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Comment by retired | Hacker News Reader

Amazon is just so convenient for me. They deliver within a day in a package locker next to home.

Meanwhile with other platforms it takes up to a week, the delivery timeframe is 08:00 to 21:00, I then have to wait for the delivery person to call me because they can never find my front door. And if I happen to be on the toilet when they ring the package is delivered to a parcel point ten kilometers away. So I have to rent a car to go pickup my package.

Amazon has absolutely nailed the delivery here. They looked at how people struggle with online orders and streamlined it completely. It’s such a blessing not to have to deal with delivery drivers anymore.

If Amazon charged €10 extra per package I would still order with them.

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You live in Europe, where everything is harder, and when it comes to shopping, you have maybe one-fifth of the choices Americans have.

I spend a good four months every year in Poland and Austria, and there’s really nowhere in the world except China that offers consumers as much choice and availability as the U.S. does.

>there’s really nowhere in the world except China that offers consumers as much choice and availability as the U.S. does.

This is true, although I find it interesting that so many people then gravitate to Costco, where consumer choice in a given category is deliberately restricted to one or two product variations selected by the head office.

Over time I have come to trust Costco’s curation. Their standards seem high, and there are definitely products and brands that they sell that I don’t like, but those are subjective tastes vs objective low quality in my experience. I don’t buy everything there, but I take note of the brands and products that they either keep for a long time or dump quickly.

Quality vs variety trade off. Costco only has a couple options but they are well better and you don't have to do extra work to make sure you're not buying a piece of crap.

Also, you don't have to shop at Costco exclusively, you still have all the other options available. Costco is just a good default if you're not looking for something specific.

It really baffles me when an American can just walk into a store and buy car parts for their fairly niche model from the 1990s.

Meanwhile in Europe I spend many evening on internet forums and Facebook groups doing research trying to find a part that will work with my car, then finding someone willing to sell it and finally using Google Translate getting someone to ship it to my foreign (to them) country. I even had to resort to proxies just to get car parts from Eastern to Western Europe.

Weird, I rather have more government mandated vacation, public healthcare, and a pension system that doesn't mean I have to work in my 60s but I understand people have different priorities in life. Hopefully you move beyond the consumerist phase as it's probably the lowest rung of the human experience.

Jokes on you, in my part of Europe I don’t have access to public healthcare, I don’t have mandated vacation, I don’t have a pension system. And I can’t even have a consumerist phase apparently since car parts are so hard to acquire.

What a strange and pretentious comment.

They're not mutually exclusive, two things can be had at the same time.

Not only are they mutually exclusive, the current neoliberal regime has dismantling the welfare state as its explicit goal.

Wish to live in your reality tho, where I can buy a dozen different brands of hot dogs while visiting the doctor for elevated blood pressure without needing to take out a payment plan on klarna.

They aren't mutually exclusive in the least.

The ease of buying things that the prior poster referred to is basically just three things:

- A massive common market with few to no internal trade barriers/complications. The EU is still nowhere near as integrated and has all sorts of odd hidden complications to actually moving + selling things.

- Hell, just this week I've seen that one of the indie record labels I pay attention to will no longer sell merch within the EU other than to the country they're based in, because the new EU packaging regulations make it infeasibly expensive to comply with for every country for the small volumes they move.

- A common language that ~92% of the population speak fluently.

- Relatively efficient logistics.

None of this has anything to do with "dismantling the welfare state" and has only a little to do with differences in workers rights/benefits - giving delivery workers in the US better wages/job security would not make the "Amazon" logistics model infeasible.

For your next 10 purchases that you don't need within 3 days, use an llm to find the best choice for your needs (have been doing this and learning a lot on how the ideas I had about a product prior to purchasing missed many things I didn't knew I dind't know, and the llm helped to find better products) and ask the LLM to find alternative shops - you may be surprised and have the nice feeling of increasing choice in the world by allowing alternate stores to keep going.

eg. wanted to purchase a FIio KA17 DAC - amazon price £150, asked an llm for an alternative, found for £120 from a decent small audiovisual real store, ordered, delivered within 3 days.

Have found you can save money for purchases from cosmetics to garden fertilizer and grass seed to audiovisual and IT equipment.

Why use an LLM for something that is a 5 second Google? Google Products is right there in the top. Forums will advice you on alternative products.

Am I getting old? I feel like a dinosaur still Googling things.

At this point in time…

…you've got to figure that Google is just as disgusting as Amazon in the ads/search dept.

LLMs seem positively naive in that regard. Just, you know, simply suggesting what their subsumption of the internet suggests.

(For now anyway.)

Doesn’t ChatGPT also recommend products from their advertisers first?

Google's search results defaulting to starting with an LLM; and by the power of SEO, so are many of the search results themselves.

Having to add "reddit" to get genuine results was already a meme 3 years back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrFv1O4dbqY&pp=ygUXZ29vZ2xlI...

In my house we have something from Amazon show up several times per week. They usually deliver when they say they will (often the same day), returns are a breeze (occasionally they refund us and don't want the item back), and I don't think I've ever had an issue with counterfeit items.

I know Amazon often isn't the lowest price anymore, but that's okay with me as long as their customer service is great.

This was something I would have never understood living in the US until I moved to France 4 months ago. And yeah, as much as I dislike the company, those lockers are clutch.

Package delivery is pretty good when you live in a country with a standardized address system, large homes and where the delivery driver can park in front of your home.

However if you live in a historical city center where your address is the equivalent of “That small door if you go up two stairs behind the old tavern” then package deliveries plain suck. Especially since you don’t have the “village postmen” anymore. You have ten delivery companies and none of them have fixed routes.

I live in one of those places (Copenhagen) and I prefer the local online shops, since they offer all the delivery choices.

I always choose delivery to the convenience shop on the opposite corner. It's open late, and picking up a parcel takes about a minute.

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