares today are still far cheaper then Taxi fares were even in 2009. A 12 min ride home in a taxi from my local train station was $20 in 2008... Today in Uber it's $12.
I’m not sure what city the author lives in, but, while Uber is pretty bad, Uber is still better than taxis. Better service, better fares, and better pay for drivers.
Taxis were like the biggest racket around with usually sleazy companies owning the car and paying immigrants and literal slaves from human trafficking poor wages to drive.
There’s this mythical owner/operator that I never encountered.
So I think that’s why Uber is tolerated because they are still better than the worlds shittiest industry, taxi. Maybe the only more hated industry would be debt collectors or hospital administrators or telemarketers.
That said I’m a Lyft customer to this day because when Uber started they geofenced the southside out.
South side I don’t know, never went there on purpose unless you count Chinatown which is at a red line stop. South side has always been an island.
South side isn't an island, it's half the city's land area and population. To the extent it's cut off from the rest of the city that's an intentional policy choice supported and justified by comments like yours.
So those numbers absolutely match up in my city, at least from the rider’s perspective. STILL better than taxis, however. Of course there is inflation, but that doesn’t nearly account for this discrepancy. I can’t provide exact driver numbers but I sometimes have the courage to ask the driver what they are making and on average when I do ask it’s about 1/3 of what I am paying. Never more than half.
From the investor perspective, I wonder if that's good enough-- the people chasing unicorns and 500% IPO paydays would probably be angrier watching it become a low-margin but functionally useful company, than seeing it close up shop.
Over time, there's a lot of pressure on Uber's margins. The technology and business idea are obvious enough that the moat is pretty low. There's little reason for drivers to not be on every available platform, and you can do a splashy "Download our app to get $20 in credit" to growth-hack a new competitor. So you're always at the risk of someone launching a price war, and even if you can drive them out of the market, you'll have a hard time resetting customer expectations.
> There's little reason for drivers to not be on every available platform
So yes and no. Yes in the sense that switching costs for a driver are very low, but no in the sense that not all platforms provide the same value to drivers. A platform that reduces wait times, batches deliveries, plans better routes, etc. can provide drivers better income per-minute/mile compared to competitors.
For the record I have been stranded, messing around with drivers accepting then rejecting fares and then given up and taken either a street hail taxi or another app. I have even gulped down the fee for cancelling on a driver who drove off in the other direction for 20 minutes.
Amazon still has mostly lower prices than other retailers. Uber is still cheaper than cabs. Whether those prices are sustainable or not is a different issue, but simply claiming that they are actually _higher_ without providing any evidence other than "I saw a $55 Uber fare once" is not responsible writing.
I want to believe Cory is just devoted to the cause of protecting people from unchecked Big Tech power (which is a legitimate cause I do not oppose) and he is letting his confirmation bias get the best of him.
Has Amazon sneakily enforced planned obsolescence somehow? Does the cutthroat market create conditions where only low-quality products can survive? Is it just that the rise of planned obsolescence happened to coincide with Amazon's takeover?
I've extended the life of several devices by decades through simple repairs. It is no wonder that these same companies that want you buying a new washer/fridge/oven every 4 years are opposing right to repair. They love adding walled gardens to their products. Even our BBQs are getting electronic garbage added that can't be fixed normally...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect
Personally, I found that if the product is heavy, don't buy it on amazon. Everything is relentlessly based on shipping costs. If you buy wire shelves on amazon, they cost slightly less but the entire unit is far less durable.
Our family motto is "I can make it cheaper than that!" which tells you how often we fall victim to the IKEA effect. Lately I like to budget out my projects so I know if I'm actually saving any money. Especially considering labor. Most of my projects lately are stuff I can't get for hook or crook from anywhere.
You are totally right about heavy stuff on Amazon. To your door freight is SO expensive. The problem is all the stores are setting their prices to Amazon's prices.
It's always the fault of greedy corporatists here on HN -- honestly, that is just lazy thinking. Sure, they want to make money. But also, the average Joe wants stuff cheap. Made in China, lots of plastics replacing metal, lower-density materials, fewer fixable/replaceable parts, limited quality control. You can't really blame companies who build their products like this when it's shown over and over and over that cheap stuff is what sells.
It’s a vicious cycle
Such as? Every product I've considered buying in the past few years has more price points and options than ever before. Yes many of them are ultra-cheap, but plenty of mid-priced options as well. For example a new top of the line GoPro Hero11 is $550. However you can easily find other action cams anywhere from under $99 to $450, some of which are other GoPro products.
Requiring data to prove that concepts are a thing is disingenuous -- what products? what timeframe? what metrics? what profit margins vs. outcomes?
I don't need a 2 million strong Postgres DB to tell me that Ikea furniture is more prone to breaking than the heavy Amish furniture they sell a county over.
Let's say you have a sturdy product with a 1% defect and replacement rate. You make 1000 of them. You have to replace 10 of them, so you've manufactured 1,010 of them in total. Let's say they each use 100 grams of material. You've used 101,000g of material.
Now you redesign it to save 1 gram of weight, but it doubles the defect rate. Again, you make 1000 of them. You have to replace 20 of them, so you manufacture 1,020 of them. But because of the 1g material reduction per unit, you've used less material overall – 100,980g.
These are just easy numbers to work with, but it's not hard to imagine many products might work like this. And the same calculation can be done for either energy or materials.
Nah. Privately held means that they don't need to pander for next quarter's numbers. Publicly traded is always a race to the bottom.
Consumers are impulsive[1], and get a genuine rush from spending money and receiving pretty packages.
Things like listing rank (ie, being the top item in Best Match), eye-catching pictures and low prices, in that order, matter far more than how useful the product is, because the utility of the product itself is irrelevant to this kind of consumer.
[1] Or, more specifically, the consumer dollar is impulsive. Non-impulsive people are far less likely to fritter away their money on cheap retail purchases.
This exactly. When folks buy the idea that their primary identity is as consumers, they loose the ability to resist all the psych-ops marketing constantly thrown at them (at least at those living in Occidental countries).
In contrast, people who consider themselves first as creators---those who work to produce something of value, out of a desire to serve others through one's work (this is broader than just the 'creative class')---may be much more restrained and selective in their purchases. "Will this tool enable me to work more effectively?" "Will this item last long enough?"
In my experience this is just the lie those people tell themselves to justify indulging in the same impulsive consumerist behavior albeit usually higher price points than the unwashed masses.
Look at how HN and Reddit, examples of places dominated by upper middle class culture, fawn over the products and brand those demographics consider to be befitting them. It's the same exact kinds of statements and praises that you see the bluer collar crowd applying to different classes and price points of products in other filter bubbles.
As a result, as a consumer i generally buy cheap because if I pay more I still may end up with a cheaply manufacturered product.
On some things however you can burn Amazon. I bought a commercial leg press last year that weighted over 500 lbs. Everyone else wanted to charge shipping of almost $200. Not Amazon. Free shipping and for the same price as everyone else. SOLD!
That's better than what I have been experiencing. About half of the stuff I buy breaks right away. I leave them 1 star and comment on what happened. Amazon approves the reviews to my surprise. Some of the vendors will physically mail me a card offering $30+ for 5 stars. I find it interesting they are able to send me physical mail.
I would avoid Amazon but I live in the middle of nowhere. That is one of the trade-offs I accepted by moving here. I try to utilize the local stores as much as I can.
The range of options for any given consumer product has grown substantially on the low end.
When they officially launched in the Netherlands a few years ago the prediction of some retail experts was that they would take over the market but their local competitor Bol.com has weathered the storm perfectly. Brand power, convenience and speed- Amazon is not unbeatable.
The real source of the enshitification Doctorow writes about is the fiat US dollar, not necessarily Amazon. Amazon is just one of the more successful at sucking up that monetary creation. Remove the money creation and the opportunities for regulatory capture, and competition becomes a much more viable option to prevent the abuses Doctorow describes.