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Comment by bluSCALE4 | Hacker News Reader

I don't think any of that is true. If Costco produced such features in their imaginary product, people may use it. Why? Because Costco has proven itself trustworthy of a blind repeat purchase. You could trust the price you're paying is typical and fair. Amazon on the other hand...

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To build on the Costco analogy: for any given product category they typically only have three specific options: good, better, best. I could tell Costco bot that I need AA batteries and it would ask me if I prefer Duracell, Kirkland brand, or cheapest. I trust that either of them will be plenty good, so I would say cheapest.

Amazon has a vastly different experience with thousands of indistinguishable Chinese knockoffs. I can only ask Alexa for a very specific product, otherwise I don't trust what I'll get. I use Alexa to add products to my cart, which serves as a reminder that I need to do a little more shopping from my phone or PC.

To add to your point, one can't even pick out a brand-name product directly from Amazon's website and be sure of getting the real thing.

That's been an issue with ordering consumer electronics. I don't know if the item is refurbished, returned,or endorsed by the manufacturer warranty. I basically only order through the manufacturer or best buy these days.

Even when amazon shows that you're on the manufacturer store, it still may not be genuine. I bought an intel wifi card off what looked like the official intel store on amazon, but it turns out that it was an out of production model sold by a third party, but amazon showed that it was "Intel". Very confusing and frustrating if you don't know what to look for beforehand.

Does Best Buy not resell returns?

Yes, they do. Plenty of horror stories on r/datahoarders of fake resealed HDDs.

I once bought a "new" hard drive from Amazon. It was an enterprise datacenter drive with thousands of hours. Someone had scrubbed the SMART statistics, but did not wipe the drive. They deleted the partition table, but it was still chock full of data. Mostly encrypted, but there was plenty of cleartext logs including runtime statistics for the rack the drive was in.

I'm about 85% sure it was a decommissioned Backblaze drive based on the logs I could see. This was probably 10 years ago, though.

I ordered automated cat feeders and had bought the “honey guaridan [sic]” which is a Chinese knockoff when I thought I was buying “HoneyGuardian” brand automated cat feeders.

This is blatant behavior on the part of sellers and Amazon turns a blind-eye to it.

I didn’t learn my lesson either.

I ordered seat covers, and what came was a misspelled Chinese knockoff brand instead of the name brand I thought I was ordering.

I can’t trust purchases made on Amazon and I have an eye for detail. They got me twice. I don’t know how non-detail oriented folks keep from it happening.

> I ordered automated cat feeders and had bought the “honey guaridan [sic]” which is a Chinese knockoff when I thought I was buying “HoneyGuardian” brand automated cat feeders.

I have to admit that's hilarious, but I'm pretty sure HoneyGuarDIan (correct spelling) too is a Chinese company, based in Shenzhen.[1] Edit: Actually I'm increasingly convinced HoneyGuarDIan and HoneyGuarIDan are the exact same company: take a closer look at the URL https://www.honeyguardian.com/pages/honeyguaridan-app and compare the second-level domain name with the last part of the URL pathname! Maybe it wasn't a knockoff after all :-D

[1] Go to https://www.honeyguardian.com/pages/honeyguaridan-app and click either of the appstore links to see the company name (Shenzhen Hailong Zhizao, whose corporate website is at https://www.pdpets.com/)

"typosquatting"

These days, you can't even pick out a brand-name product from a brick and mortar store and be sure of getting the real thing.

People will buy something from a store, buy a fake version of that thing on AliExpress, swap the fake into the box, re-shrinkwrap the box, return the shrinkwrapped fake to the store, and sell the real one on eBay.

The store will often put the thing back on the shelf, because it's still shrinkwrapped, weighs the same, and even looks the same under an x-ray.

And then someone buys it and gets a dud.

This is why, except for a few high-margin categories, Amazon itself will never put returned stock back into inventory, instead always selling it off through bulk channels. It's effectively impossible to authenticate a return as legitimate these days, without converting the "BNIB" device into a "NIB" device.

> People will buy something from a store, buy a fake version of that thing on AliExpress, swap the fake into the box, re-shrinkwrap the box, return the shrinkwrapped fake to the store, and sell the real one on eBay.

Why not just sell the AliExpress one on ebay?

Because eBay will respond very angrily when people report getting the fake piece of junk. Walmart doesn’t care if you are intelligent work hard at it. You don’t even have to give them your drivers license and they never know.

https://toolguyd.com/amazon-sent-me-used-broken-knipex-plier...

Amazon put tons of stuff back on the shelf. It’s not quite as bad as Fry’s Electronics where every single thing they sold had obviously been opened and shrink up, but it’s getting close.

Panasonic makes the best batteries though.

But to your point, Amazon actually bait-and-switched their own batteries. They had basics batteries that were confirmed rebranded Panasonic eneloop, then changed them out to Chinese batteries while keeping the product page and reviews.

Amazon did that. So good luck getting them to crack down on reputation fraud.

I've never used Alexa, and hardly use Amazon anymore, but this kinda gave me an idea.

Is it possible to ask Alexa to add generic items to a list, then be able to iterate said list as Amazon searches? That seems kinda useful, if it exists.

Maybe I'm not the every man, but I price shop. If All free is on sale half of Tide free, I'm ordering that, and so on.

Executive function tax.

Yes, Costco is like the opposite of the Amazon experience. Costco will only carry a few brands of any given item, but they're all generally pretty good with nothing drop-shipped from a random AliExpress vendor. Their house brand - Kirkland - is pretty good as well. It's a curated set of products with a relatively small number of SKUs vs. Amazon's flea-market-like experience.

The Kirkland house brand is often backed by one of the name brands they sell. They have quality metrics for Kirkland and they check the products regularly. If the quality dips, they swap out the provider.

This used to be the Sears Kenmore & Craftsman model where appliances were really Whirlpool, or Maytag, Carrier{1}.

Hand tools variously came from many OEMs like SK, Plumb, Knipex, and Williams{2}. I suppose they still do, now at Lowes, but the OEM is Chinese.

{1}https://www.ifixit.com/Wiki/How_to_identify_who_made_your_Ke...

{2}https://forum.toolsinaction.com/topic/2118-craftsman-date-co...

The big thing with Sears Craftsman (formerly), and Costco (currently) is that the company will back the product.

If I want to return a product to Costco, I have really strong confidence that they will take it back.

TBF to Amazon they take all my shit back on the reg

Amazon will accept returns, but not like Costco will or sears did.

Sears would exchange any broken craftsman tool for a new one even decades after purchase. Costco is much the same. Used, year old stuff with missing parts will gladly be refunded in full.

To be fair to Costco you have to understand that the way they do that is they just send the item back to the vendor and deduct it from the next purchase. The vendors only option is to not sell stuff to Costco anymore.

Which provides an incentive to the manufacturer to produce at least decent quality products.

I've seen people drop off stained mattresses at Costco for return.

I think it's the other way around. Kirkland takes the "B quality stock" and sells it under it's own label. This is why they have an essentially no questions asked return policy. If the quality dips it eats into this margin and the provider is back to making next to nothing on units that fail to pass their own more stringent brand QA checks.

Costco really needs to get new products in or I don't think it will do well with genz and younger millennials.

I hadn't been to a Costco since I was a kid so I had completely forgotten that the only stock (maybe) a few versions of specific items. I went a year or two ago thinking I'd come home with months worth of groceries and I was shocked that it STILL looked like the inside of a 1990s fridge and cabinet with such incredibly healthy options as (only) Sunny Delite and Tropicana for orange juice, massive boxes of Lays chips and cheezits and popcorn. I saw so few items that weren't basically boxes of corn syrup and sugar in some form. There's so many healthier snacks nowadays.

I didn't expect a complete grocery experience but I was expecting it to have far more healthy options these days, or even just more options in general.

I don't eat any of this stuff. I guess you're a costco family or not. I was a costco family as a kid and had to learn how to eat healthy after shoving soda down all day long my entire childhood.

edit: Yeah I'm looking just at their juice section here and there's not a single less-sugar option just as an example https://www.costco.com/juice.html.

Although, damn, $18.99 for 24 ojs is good. But both options are so disgustingly sweet. I had a single OJ for $7 from einsteins yesterday.

edit: Go down the orange juice flavor pack "Why do they all taste different" rabbit hole with me.... https://old.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5mpdop/e...

What’s healthier than being able to buy massive amounts of high quality fish and beef and decent quality vegetables and fruit, with zero extra ingredients? Same for legumes, farro, brown rice, etc. They have tons of zero sugar drinks as well.

I can’t eat that healthy via other grocery stores because it’s too expensive typically.

if you want healthier juice....buy a juicer and make it yourself. You're never going to get healthy options from a wholesaler who buys from massive brands that are not known for healthy options. Long term, making it yourself is cheaper too.

Most of the time in the juice space, anything that is designed to be shelf-stable in a warehouse is not. at. all. healthy. It's packed with preservatives and other stabilizers that are not good for you to consume. Or it has been pasteurized, which kills the vast majority of the nutrients in the liquid itself.

I will say as a caveat, that the Kirkland Signature Organic Coconut Water is quite good.

I tried multiple juicers, but they were too hard to clean, so I stopped using them.

The Vitamix is easy to clean, so that's the winner for me.

Are there actually good juices on the public market? I'm pretty sure anything you don't squeeze yourself has been reconstituted from parts.

I was chatting up a hotel chef recently and he told me the lil 8oz of 'proper' orange juice he gave me cost more to put on the table than the entire rest of the breakfast combined.

Well Sunny D is an "orange drink" and there are various widely available "fresh squeezed" real juice options so... Yes?

> Are there actually good juices on the public market?

I never found one.

Fruit juices consist of fructose. It's bad for you in high quantities, just like sugar. Eating a piece of fruit is healthy for you - fructose in small quantities, and the rest of the fruit slows down its digestion. Fruit juice is a fructose bomb.

Not really. I was just using OJ as an example because for whatever reasons I've been paying attention to the pricing of different breakfast places OJ + grocery OJ since covid. I pay $7 for "fresh squeezed" from Einsteins, but Syrup a popular breakfast place next to me charges $8.99 for a cup about half the size of that. I made that mistake once.

I was just hoping for healthier, zero/low sugar options of a lot more things at Costco. If I ever have a zero/low sugar option, I usually get it. I haven't drank a full sugar soda in a decade and avoid all sugar so my tolerance to sweet things is super low. Black coffee, etc.

No/low sugar isn't inherently better for you...just saying. Most of the time stuff that advertises that there's no or low sugar is packed with sweeteners that your body still treats as sugars...but massive food conglomerates have lobbied the FDA to allow them to say there's no added sugar.

Plus, if you're drinking fruit juice to help stay hydrated, you literally need sugars and salts to actually instigate the hydration process.

I find that Costco in store generally has stuff that tends to follow local consumer preferences.

It is worth mentioning that Costco.com does not stock the same things that the physical stores sell, more-so than any other retailer I know of. And different stores have a lot of latitude in what they stock.

My nearest store has tons of things like sugar free sodas, pro-biotic soda, kombucha, no sugar added juices, and juice shots, etc... It might just be the local Costco catering to their market.

Weird, I'm in Denver, pretty healthy crowd here but maybe that Costco is just bad. Nothing like that there.

Yeah, my wife and I always check out the local costco when visiting a city. I can't remember which one it was but I distinctly remember being surprised at all the asian-type foods at one. They had squid chips, sushi, boba, and all kinds of strange things. I want to say it was Oregon or Seattle but it's been a while

I saw a picture of the Costco in Alaska a few years ago and it was full of camping gear and salmon and stuff like that. It was pretty cool. I think it was Juneau, the "smallest Costco."

Yep found it https://old.reddit.com/r/Costco/comments/1e0t9u6/costco_june...

Oh they definitely cater to the local market. Here is a costco in Mountain View: https://www.reddit.com/r/Costco/comments/1dk2pfo/not_a_wine_...

What are you talking about? Buy a bag of oranges and a juicer from Costco and you’re set. You can also get 50lb bag of rice, tons of produce, milk, eggs, meat—you don’t need to buy the processed junk foods. In fact I don’t find many stores other than Costco where I can buy e.g. entire cuts of meat to cut into steaks myself.

> I saw so few items that weren't basically boxes of corn syrup and sugar in some form. There's so many healthier snacks nowadays.

Costco sells a lot of junk food because Americans, as a whole, eat a lot of junk food. They also stock a lot of staples (rice, beans, flour, cooking oils, canned/frozen fruits/veggies, &c), and decent quality raw fruit/veggies/meat. Not liking the Costco shopping experience is a pretty reasonable point of view (it forces you to plan/structure your shopping and food storage in weird ways IMO), but it seems like a strange complaint to zero in on the selection of processed foods when they really do seem to try and accommodate a wide variety of needs and preferences the best they can.

They also sell kind of strange (compared to the bags of doritos) stuff periodically, which I love. For instance the Costco in Maine (of all places) has Bird Nest Soup and NordeX PIKNIK cheese in a can. Kind of apropos of nothing. It's pretty cool.

The prices for items in my Amazon cart change multiple times per day.

Until they figure out price stability for staple goods then nobody will use this. Hell I don't even use Subscribe and Save for the same reason.

This. I bought toothpaste on Amazon, used it up, and the next time I went to buy the exact same toothpaste, the price had doubled.

Yes, they have a dark pattern where people buy a product and give good reviews, so suddenly they increase the price to benefit from that.

Same, that's really why it was my sticking point for the post when in reality, getting the wrong item is a bigger issue. Lots of times I'll order something on promo only to have it substituted in the near future for either an inferior product or near double the cost.

> If Costco produced such features in their imaginary product, people may use it.

The question is would it make people shop more? If you buy one set of paper towels a week, and Costco rolls out a voice interface, would you now start ordering 2 or 3? If not, what return are they getting on the billions of dollars in additional spending?

In reality people would use it for a day, go "neat", and switch right back to the website or app.

> The question is would it make people shop more?

No, that's not the question.

The question is would it make me shop more AT COSTCO.

And yes, it would make me shift some of my purchasing from my local grocery store to Costco. Costco is a long drive that's only worth it for large trips.

But if I could voice order for shipping or (even better) delivery? My local grocery with its god-awful parking lot full of blind 90-year-olds stuck in reverse would be in serious trouble.

Huh, we are not talking about building a delivery network here. The comparison is between ordering on a website/app and ordering on Alexa.

Do you think you go pick up your Alexa orders at the store?

This is the inherent problem with Amazon's support of 3rd party vendors through their platform, and the general lack of quality controls.

I increasingly use specific companies for purchases, because I can't guarantee that what I order through Amazon will actually be the product I wanted, or be at the quality level I'd expect. It's getting to be absolutely awful.

This is interesting because you often hear Amazon treats its 3rd party sellers poorly - perhaps they are driving away the quality sellers?

Yeah I've largely migrated my purchases off of Amazon for exactly this reason.

Checking now, I placed 83 orders last year. I've placed 3 so far this year.

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