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Comment by dehrmann | Hacker News Reader

> Amazon subsidizing shipping

Do they still do this?

Do, did, does it matter. The sheeple are now hooked on the free shipping, and are now too addicted for how it happened to matter.

It matters. If it's not subsidized, it's not actually free, it's just baked into the price, and a large player like Walmart might be able to compete.

Which is possibly the bigger deal. Every time I shop at a specialty provider I end up frustrated by their lack of clarity around shipping costs - many will actually force you to go through the entire order process before giving you a shipping estimate, complete with collecting contact information.

Makes it very tedious to price-shop.

I will actually go out of my way to search for some suppliers on Amazon, eBay, Walmart, even Tictok before dealing with buying directly, just so I can rule them out if they're gonna pull a "$10 + $60 s&h" trick.

And... Again, this isn't new; pretty sure Ronco was doing this on TV before the Web.

And the old 10 CDs for $0.01 requiring a minimum full price purchase of some sort of subscription that is difficult to cancel has been around long before modern SaaS platforms.

The old "which long distance carrier do you want?" with an "I don't care" response resulted in you receiving the most expensive long distance plan from a company called "I Don't Care".

Just because scams/shaddy practices existed in the days of yore does not make them any more acceptable today.

Which is why companies that tell you what you'll pay up-front (Amazon, eBay) have made life hard for "traditional" sellers. Your sheep are tired of being fleeced.

What I find wild is at least at my walmart they pay the employees to shop for customers for their delivery service. Like how can that be cost effective? Walmart used to be a leader in tech in the 90s now it's applying ancient techniques to modern problems.

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