As someone who uses Amazon regularly, we live in different worlds. My experience is pleasant and straightforward; I get what I want and it arrives quickly.
When things show up and actually are what I expect based off of the image and they work right it is a rare surprise.
I think one factor might be what city you are in. I’m in Austin and I think there must be a big warehouse nearby because it’s not that unusual for something I order to show up a few hours later.
FWIW, I placed exactly 100 orders in 2023.
If you're getting commodity stuff from the cheapest vendor, good luck. There's lots of stuff put in there by Chinese shops that's garbage quality, mislabeled, a miniature model of the real thing, etc.
You might be buying off-brand stuff.
But what you'd find at Target or Microcenter, and you'll have a good time.
I’ve been more and more ordering elsewhere. I order direct from the manufacturer when I can.
So, Amazon bought my good will back again with that. They shouldn't have had to do it, though.
Where I have not found that is if I am browsing, e.g. today I wanted to look for an evaporative humidifier. The top results are sponsored and for brands I have never heard of like YougetTech. I find I have to depart Amazon, Google / Reddit for things to get a sense of what the trusted brands are and then go back on Amazon to purchase it.
The phrase "caveat emptor" was coined long before Amazon existed.
We were foolish to think that situation would last.
Nowadays the search is unusable. Unless you go to an individual brand's "amazon shop", you will only get products from UUMEBE, SYLTOM and YGWEEN. And "Amazon's pick" will be either Amazon's own product or TROWLY. Perhaps on the fourth page you will get a proper brand. You get products at $1 with a shipping cost of $67. Customer service now asks many questions. When you want to return something, the site uses dark patterns to try to nudge you into getting the products to the post office yourself instead of sending you a messenger. And the prime subscription price went up.
I cancelled my prime account. If I want Chinese quality merchandise there's a Chinese store very nearby where I can go and look at the plastic at least.
You mean like the equivalent of sorting by lowest on eBay??
Like a Chinese guy I can walk up to and say, "I need a 120 foot HDMI and I will not be paying a cent over $22.43 for it because that's what's all the lowest cost sellers on eBay charge."
Maybe ignorance is bliss.
I could also make a more graphic analogy, but I don't think anybody needs to read that.
But when I just need some basic household thing and don’t want to become an expert on the category, I often shop from other retailers where I can just be pretty sure they aren’t selling garbage.
Any porcelain measuring spoon someone like Crate and Barrel sells is probably a decent porcelain measuring spoon, but if I buy that on Amazon, I have to worry about which brands are legit so I don’t end up getting a spoon with porcelain-look paint that will flake off or something like that.
A marketplace where almost anybody can sell almost anything has a completely different level of trust than a store where professional buyer is making a conscious decision about what products they should carry - the presence of many low quality products dilutes the entire marketplace, even the quality products from legitimate brands
(I'm still having good results from amazon but I can understand 'entirely enshittified' as an opinion from people getting a similar thing there)
I’m an enthusiastic amateur home chef. I have ordered some of these “trash” whetstones.
My knives get sharp. They aren’t damaged. The whetstone works over time.
If you are like a knife artisan, yeah I guess Amazon won’t work for you. But I’m guessing the results work for 99.9% of people.