Looks like I’m spoiled for choice. Temu has exactly the same for 11.29. Not that I’d be purchasing from either place; it’s just another example of Amazon’s enshittification.
I always love the nonsensical order of letters that these companies use.
My favourite of these company names is still BOIFUN who obviously sell DVD players, baby monitors and door bells.
The one that really stuck with me was COCKFAIS
FOCMKEAS (19mm reamer) SCHNITPWR (12V power supply)
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I’m pretty sure CTIRCHIU is a Lovecraftian monster.
Hoement sounds like a word, at least. A… Hoe moment?
I don’t care what the Hoe meant, she’s still a hoe.
What you mean? HAFSBEVCZ is a totally established, reputable brand.
Looks more like a randomly generated password.
There’s a reason for them! I can’t find the original video I saw about it, but this one explains it pretty well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UrqlMfwUC4
I also like how sarcastic this person sounds (at least to me) during their sponsor segment.
edit: Removed the timestamp from the YouTube link.
You’re probably thinking of the HAI video.
That seems very likely. I guess my YouTube search skills aren’t what I thought they were. Thank you.
My favourite one so far is “Hoement”
“CTIRCHIU” sounds like an eldritch god
People need to realize that Amazon has them locked in.
I needed a tall mini fridge for a garage. Cheapest I could find was fucking $700.
I went into a nearby home appliance store and got the same one for fucking ~$200. Granted I had to pay for an $80 delivery, but it still beats the shit out of every option for a 7 cu ft fridge on Amazon.
Every dipshit with a freshly minted MBA thinks they’re going to go and disrupt the appliance industry by putting it online and snatching it out from under all those antiquated local dealerships run by out of touch old men who can barely operate a computer. They think they’re going to go from zero to nationwide tomorrow, and they’re so smart because nobody’s thought of it before.
It turns out that dealing with the final mile with appliances is killer, and extremely difficult logistically. That makes the entire operation much more expensive than anyone thinks at first glance. Not just in terms of raw dollars and cents paid to disinterested common carriers to move your product from A to B (who also won’t install the stuff or even bring it inside your customer’s house) but also in damaged and returned products and angry screaming customers who will be initiating credit card chargebacks all the time whenever anything goes wrong.
All of those little local dealerships have had decades to figure out how to move a refrigerator from their warehouse to your kitchen and how to remediate the situation if it all goes pear shaped on delivery day, and all of them only service their local territory for a reason. The further you stretch without some physical presence in where you’re stretching to, the more impossible it becomes to control the logistics.
So yeah, that’s probably in no small part why your fridge would have been so expensive. Amazon is among the latest figuring this out the hard way, and you can’t just slap a refrigerator or a stove in a bubble mailer and dump it on somebody’s front porch.
Local appliance dealers likely also have a dude who in a pinch can just carry most appliances where they need to go.
Tangentially, this reminds me of some advice I read on whole home water filters. Get this one or get that one. but get it from a local business who’s been in your area for years and years. You will have a problem with it. You are going to need someone to call. And they say, just plan for that from the start.
Not to be that guy but there’s no way in hell that $700 is true. There are pages of fridges for less than $400 that are 7 cu ft.
I mean, fuck Amazon and all that jazz, don’t get me wrong - I just feel like it’s worth noting the hyperbole. It’s not that bad, at least from an end consumer perspective.
Amazon is admittedly powered by greed and the tears of the proletariat but they do a good job keeping the customer happy.
my 2 cents… not everybody sees the same prices at Amazon… that is part of their dynamic gouging
Just to add an anecdote… My friend is beyond millionaire as her father started a retail giant. Anyways, she has money coming out her ass and the prices Amazon shows her are almost consistently 30%-50% more than what they show me. Because they know she’s rich AF and they know I’m fairly poor.
e: grammar
Yep. Amazon knew my gf and I were moving in together.
I don’t know what kind of setup my GF’s phone had going, but she loved hands-free features like “hi Google” or whatever it was.
I specifically remember having a chit chat verbal conversation with her on her patio while her phone was laying there… and the next day products started getting recommended to me on my phone based on that convo.
My phone at the time was turned off and in my backpack in the house. Somehow the back end logic sewed everything together.
I was studying classical guitar. I was practicing piece and literally YouTube video results on my PC for learning the piece before searching for it.
Only network traffic to indicate was downloading a .PDF on my chrome browser on my phone. This was in like 2012.
Everyone is free to set their own priorities, but for me, I’ll just not purchase a thing at all, rather than buy it off Amazon. Most people buy too much crap they don’t actually need anyway.
Some stuff is more, most is less, at least in my town.
This shit frustrates me to no end. These days I just look on Aliexpress first, just so I’m aware what the usual drop shipping item actually goes for.
It’s very annoying that platforms like Amazon tolerate this. Because it’s actively driving me away from them. I want to see good quality items, not the same Aliexpress shit priced ten times higher. But I can’t FIND the good stuff because the platform is literally full of garbage.
It’s missing the random “Amazon’s Choice” badge on one of the 20 identical choices 🤣
Honestly, I stopped buying on Amazon 3 years ago. Apart from an enshittified experience I don’t want to pay for Jeff Bezos next Helicopter. I go to the store or buy on alternative web sites which are 10€ more expensive, but fuck Jeff.
ebay. You get pretty much the same offerings but at least on ebay the people selling actually care about looking good since negative reviews really tank your scores and those actually matter.
Just a week ago I got victim of Amazon dropshipping on eBay. The product was delivered by and from Amazon, but the ebay seller used a weird tracking service so it isn’t too obvious. He put the 5€ difference directly into his pocket. I complained to eBay, but they decided “based on automation and the use of artificial intelligence”, that no rules were broken. So be careful with using eBay as an alternative. Negative reviews can be more or less easily removed on eBay, better give a neutral review in these cases.
Negative reviews are not easily removed on eBay. My husband has been a seller for years now. People will complain about the wildest shit that was clearly addressed in the listing, then you spend 2 hours on the phone with eBay, and likely they will keep the review.
On Amazon, on the other hand, vendors will personally reach out to you if you give anything less than 5 stars and basically “work” with you u til you change your rating (giving you free shit). A lot of people end up changing their review.
vendors will personally reach out to you if you give anything less than 5 stars and basically “work” with you u til you change your rating (giving you free shit)
Not the one I had a problem with. They sold me a bunch of reman hard drives that were listed as new. When I returned them and gave them a shitty review about how they lied they tried to bribe me with 1 used drive to take it down. I was like, “no, give me what I actually ordered or fuck off” They fucked off. Amazon also didn’t do shit to them for there fraudulent listings as far as I can tell.
Good call.
I will say, I do go out of my way to buy from local spots. I’ve thought about trying to negotiate with some Local Game Store types about prices. I want to buy from LGS but if the price is twice that of Amazon I do find it challenging, if it was like 50% up from Amazon I’d do it, but double is a bit too big of a difference to me in some cases.
Especially if it’s just one extra trader in between who drives the price. Jeff Bezos is evil, but let’s not act like local electronic stores are charity. In the end it’s all produced in China…
Their b2c stuff isn’t what’s making bezos rich. It’s AWS, which is difficult to avoid as it runs over half of the internet. But I get the sentiment.
Amazon is just a drop shipping marketplace where everything comes direct from the exact same warehouse in China.
Exactly. Once you know about “white box” goods and the robust Chinese manufacturing chains that support it, you can’t unsee it.
What blows my mind is that Amazon is just accelerating this, and at times, embracing it with their own brand. They’ve gone from being a whole-ass shopping mall to end-of-days-K-Mart in just a few years.
How do they drop ship from China in 2 days?
Easy, they don’t.
Because Amazon pushes sellers to use Amazon warehouses and shipping their product in advance
…so they’re not drop shipping the product to the customers.
Not everything on Amazon ships in two days. In the picture, the dates vary quite a bit.
One of the many reasons I canceled my prime subscription is a lot of stuff was not coming in 2 days.
Hey now. China’s been churning out much higher quality merch of late. And the American Tech Giants have been increasingly wrapped up in US trade war politics. So a lot of this shit now comes from the Philippines, India, and Bangladesh.
The internet was so good in 08. You searched for stuff, found exactly what you needed, and were done.
Poor kids today will never know anything other than ad ridden bot corponet.
The internet was so good in 08. You searched for stuff, found exactly what you needed, and were done.
Shit was bad in 2008, too. The degree to which drop shippers had consolidated down to one mega-wholesaler rather than a dozen crappy fly-by-nights hadn’t happened yet. You got a dozen different flavors of crap rather than just one. But it was still crap.
Poor kids today will never know anything other than ad ridden bot corponet.
Under an Amazon keyword search, sure. You can still find good quality products outside of Amazon. You can even find it inside Amazon if you know what you’re looking for.
The difference between 2008 and 2025 is primarily that Amazon’s algorithmic tools have degraded to the state of Yahoo or Sears.
In 2008 you could do a web search and have relevant real results right on the first page. Maybe an ad or two.
Now it is effectively:
- AI summary
- ad
- ad
- ad
- link that is effectively an ad
- link to AI generated website
- link to AI generated website
- link to an actual decent result
- link to a questionable result
- link to AI generated website
In 2008 you could do a web search and have relevant real results
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bombing
Google had (mostly) solved this problem by 2007. I couldn’t name another search engine that could claim the same.
But the process of Spamdexing has been an ongoing war of the websites since the nineties. Google never fully solved it, they just did a better job than most up until the big executive shift in 2018.
The spam site takeover of your search results in the modern day is as much a consequence of modernization in Spamdexing as it is any search engine’s own failures. None of those AI content mill sites existed to index 20 years ago
You can change search provider and have the experience back ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I use DuckDuckGo and it is better in general, but still has a big pitfall with AI generated websites. I’ve used some others like SearXNG but those feel experimental at best. I’m willing to hear about viable alternatives.
Kagi is where it’s at. Changed my search experience for the better like crazy.
You think normal people today go outside the 5 walled garden corpo sites?
They dont.
They are terrified of an html website. I dont have tech friends irl, so trust me. The real internet, the original non corpo net, is only for ultra nerds now.
If you seriously think the internet is better now than 08 ish, well I dont agree.
If you seriously think the internet is better now than 08 ish, well I dont agree.
I think it’s heavily predicated on what you’re using the Internet for. In the business world, we’ve improved system redundancy, backup/recovery, and transfer speeds by leaps and bounds.
Back in 2008, I was in my car driving to Dallas to escape Hurricane Ike, with a trunk full of server hardware needed to keep our business running. Datacenter proliferation has fully eliminated the need to do anything like that again.
We have significantly more high speed broadband. We have superior wireless connectivity. HTML5 is much better than it’s predecessors. We’ve modernized APIs and broadly adopted JSON for transmission. The hardware is so much better, from phones to routers to raspberry pis for self-hosting.
I get you don’t like the current content of big Web 2.0 publishers. But you’re really missing the forest for a few big ugly trees
- driven by AI-slop
(For real: all those products and descriptions/titles are so bad, it has to be AI-slop)
I forget the exact proposed bill, it might have been SOPA (or something else threatening net neutrality), and it might have been around 2010. That made me think “they want to make the internet into cable TV”. And we’re pretty close to that being reality in a way.
I deleted my Amazon account last month. No more Goodreads and IMDb is just another plus.
Extracted my ebooks from my Kindle with Calibre, so I am fine.
Feeling good and less targeted and bombarded.
Does that work for Google Play books? Is it an app?
Calibre is a program for Windows/Linux. To be able to export books (and deDRM them) there are different plugins, but I never heard about one for Google Play Books.
Thank you.
More expensive AliExpress…
It feels like Amazon is flooded with dropshipping beyond repair.Are you looking for something which can actually take a beating? I have bought like four of these cheaper bags on Amazon and they all fall apart in a year or two. And before then they all have shitty strap adjustments which slowly slip over time.
I’d strongly suggest getting something like a chrome or timbuk2 bag which will be like 5x more expensive up front but will actually last decades instead of years. I have been dailying the OG chrome citizen messenger bag for five years now and it’s barely broken in.
Timbuk2 isn’t as good as they used to be. If you can find a used one it’s worth it, I’ve had mine for like twenty years, but I wouldn’t gamble on one made in the last five years. (They closed all their physical stores and cut costs on manufacturing by moving offshore)
"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet."
GNU Terry Pratchett
I agree. I have several timbuk2 bags and the only one with significant damage is the pet carrier that my cat clawed the shit out of. The company repaired it for like $10 to cover the shipping
I second this. I am currently still using the waxed canvas bag from the distilled collection and all I’ve had to do is replace the strap from wear. Its seen rain, snow, and shitloads of abuse that would cause these cheaper bags to just disintegrate. Its old as shit by now but aside from being well worn - is still perfectly functional.
Do Amazon companies count in Scrabble?
Probably not but “zoomer” and “yeet” do!
My co-worker & I have the exact same lunchbag, except the label has a different gibberish name on it. Yup, both from Amazon.
So I just got a steam deck… A little birthday present to myself.
My local microcenter sells nothing for it… Neither does best buy. And if best buy did I wouldn’t over pay anyway at that failing store.
So… Amazon it is. 40 bucks and two days later I have a silicone case, anti glare screen protector and a cheapo dock.
I didn’t want to get all that shit off amazon… It was just the most convenient place and in my case the only place.
If anything amazon needs to crack down on these bs Chinese sellers.
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Like what? 2x the price for worse hardware?
Feels like the only alternative for reasonable priced stuff is AliExpress (in regards to electronics)They have a near monopoly on certain goods. I built my home gym using Amazon 2 years ago. I couldn’t find most of the stuff anywhere else for anywhere near the same prices.
Things have changed. I don’t use Amazon anymore. Out of curiosity I checked some prices on my gym equipment and a lot of it is 50+% more now. The squat rack I have is almost double the price.
Prices elsewhere haven’t gone down. It is still probably cheaper to buy the double the price squat rack from Amazon. But I’m done, Amazon is full evil.
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without literal exploitation of everything?
Huh? Do you think workers are not exploited at physical stores? Do you think most of the stuff isn’t made identically and then rebranded differently for Amazon or for other stores?
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Two things can be true at the same time.
No, I’m saying that I bought some stuff then changed my ways. I didn’t look elsewhere previously. I am looking elsewhere now, and I will not give Amazon money. I was highlighting the problem that tons of people run into - shit is still cheaper at Amazon even if it is much more expensive than it was 2 years ago.
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Sometimes Amazon has the stupid low priced widget that I need, at a lower price than anywhere else, with next day delivery…
Like… Fuck…
They have a most favored nation policy, meaning that people who sell on their platform can’t have a lower price anywhere else than what they have on their platform.
Yeah I had the same thing happen with a smartwatch. I want a new band made of fabric instead of the silicone rubber or whatever it is. It is extremely frustrating to find one anywhere but Amazon. I don’t use Amazon anymore, so I guess I’m getting my random Chinese products from ebay now. Not sure if that’s any better.
Two major differences between Amazon and eBay eBay has longer shipping times but a significantly better rating system which holds the buyer accountable as much as it does the seller.
But since I like and enjoy instant gratification Amazon’s faster shipping times are a little better for me especially as a consumer rather than seller.
I will not defend Amazon. But the lack of local retail/price gouging which is shipping in Canada keeps pushing me to Amazon.
I need a role of 3D printable filament or an SD Card. The nearest store is 1-2 hours away and costs twice as much for the convenience, buying from the manufacturer may not possible and if it is shipping cost just as much as the product.
I would love it if there was competition, but there isn’t and Amazon knows it. So for the most part I just buy from brands I know are safe.
I have a few local electronic shops.
It’s just that they dont have what I need or are way more expensive.It is almost impossible to buy RAM or a CPU in person outside of specialty shops.
SSDs or HDDs are only available in low capacity (<2TB) and/or low spec (M.2 Gen3).Nothing of use for an enthusiast.
The only worth they have to me are as a appliance seller (e.g. TVs, household appliance, general use audio equipment)I see you too have a waste of retail space known as Best Buy/Best Buy Mobile in your community.
MediaMarkt and Saturn (our largest electronics retailers) first merged then were bought up by JD.com (chinese retailer)
Any other shop is a small chain/one-man-army type of shop which usually don’t have what I need :/Recently discovered a decent camera shop by coincidence while traveling :) That was cool.
They are both physical and online. And they werent pushy about their products. Which is great!
This is what people aren’t talking about enough. It may make people feel all good inside to not have Amazon and everything - until they are commuting for long periods, having to spend more than they budgeted for and shipping to not be available. Also, who loves it when you have to store-hop multiple places and still not find what you need?
It’s like I can’t rely on Walmart or even Best Buy to have what I’m looking for. They have their limits. I can’t rely on small businesses either because they probably won’t have whatever it is I need.
So, sorry, I’m going to keep shopping Amazon as sparingly as possible. Do I hear anyone who is Anti-Amazon prop up any stores for reasonable commute and pricing and available shipping for people and communities? No? Then shut up about your lectures that people don’t need Amazon and how they’re sheeple for continuing to buy from it. It is all about self-pride and virtue signaling.
More and more I’m finding things I want either aren’t on amazon or are buried under so many inferior products that they are hard to find. Earlier I was looking for geek themed ugly Christmas sweaters, and the ones on the first few pages of amazon results were absolute garbage. Found several viable suppliers elsewhere in no time.
