Something that has been lost is genuine reviews. First you have all the sponsored reviews and then all the equally worthless "I don't know how to use it so it's junk" or "it never arrived" 1 star reviews.
And so many "review" sites look like they've been procedurally generated then SEO optimized and filled with ads.
Currently I only trust reddit for "genuine" reviews. Seems like Amazon reviews these days are gamed to the max. Once companies figure this out and reddit has a high degree of astroturf it will be impossible to find out what normal, unbiased (as in don't have an agenda) humans think about a product.
I suspect that once that fails, the next step is going to be having to join the Discord server or whatever chat-group exists for that niche. Then asking for a recommendation from some weirdo whose super obsessed with gloves or whatever. The future is weird.
Super niche forums have existed for this need for many years and cover everything from multi-tools and flashlights to makeup and perfume. It's just that they require more effort to use and many are disappearing due to social media.
I used to drive down those ratholes but found the superniche items of choice tended to be dated, hard to find, expensive & suffered from hyper-optimization. Worst of all due to being dated, I found mainstream products were actually comparable to superior in nearly all measures.
But reddit is flawed in a different way - it's extremely biased towards the trendy and the fashionable.
For example if you search reddit for what computer mouse to buy, you'll be told that unless it weighs less than 70g and has holes, it's utter shit and not worth your money.
I suspect reviews have been gamed for some time. Now it seems like all reviews are always gamed. I even have a conspiracy theory that Amazon is gaming Costco products. A number of their household products have had sub-3 star reviews; seems suspicious. I still feel somewhat confident in products with over 1k reviews. The same goes for reading a few reviews and "trusting" the helpful ones to some extent.
Reddit works in many (not all) cases for reviews because if there's something falsey enough, you can often count on the hive mind to provide many points as to why that is fake, links to reliable sources on better info, or alternative experiences and documentation (photos/vids) to back it up. Unlike retailer sites or Amazon, where the platform has a vested interest in just getting you to hit Buy, Reddit has no such issues, and there's no real policing of dissenting reviews.
It is self-policing in some ways. But again, some review categories are better for this than others, and the hive mind can be susceptible to hype and astroturf.
I used to work for on of those "review" websites and it completely ruined my trust in most online product review sites. It's all just affiliate links, optimized for which offer pays out the highest conversion fee, with little to zero regard for the actual product.
I would pay a decent amount of money for a tool that just filtered out any sites in Google search that promote products using affiliate links.
Any time money is involved I have to believe there will always be a motive, however small, to alter results for financial benefit. It's common for other "trusted" media companies to be impacted by their advertisers - why would the NYT be immune?
Anyone working on a Trader Joes meets Amazon? That curates maybe 1-3 versions of things, largely eliminating paradox of choice.
I guess Costco is kind of a bulk version of that...
Also I've been increasingly interested in just buying things once and having them last a decade+, ideally a lifetime (less waste). But this takes a lot of research. Trader Joes does a good job of curating groceries and I've come to trust their choices. It would be nice to have this for products.
Essentially, "This is the version of X that will last 10+ years."
Brandless makes no sense to me. They mostly buy from China and their products are more expensive than they should be (their product descriptions don't offer any arguments why, at least). They claim to be health and environmentally-conscious but there's no relevant information to read on the product pages.
Why wouldn't you buy it? It's a $4 kitchen spoon. What could you possibly want to know?
Edit: A bit of poking around suggests that Acacia is a fairly sustainable source of wood, so I would guess that's the thing that makes it eco-friendly. Some of their other acacia products do mention this, but the spoon doesn't for some reason.
I think they're trying to convey a sense of trust across all of the items they offer through their parent 'Brand' which is a bit ironic given the name. Ideally they only offer eco-friendly items and that relieves the consumers of the burden of making that choice for themselves. As noted on other Acacia products, it's a fast-growing renewable wood.
I don’t understand how selling items manufactured in a country with the environmental regulatory environment of China can honestly be sold as eco-friendly.
China is improving, if only because a rising middle-class is demanding air that doesn't choke their lung in cities like Beijing or Shanghai. The US, on the other hand, is regressing.
There are many vectors to environmental health besides the PM2.5 and PM10 levels. Chinese industry dumps straight into the rivers and onto the ground. Among many other environmental shortcomings relative to western industry. They also have no/toothless Occupational Safety,a separate but still reasonable concern.
The care instructions still mention that the handle is stainless steel. I suspect they’ve revised the design without creating a new SKU.
I do wonder why they felt the need to add metal at all though; I’ve never felt that a plain wooden spoon was lacking anything and having a heat-conductive material in a hot pot seems like a good way to get a burn. The description just says it’s a “nice accent.”
"At Brandless, we define clean beauty as beauty products that are made without questionable ingredients and only formulated with the minimum ingredients required for the product to function."
I looked at a lotion, which includes the ingredient "fragrance". This is automatically questionable because it doesn't tell you what the ingredient actually is. Moreover, it's a term that companies use instead of telling us what's actually in the product, including any number of potentially harmful ingredients. It is also patently not required for the product to function, so it's clearly against Brandless's stated aim.
Brandless looks to me like an Orwellian marketing gimmick: they claim to be brandless, yet they're actually trying to develop a brand.
Not OP, but I would say no. The corporation is subject to competition. If their curated products suck eventually people will figure it out and they'll go out of business. Do you consider Trader Joe's a planned economy?
You can search for Amazon Basics or Amazon Essentials, which seem to be listings of high volume commodity products. However, I don't see adult dress gloves in Amazon Essentials. There are kids gloves. And if you want high style, these products aren't for you.
The other alternative is to use specific branded sites, such as LL Bean or REI. These will provide premium products at a premium price.
Finally, you can go directly to the manufacturer. If you want Marmot gloves, go to marmot.com. (Of course, it's unlikely that Marmot actually manufactures their gloves.)
In 2006, I started a blogstore called "Reasonable Goods", and this was the whole premise. I got a Consumer Reports subscription and did a bunch of online research and tried hard to pick the one I thought would work well for ~80% of people in a bunch of categories. The first category was "toaster", and I found a decently-reviewed $20 basic toaster from a major manufacturer. I started using the tagline "It shouldn't take all day to buy a toaster".
For the one-year anniversary post, I decided to write a follow-up article on the toaster. That's when I discovered, in an ironic twist, that a half-dozen of our flagship pick had caught on fire during operation, and because of this the model had been recalled by the manufacturer.
That's when I realized that trying to find a commodity item that will last for a decade+ is impossible (these days anyway). The same model isn't manufactured for a decade, so you can't rely on history. Major manufacturers make mistakes and/or cut costs and/or sell their brand, so you can't rely on reputation. Even a top-3 recommendation from Consumer Reports did not prevent me from picking a lemon despite my sincere best effort to avoid it.
That "tyranny of perfect information" begets FOMO. If you'd looked at one more site or one more review you might have discovered a "better" (cheaper, high quality, higher utility) item.
I'd add that's it's worse because the world is flatter. Why should I buy Brand Item when I can get a version from Alibaba for 10-20%? If it truly is comparable, then why pay the markup when the internet lets me cut out the middleman? But then when the version from Alibaba is total crap, there's no recourse. It's not like a local shop with reputation at risk.
So you end up in this world where nothing matters and it's a race to maximize attention. Which means, as a consumer, you have to do your research or risk getting taken for a ride.
yeah, I get bombarded with ads on Instagram for a decent looking product at a "must be a quality item" price. But a quick AliExpress search reveals there probably just getting it there and reselling for huge markups. Pretty smart actually.
> Why should I buy Brand Item when I can get a version from Alibaba for 10-20%? If it truly is comparable, then why pay the markup when the internet lets me cut out the middleman? But then when the version from Alibaba is total crap, there's no recourse. It's not like a local shop with reputation at risk.
The unfortunate reality these days is that the majority of items on, say, Amazon, are the same crap from Alibaba imported by a guy who read a How To Make Money On Amazon book, or just marked up directly by the same people selling on Alibaba. Heck, even the "brand items" may turn out to be a cheap clone that someone had shipped to Amazon fulfillment, bypassing their incredibly stringent "I pinky-swear this really is the authentic item" vetting process.
>It’s gotten to the point where I trust eBay more.
Absolutely! I recently bought a simple item, a roll of wiring loom tape. It was on Amazon and had a few reviews that stated that the received tape was old and didn't stick very well anymore.
Same item on eBay for cheaper has the seller specifically mentioning that they only sell fresh tape from the running production, not old stock. Even better, the seller specialized in these (and other) tapes.
It seems that eBay has just cultivated a much higher quality base of vendors. Many of them seem specialized.
Right! So why should I pay for crap, or the other way around, why should I overpay for good quality, if I can get a solid substitute for less?
For example, I'm shopping for landscape lighting right now. You can spend a lot on landscape lighting. A nice bronze spotlight from a "good" brand like Kichler can run you $100+ ea.[1], and I need 8–10 of them.
Conversely, I can get an 6-pack of albeit-plastic spotlights off Amazon from a Chinese company for 40 bucks, with 4.5 stars and 252 reviews.[2]
I am getting ripped off with Kichler? I am getting crap from Zuckeo? Who knows!?
And this goes the other way, too. In the same vein as lighting, I was trying to find a simple, modern, LED vanity fixture.
You can get builder-grade and often-ugly crap from Home Depot (see also: Brands not being an indicator of quality), or spend hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars on designer pieces.
I ended up finding one I really liked off a no-name website, with the product shipped from Hong Kong for like $80. Solid metal, reasonable-looking electronics, arrived in 2 weeks, good communication... very happy!
Consistent quality is the entire point of brands. Find a soap you like and you can mindlessly get the same thing for the next 20+ years. Which also generally means you can pick a random brand and not end up with junk as long as trust the supply chain.
The issue is when you want something different than the millions of other people out there. Sure, things change and the quality may slip, but there is only so much time in the world is comparison shopping really worth it to you?
That's kind of the point, though. Supply chains are becoming more transparent and accessible to the end customer, so in 2020, you have a much better chance of going "directly to the source" than you did 20 years ago.
So the FOMO is paying a brand markup for consistent quality you could get for less.
Then you have "established" brands that are just trying to maximize profit. And "new" brands that are just AliExpress resellers. So trust that even a Brand™ experience will be a good one is waning.
In other words, the premise that you're paying for time savings is less assured, and the information to actually make comparison shopping worthwhile is right there.
30 years ago, there were 10 options, but the information was hard to get. Now, the information is right there, but there are 1000 options. Does it now take less time, or more?
A lot of brands also try to push cheapo goods under their good brand, usually by adding some stupid suffix like "express" to the brand name, which you don't realize until after you've bought the item.
Electronics especially is very difficult. Take Samsung for example, any phone that is not the latest S-model is really disappointing. Less educated consumers just know that "samsung phones are good", when most reviews only refer to S10. Likewise I can't mindlessly go into a store an buy a Sony TV even if my last Sony TV was good, i need to do the online research to figure out that the last 2 characters in the model-nr indicates if this is the premium version or not. Things change so quickly also that the brand that had the lead one year ago is no longer having the best options.
Unfortunately private equity funds buy out companies with a good brand reputation, do "quality fade" on the produce, and milk the company's reputation until it is in tatters, then get a tax deduction for the inevitable bankruptcy.
Some people are "satisficers" content with good-enough. Some are "maximizers", who want to find the absolute best product, which leads to wasting enormous time on research, and ultimately frustration and buyers' remorse. Usually people are maximizers in some product categories and satisficers for the vast majority of other items. In my case, I am a maximizer for computers, cameras and optics, but couldn't care less about shampoo or hand cream and just want an end to the madness.
Buy from a handful of trusted brands; if it doesn't work out, don't buy from them again. Like what people did before all this information was available.
Well... make a fairly fast decision rather than an optimal one.
Say I'm looking for something that costs $20 online. I might look at three or four sites. I might take five minutes. It's not worth it to take more time.
Say I'm looking to rent a ski chalet for a week for $3000. Now I'm taking considerably longer - probably at least an evening, followed by letting it sit in my mind overnight.
Let the size of the purchase scale the amount of time you spend looking for a better answer.
Unfortunately, I find I do the exact opposite naturally.
Bigger ticket items are a pain, but they also don't have as much variety, so I'm more motivated to get it over with and choose between my available options fairly quickly (buying house, car, etc). I'm also more likely to be able to adapt the more expensive items to my needs.
However, smaller purchases tend to have far more options and searching more will nearly always turn up even more. Smaller items are also difficult to adapt, and I really don't like to add more to the landfill than necessary, so I worry quite a bit over these smaller purchases.
What I tend to do in that situation is to do a master's thesis level of research of every forum post and review I can find until 2 weeks and 750 browser tabs later the existential angst wipes out all my desire to buy the item and/or to live.
> not being able to pick single objects that work for absolutely everyone (ironically, this criticism comes from outlets that each exist but for the grace of extremely wealthy Silicon Valley benefactors).
It's been a long time since a long-form vice article has really resonated with me. I am happy that we're clearly moving away from a world of a million variations of the same plastic crap to a place where consumers are demanding the right thing.
When I was living in the PNW and realized I direly needed gloves, I just hit up a few of the department stores downtown until I found some that met my criteria. Which are probably similar to those of this author, I wanted some that looked cute, had a conductive patch on the finger so I could use my phone without taking them off, would fit on my long hands with long fingernails, and weren’t super expensive gloves designed for arctic expeditions. I could see them in person and make choices based on how their build quality felt.
I think my total time, including the bus rides downtown and back (even though I was probably doing other things downtown on that trip like “working”), was probably less than she spent opening ten thousand different tabs in her search for The Perfect Glove.
And then in a couple years I had to do it again because I could only find one of the gloves when it started to be too cold for bare hands again. It ain’t worth investing a ton of time into picking gloves or umbrellas or other things that tend to get lost or separated.
Shopping for physical goods on the Internet sucks.
Definitely. Shops have limited inventory so they will tend to sell a well rounded, well made product (depends on store of course). And if it is junk, you can usually tell in person.
You're talking about a pretty specific type of physical goods that have to fit properly and meet your requirements for aesthetics, quality, and function.
Buying physical commodities or items where those factors don't matter on the Internet is incredible. I don't have to go anywhere, I don't have to talk to anyone, I don't have to lug anything anywhere, etc.
What are you buying that quality and function don't matter? I expect quality and function even in something as basic as toilet paper. It used to be I could find a brand and type that I liked, and then order it over the internet, often in bulk since it stores without really going bad. But now, I can't be sure I'll even get the genuine product from ahemazon certain vendors.
Did you read the article or go straight to the comments? I’m talking about buying the exact same thing the article used as an example. I think that’s a fair thing to contrast with its thesis that “all shopping sucks now”.
She had a terrible time spending days researching the Perfect Pair Of Gloves online, going to the one “big box” store in her area that had supposedly had it, and going back home ungloved instead of looking at other stores when the one store had no gloves in stock that day. I had a perfectly fine time going downtown when I was probably going there for some other reasons already and visiting a couple of stores looking for some Okay Gloves.
The problem is that even in big cities, real world shops are disappearing.
This year I wanted to buy a TV, and wanted to see them in real life to judge colors/brightness levels, and shockingly, in London, I found just one place which had like 10 TVs from the leading brands. I'm sure there are a few more, but I wasn't able to locate them using google, or walking the main shopping streets. I remember shops 10 years ago which had acres of electronics (albeit in a different country).
Brick and mortar shops can't stop you from coming in and finding the perfect item, then buying it online to save money. I bought an office chair recently and didn't feel confident picking one without trying chairs out in person. The chair I settled on was $100 cheaper online
Maybe they can offer a super wide selection available to see, since they don't need to carry stock. And perhaps you can order from them if you like it, and they run an online store where they ship it from, and you get your $10 back as a discount.
But it's not very common. I expected showrooming to develop into a more formalized thing but it really hasn't. I guess between Walmart and B&M chains like Best Buy that have managed to stabilize for the most part, there hasn't been a compelling need for manufacturers to establish a showroom presence.
Rumor has it that a certain US retailer has an online store that tries to determine whether you are checking prices from inside their physical store, and raises the advertised price to match those of the store you are in.
This is one point the article forgot (or didn't catch) to touch upon. I would like to go buy items in-store but I always hesitate to make the purchase because I know that same item will likely be significantly cheaper somewhere online. Of course, when I go online to find that product, I get distracted by the score of other options available leading to further indecision.
A shift I've noticed in the USA, is I'll go to an electronics retailer, and the item I want isn't on the shelf. In it's place is a placard instructing me to order it online. My hope was to actually handle the item and see if I liked it, then not buy it if I didn't like it.
Instead I have to order it online and then if I don't like it, either return it to the store or send it back via post.
While its super convenient for the consumer, in some respects, ordering everything online seems wasteful and bad for even the consumer and retailer in many respects.
I think the key to the article can be found in this passage:
> [T]he problem is that now, somewhat suddenly, perfect knowledge of the perfect glove, for you specifically, exists, if you simply do enough research.
When you're shopping in a physical store, you have no expectation that you're going to find the absolute, one-and-only perfect glove (or whatever) in the world for you. Even in the largest stores, you understand that their shelf space is limited, and therefore you set your expectations not to find the absolute, one-and-only perfect glove in the world for you, but to find a glove that's good enough for your needs. As long as you can find something that meets your requirements at an acceptable cost, you come away satisfied. Maybe not thrilled, but satisfied.
The infinite variety of online shopping tells us to set our expectations higher than that. Suddenly every thing we buy has to be the perfect version of that thing for us -- because if it isn't, that means we are lazy dullards who lacked the research skills and/or wherewithal to go out and find the perfect version. Instead of it being the fault of the shop that we had to settle for good enough, suddenly it's our fault.
The only way out of this trap is to realize that there is no such thing as the perfect product, that even the works of the finest craftspeople are going to have flaws and blemishes on them, and that good enough really is, you know, good enough.
Or, in other words, that happiness is not a glove that you can buy.
I think your comment makes really excellent points. This line:
> The infinite variety of online shopping tells us to set our expectations higher than that.
made me think a bit -- that used to be true for me, but the effect is trending in the opposite direction now. I have learned that it's very nearly impossible to tell if a product being shown is actually any good or not unless I'm already familiar with that company's products, regardless of what the product listing or product reviews say.
It’s the overwhelming choice yes, but it’s also the fact that companies sell junk online that looks good in a photo and then of course you receive it and it’s useless. The reviews are all rigged and the brands are unknown to you, so there’s no way of knowing until you’ve purchased it, and then in many cases there’s no way or it’s very difficult to return the dud.
> Being overwhelmed with choice is known as analysis paralysis.
Yes, but my point is that the inability to tell whether or not a product is any good reduces analysis paralysis because it reduces the trustworthiness of the analysis.
It's a case of "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good".
Some time ago I read about a paper on HN. It was explaining what can you do to maximize happiness in life. IIRC, one piece of advice therein was to avoid comparison shopping. You elaborated very clearly why.
The flip side of infinite variety is also that there are some truly terrible products for sale online that would never make it past the selection process to get brick-and-mortar shelf space. So while going to a physical store results in just choosing the best of the available options, online shopping requires at least some research or else you end up wasting money on things that are utterly worthless or, worse yet, put your health and/or other property at risk.
You see the same thing with travel lodging. In the past, you'd maybe have a few hotel/B&B names. Maybe some recommendations from friends or Lonely Planet. (Or, maybe going back a little further, just tell your travel agent to just book something.)
Today, it's really easy to go down a rabbit hole finding the best/best value/etc. place complete with lots of squinting at reviews to see if they're for real and/or have the same criteria you do.
I mostly don't sweat it too much but it's easy to do so.
> > [T]he problem is that now, somewhat suddenly, perfect knowledge of the perfect glove, for you specifically, exists, if you simply do enough research.
> When you're shopping in a physical store, you have no expectation that you're going to find the absolute, one-and-only perfect glove
Tinder for gloves problem sort of? The misleading impression of infinite possibilities on the Internet. In real life you optimize for local maximum only
It's one reason I like sites like Wirecutter and related. It doesn't necessarily work for categories where I have very specific opinions about what I like and don't like. But if I want a trowel, a USB hub, or whatever utilitarian object, I'll probably just order one of their recommendations and be done with it--and it will probably be just fine.
One of the reasons I have a membership to CostCo is that I've come to trust their product choices. If they only carry one variation of a product, it's almost certainly perfectly adequate and probably better than I could have selected on my own.
Bear in mind that financials in the form of exclusive corporate deals factor in, too.
I used to buy a lot of videotape at Price Club. I really liked the Maxell Hi-Fi tapes; they carried multiple grades of the Maxell line. After Costco took over, only Sony was sold.
Another example: the credit card partnerships. First Discover only, then Amex only, now Citi-branded Visa.
There was one other difference. Most physical stores outside the poundshops and end of line discounters really cared about their reputation. It was hard work to supply gloves (or anything) to many of the better department stores as first you would have to prove they were well made, consistent etc. If they were crap you would also hurt the reputation of the store... End result is most of the choices were good enough and which you bought came down to fit, design or materials.
Meanwhile on the internet, and Amazon especially, no one cares about quality any more. 9 out of 10 results are bottom tier unknown brands selling gloves that photograph well. They may be barely 1mm thick, appear to be sewn by someone wearing boxing gloves, and won't last two washes, but look at all that "choice". That's really crap masquerading as choice. Amazon seem to foolishly believe their reputation is immune to the shite on the marketplace and in every Amazon search.
On the internet good enough is increasingly rare. Even a "trusted" brand races to the bottom. For most physical things, clothes and shoes especially, I'm back to the shops and sad that so many of them have closed lately.
It's also that dishonesty goes unpunished. Any semi-sentient slime mold can set up a new business with FBA and do the same shitty shopping practices. They'll make enough before they're found out.
It's also why every product is like 4.5 stars -- they just astroturf the reviews by giving away product.
I feel this so much. Sometimes I'll look up objects I've bought in brick & mortar stores that I've been completely happy with, and find that they have dismal reviews. This is why for certain items I make a conscious effort to not bother looking at the reviews. Even if it were possible for me to find the best doormat, it simply wouldn't be worth the time, labor, and emotional energy of sifting through reviews and forums and blog posts, and discerning fake reviews and influencer marketing and people who have different requirements and expectations than me, and product SKUs that have changed since reviews/posts/whatever were written.
As an aside: I'd love to find the best cat wand toy. I've tried hundreds from pretty much all the major eCommerce sites and they all suck. If someone knows of one that won't break immediately I'd be willing to pay top dollar for it.
But yeah, unfortunately as other commenters have pointed out, in small towns and even where I am in Albuquerque, brick & mortar stores are either disappearing or aggressively shifting their business to the internet, so it's becoming more and more unavoidable to come into contact with reviews and whatnot even for relatively basic items.
Go outside and find a reasonably solid stick, clean it up a bit, and take the cord and toy off of one of your broken cat wands. Or visit the hardware store and get a reasonably solid dowel and do the same.
It won’t be The Best but it will have a much lower carbon footprint than buying another plastic one made in China, shipped across the ocean, and then shipped around three or four times while people try to arbitrage costs between major e-commerce sites. And if you have any kind of mystical bent then it can also have the bonus of being charged with you thinking about how much you love your little mouse-murderer, and that will make it far better than any mass-produced toy.
What's interesting is your second time around was probably faster because your research from the first round could have altered the second round of choosing gloves.
After the last few decades of recessions, stores have gradually dropped their inventory of goods for anybody outside the meat of the bell curve. I will shop for things for months just to buy local and end up buying online because nobody will carry what I want or will fit.
At Sam's Club today, eyeing a watch.
Waiting for associate to let me see it.
Open Amazon, read reviews.
Over $20 less on Amazon.
Asked if Sam's price matches.
> No.
In two taps, right in front of her, ordered it.
Said she understood.
Thanked her for showing it to me.
Is twenty bucks really that precious to you that you’ll throw money out of your local economy into Bezos’ pockets? Right in front of someone who just helped you decide this is the watch you wanted and could have put it in your hands right now instead of waiting for shipping in the middle of the super-busy Christmas season and hoping it’s not gonna end up be a counterfeit copy?
Ironically, having size 12 hands, I’ve looked for years for winter gloves that fit in person, and only very recently was able to find gloves that actually fit. Meanwhile I can order work gloves in size 12 from Amazon all day long. So kinda the opposite experience.
Many many times I've consciously thought "I'm going to give retail a chance!" and go out of my way to find something at a physical store. Often it's because I might want it that day; sometimes I've just wanted to explore.
Yet I always end up wasting many hours. I can't drive, so it's public transport and walking everywhere for me (that's fine, it just adds to the time). My experience has been that if you know exactly what you want and it's anything slightly off the beaten path, you're going to have a hard time finding a store that will stock it.
Recent examples that come to mind: a certain kind of USB cable, an SSD, musician's earplugs, an induction cooker. Plus almost any book that I want.
This year was the first year that I've done the majority of my Christmas shopping online (I actually managed to get to it early enough!). It's been hands-down the best experience I've had Christmas shopping. Not to mention that I haven't had that Mariah Carey Christmas song shoved down my ears this year as a result :)
Physical stores just can't compete for certain kinds of shoppers.
Also, I hear so much about physical stores treating their employees like shit. Primary examples include GameStop and EB Games. When I think of that, I think that some stores deserve to fail.
Online shopping is convenient at least. Why does it need to not suck? Has it ever not sucked?
Buying something without actually holding it in your hands and testing it out will never be an awesome experience. You can't really trust reviews and ratings. But you can usually return stuff and I don't see why the author made such a fuss about returning.
> On the first page, there are two different gloves listed, one for $17 and one for $60, that look exactly identical and come in the exact same colors. Both have the same exact star rating (4.5/5) and hundreds of positive reviews.
> I’d love to only spend $17 except there is no way 17-dollar leather gloves won’t be fake and off color and smell of gasoline when they arrive, and after only a few wears the lining will pill or develop holes. I’d love to just buy the $60 gloves except that seems like a pretty large amount of money to spend on non-weatherproof gloves, and how can I, when there are identical $17 gloves right there.
It could also be that the $60 gloves came from the same factory and are exactly identical to the $17 gloves, and if you buy them you're going to get ripped off by at least $43.
I wouldn't say that the problem of shopping is now "perfect information," it's rather a deluge of information liberally peppered with dishonesty and arbitrariness.
You never know if the review you're reading is genuine or paid content, especially when it's part of one of those top 10 <product type> of <year>.
All I want to know is what to expect. Will this item break on me after X years/uses, or should I expect it to last longer? Am I paying for the brand/design, or durability?
Personally, I'm trying to cut down on the stuff I buy and discard, and a large part of that is buying quality items that last. In the past, I could expect that paying more means I'll get a more durable product, but that doesn't seem to be the case anymore, especially when I've purchased name brand items that break far more quickly than off brand items.
I just wish we had a better way of signaling the trade-off between durability and aesthetics.
"Shopping" on Amazon.com is not a good strategy IMO. It's always best to find something you want on another, more specialized site (forum, review aggregator, specialized review site, etc.) and then look for the item you want somewhere online. Amazon, walmart, alibaba et al. are more like UI's for a warehouse for me at this point.
The author could just buy whatever gloves are marked as "Amazon's Choice".
Of course, then she is assuming that Amazon has her best interests at heart, and hasn't just chosen whichever product makes them the most money.
But, by shopping at a store with a more limited product selection than Amazon, you are relying on the same assumption. Also, the assumption is almost certainly wrong in all cases.
For finding what particular type or model of random good to buy I’ve become utterly dependent on just adding ‘reddit’ as a search term.
Living in Australia, adding ‘ozbargain’ and ‘whirlpool’ instead to another two searches to follow up completes the trifecta.
I just hope Google never optimises for that because then the content of bad reviews will shift to and overwhelm these sites instead. When a metric starts being the target it ceases to be a good metric.
I do really feel badly for (mostly) young people who have no frame of reference for things other than Amazon and comparison websites. I would probably never go to Amazon for something like gloves (or most other things) because you have no idea what you are going to get. When I do know what I want, the first place I try to buy it from is the company that makes it. If they don't sell it direct, then they will probably tell you who does. If they have their own store on Amazon, I will use that, even if other providers on Amazon are selling it for less.
Amazon was the only place I could find XXL leather work gloves. All the big box stores have XL at most, which shrink down to an L. That saves me money as I don’t have to throw them out when they shrink.
If you're interested in a deeper treatment of these issues check out the 2004 book [1] The Paradox of Choice.
Some interesting notes from follow-up research [2]:
> In a meta‐analysis of 99 observations (N = 7202) reported by prior research, we identify four key factors—choice set complexity, decision task difficulty, preference uncertainty, and decision goal—that moderate the impact of assortment size on choice overload. We further show that each of these four factors has a reliable and significant impact on choice overload, whereby higher levels of decision task difficulty, greater choice set complexity, higher preference uncertainty, and a more prominent, effort‐minimizing goal facilitate choice overload. We also find that four of the measures of choice overload used in prior research—satisfaction/confidence, regret, choice deferral, and switching likelihood—are equally powerful measures of choice overload and can be used interchangeably.
Shopping doesn't suck. Being picky sucks. If I want gloves I go to the discount store and buy a 5-pack of the nitrile dipped cotton, the half-leather or the insulated rubber ones depending on what I need them for, no existential crisis whatsoever. I suspect the endless options for comparable products that we can access on the internet has made us more picky than we otherwise would be.
Shopping sucks less now. Wider selection and more transparent information means that you can make a better choice today. If the author stops looking for the absolute best item, they'll find that it's a great world for the satisficing consumer.
The wider selection is very often knockoff, quasi-fraudulent garbage dressed up in fake reviews that will drown out most of the transparent information you were hoping to find.
Faced with the situation described in this article many times in recent years, I've come to appreciate the value of the wholesale buyer at traditional retailers.
While obviously there are a variety of incentives involved, the buyer has evaluated a variety of products and found ones that they not only expect to be profitable for them, but that are also something they expect their customers to like and want to buy. Also, it's very unlikely they'll risk selling counterfeits. The majority of Amazon sellers seem to optimize exclusively for profitability, and make up for it by gaming the system with fake reviews and the like.
This is pretty much the main reason to shop at Costco. I’m not really convinced anything is actually a good bulk deal. It’s just a matter of having a place to shop where you can safely grab stuff and have a decently high floor on quality.
At Costco, the generous return policy also inspires confidence. If Costco stocks an item that's not very good, they will get many returns which cost them money, so they have an incentive to research any item they sell to filter out bad quality.
There are many things at Costco where you save quite a bit compared to buying elsewhere: Cheese, smoked salmon, maple syrup, vitamins, cereal bars, peanuts, Kerry Gold butter, Chobani plain yogurt ($3 vs $6), socks.
Oh my. I once tried buying a kettle on Amazon but the reviews convinced me that any purchase would be bad. In the end I deliberately went to my local supermarket and bought one from there simply because I couldn't see the reviews.
> I’d love to only spend $17 except there is no way 17-dollar leather gloves won’t be fake and off color and smell of gasoline when they arrive, and after only a few wears the lining will pill or develop holes. I’d love to just buy the $60 gloves except that seems like a pretty large amount of money to spend on non-weatherproof gloves, and how can I, when there are identical $17 gloves right there.
17, which is too risky, and 60, which isn't 17, which is too risky...
There are probably hundreds of salespeople inside small business abodes in a 20 mile radius who are trained in the diplomacy of breaking out of that loop without making the author feel like a complete idiot.
Not saying a brick-and-mortar is a utopia, but at least the problem of ending up with a 5-star pair of "glarves" goes away.
I've started only buying things directly from brands that I trust and have legitimate warranties. I bought 5 pairs of swimming shorts on Amazon last year and all of them have completely fallen apart. I have a pair that I bought from Patagonia that look as good today as they did 6 years ago. I have a 10 year old puffer from them that has been so good to me. It's worth the extra money, if you can afford it, to just buy one nice thing and be done with it.
1. You have the choice of getting any of the options you want, that are not available in store near you in 2 days sitting at home.
2. You can compare prices on each of those items and choose the price point that best suits you.
3. You have an option to get information from people who have previously owned that item and read their thoughts and reviews.
4. You can order as any many you want, and spend 5 mins preparing a return and 10 - 15 mins returning the item (or, just pay a small fee to get it collected back from your house)
Yet, you choose to drive down to a store, a store which probably doesn't have an online inventory index. Try to find an option you want, don't find it, and now you're mad?
I know where this article is trying to go, but as someone who rarely shops .. damn is it nice.
I went to Uniqlo in Faneuil Hall here in Boston yesterday. Simply walking into the store is an _experience_. It's in a historic district, surrounded by quick bites and other fun knick knacks, and the store itself is beautiful laid out.
This is where the physical store absolutely destroys the abysmal online experience. Curation and the human experience.
This is what branding is all about: you can't really tell but you know brand 'B' hasn't let you down so just choose that again.
Of course then the tail began to wag the cow* and the brand became the point; product value became irrelevant. Still it's probably the least terrible way to choose. I want a USB power brick but brand 'N' doesn't sell something that meets my desires: I'll wait.
* chose cow rather than dog because I doubt farmers used to actually brand (German for "burn") their symbol on their dog.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 256 ms ] threadFor example if you search reddit for what computer mouse to buy, you'll be told that unless it weighs less than 70g and has holes, it's utter shit and not worth your money.
It is self-policing in some ways. But again, some review categories are better for this than others, and the hive mind can be susceptible to hype and astroturf.
I would pay a decent amount of money for a tool that just filtered out any sites in Google search that promote products using affiliate links.
I guess Costco is kind of a bulk version of that...
Also I've been increasingly interested in just buying things once and having them last a decade+, ideally a lifetime (less waste). But this takes a lot of research. Trader Joes does a good job of curating groceries and I've come to trust their choices. It would be nice to have this for products.
Essentially, "This is the version of X that will last 10+ years."
https://brandless.com/
Take this random Brandless product: https://brandless.com/products/stainless-steel-wooden-turner
Why on Earth would you buy it? How can you possibly tell that it's eco-friendly or not?
Edit: A bit of poking around suggests that Acacia is a fairly sustainable source of wood, so I would guess that's the thing that makes it eco-friendly. Some of their other acacia products do mention this, but the spoon doesn't for some reason.
https://brandless.com/products/acacia-wood-cheese-board
I do wonder why they felt the need to add metal at all though; I’ve never felt that a plain wooden spoon was lacking anything and having a heat-conductive material in a hot pot seems like a good way to get a burn. The description just says it’s a “nice accent.”
I looked at a lotion, which includes the ingredient "fragrance". This is automatically questionable because it doesn't tell you what the ingredient actually is. Moreover, it's a term that companies use instead of telling us what's actually in the product, including any number of potentially harmful ingredients. It is also patently not required for the product to function, so it's clearly against Brandless's stated aim.
Brandless looks to me like an Orwellian marketing gimmick: they claim to be brandless, yet they're actually trying to develop a brand.
My trust in such a brand quickly goes to zero.
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-to-launch-new-grocery...
The other alternative is to use specific branded sites, such as LL Bean or REI. These will provide premium products at a premium price.
Finally, you can go directly to the manufacturer. If you want Marmot gloves, go to marmot.com. (Of course, it's unlikely that Marmot actually manufactures their gloves.)
For the one-year anniversary post, I decided to write a follow-up article on the toaster. That's when I discovered, in an ironic twist, that a half-dozen of our flagship pick had caught on fire during operation, and because of this the model had been recalled by the manufacturer.
That's when I realized that trying to find a commodity item that will last for a decade+ is impossible (these days anyway). The same model isn't manufactured for a decade, so you can't rely on history. Major manufacturers make mistakes and/or cut costs and/or sell their brand, so you can't rely on reputation. Even a top-3 recommendation from Consumer Reports did not prevent me from picking a lemon despite my sincere best effort to avoid it.
I haven’t but anything from them but this seems to be their premise.
I'd add that's it's worse because the world is flatter. Why should I buy Brand Item when I can get a version from Alibaba for 10-20%? If it truly is comparable, then why pay the markup when the internet lets me cut out the middleman? But then when the version from Alibaba is total crap, there's no recourse. It's not like a local shop with reputation at risk.
So you end up in this world where nothing matters and it's a race to maximize attention. Which means, as a consumer, you have to do your research or risk getting taken for a ride.
The unfortunate reality these days is that the majority of items on, say, Amazon, are the same crap from Alibaba imported by a guy who read a How To Make Money On Amazon book, or just marked up directly by the same people selling on Alibaba. Heck, even the "brand items" may turn out to be a cheap clone that someone had shipped to Amazon fulfillment, bypassing their incredibly stringent "I pinky-swear this really is the authentic item" vetting process.
I find “on, say, Amazon” entertaining. Amazon may well be the worst largeish US online vendor. It’s gotten to the point where I trust eBay more.
If you want winter gear, buy from one of several excellent online stores dedicated to it.
I was actually thinking about my recent experience trying to buy a $5 Monoprice USB-PS/2 converter when I typed my original comment.
Absolutely! I recently bought a simple item, a roll of wiring loom tape. It was on Amazon and had a few reviews that stated that the received tape was old and didn't stick very well anymore.
Same item on eBay for cheaper has the seller specifically mentioning that they only sell fresh tape from the running production, not old stock. Even better, the seller specialized in these (and other) tapes.
It seems that eBay has just cultivated a much higher quality base of vendors. Many of them seem specialized.
For example, I'm shopping for landscape lighting right now. You can spend a lot on landscape lighting. A nice bronze spotlight from a "good" brand like Kichler can run you $100+ ea.[1], and I need 8–10 of them.
Conversely, I can get an 6-pack of albeit-plastic spotlights off Amazon from a Chinese company for 40 bucks, with 4.5 stars and 252 reviews.[2]
I am getting ripped off with Kichler? I am getting crap from Zuckeo? Who knows!?
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Kichler-16012BBR30-10-Degree-3000K-Br...
[2] https://www.amazon.com/ZUCKEO-Landscape-Spotlight-Decorative...
You can get builder-grade and often-ugly crap from Home Depot (see also: Brands not being an indicator of quality), or spend hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars on designer pieces.
I ended up finding one I really liked off a no-name website, with the product shipped from Hong Kong for like $80. Solid metal, reasonable-looking electronics, arrived in 2 weeks, good communication... very happy!
The issue is when you want something different than the millions of other people out there. Sure, things change and the quality may slip, but there is only so much time in the world is comparison shopping really worth it to you?
So the FOMO is paying a brand markup for consistent quality you could get for less.
Then you have "established" brands that are just trying to maximize profit. And "new" brands that are just AliExpress resellers. So trust that even a Brand™ experience will be a good one is waning.
In other words, the premise that you're paying for time savings is less assured, and the information to actually make comparison shopping worthwhile is right there.
Electronics especially is very difficult. Take Samsung for example, any phone that is not the latest S-model is really disappointing. Less educated consumers just know that "samsung phones are good", when most reviews only refer to S10. Likewise I can't mindlessly go into a store an buy a Sony TV even if my last Sony TV was good, i need to do the online research to figure out that the last 2 characters in the model-nr indicates if this is the premium version or not. Things change so quickly also that the brand that had the lead one year ago is no longer having the best options.
Buy from a handful of trusted brands; if it doesn't work out, don't buy from them again. Like what people did before all this information was available.
Say I'm looking for something that costs $20 online. I might look at three or four sites. I might take five minutes. It's not worth it to take more time.
Say I'm looking to rent a ski chalet for a week for $3000. Now I'm taking considerably longer - probably at least an evening, followed by letting it sit in my mind overnight.
Let the size of the purchase scale the amount of time you spend looking for a better answer.
The amount of time spent optimizing is directly related to the impact.
I won’t spend 1 hr looking for a cheaper hotel if it’s a $10 difference. I will if it a $100 difference.
Bigger ticket items are a pain, but they also don't have as much variety, so I'm more motivated to get it over with and choose between my available options fairly quickly (buying house, car, etc). I'm also more likely to be able to adapt the more expensive items to my needs.
However, smaller purchases tend to have far more options and searching more will nearly always turn up even more. Smaller items are also difficult to adapt, and I really don't like to add more to the landfill than necessary, so I worry quite a bit over these smaller purchases.
It's been a long time since a long-form vice article has really resonated with me. I am happy that we're clearly moving away from a world of a million variations of the same plastic crap to a place where consumers are demanding the right thing.
I think my total time, including the bus rides downtown and back (even though I was probably doing other things downtown on that trip like “working”), was probably less than she spent opening ten thousand different tabs in her search for The Perfect Glove.
And then in a couple years I had to do it again because I could only find one of the gloves when it started to be too cold for bare hands again. It ain’t worth investing a ton of time into picking gloves or umbrellas or other things that tend to get lost or separated.
Shopping for physical goods on the Internet sucks.
Buying physical commodities or items where those factors don't matter on the Internet is incredible. I don't have to go anywhere, I don't have to talk to anyone, I don't have to lug anything anywhere, etc.
She had a terrible time spending days researching the Perfect Pair Of Gloves online, going to the one “big box” store in her area that had supposedly had it, and going back home ungloved instead of looking at other stores when the one store had no gloves in stock that day. I had a perfectly fine time going downtown when I was probably going there for some other reasons already and visiting a couple of stores looking for some Okay Gloves.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
To promote quality discourse, I will not reply. Feel free to edit and re-submit.
This year I wanted to buy a TV, and wanted to see them in real life to judge colors/brightness levels, and shockingly, in London, I found just one place which had like 10 TVs from the leading brands. I'm sure there are a few more, but I wasn't able to locate them using google, or walking the main shopping streets. I remember shops 10 years ago which had acres of electronics (albeit in a different country).
Instead I have to order it online and then if I don't like it, either return it to the store or send it back via post.
While its super convenient for the consumer, in some respects, ordering everything online seems wasteful and bad for even the consumer and retailer in many respects.
> [T]he problem is that now, somewhat suddenly, perfect knowledge of the perfect glove, for you specifically, exists, if you simply do enough research.
When you're shopping in a physical store, you have no expectation that you're going to find the absolute, one-and-only perfect glove (or whatever) in the world for you. Even in the largest stores, you understand that their shelf space is limited, and therefore you set your expectations not to find the absolute, one-and-only perfect glove in the world for you, but to find a glove that's good enough for your needs. As long as you can find something that meets your requirements at an acceptable cost, you come away satisfied. Maybe not thrilled, but satisfied.
The infinite variety of online shopping tells us to set our expectations higher than that. Suddenly every thing we buy has to be the perfect version of that thing for us -- because if it isn't, that means we are lazy dullards who lacked the research skills and/or wherewithal to go out and find the perfect version. Instead of it being the fault of the shop that we had to settle for good enough, suddenly it's our fault.
The only way out of this trap is to realize that there is no such thing as the perfect product, that even the works of the finest craftspeople are going to have flaws and blemishes on them, and that good enough really is, you know, good enough.
Or, in other words, that happiness is not a glove that you can buy.
> The infinite variety of online shopping tells us to set our expectations higher than that.
made me think a bit -- that used to be true for me, but the effect is trending in the opposite direction now. I have learned that it's very nearly impossible to tell if a product being shown is actually any good or not unless I'm already familiar with that company's products, regardless of what the product listing or product reviews say.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analysis_paralysis
https://xkcd.com/1801/
Yes, but my point is that the inability to tell whether or not a product is any good reduces analysis paralysis because it reduces the trustworthiness of the analysis.
In general, more choices don't make you happier -- in fact they usually have the opposite effect.
Some time ago I read about a paper on HN. It was explaining what can you do to maximize happiness in life. IIRC, one piece of advice therein was to avoid comparison shopping. You elaborated very clearly why.
Today, it's really easy to go down a rabbit hole finding the best/best value/etc. place complete with lots of squinting at reviews to see if they're for real and/or have the same criteria you do.
I mostly don't sweat it too much but it's easy to do so.
> When you're shopping in a physical store, you have no expectation that you're going to find the absolute, one-and-only perfect glove
Tinder for gloves problem sort of? The misleading impression of infinite possibilities on the Internet. In real life you optimize for local maximum only
I used to buy a lot of videotape at Price Club. I really liked the Maxell Hi-Fi tapes; they carried multiple grades of the Maxell line. After Costco took over, only Sony was sold.
Another example: the credit card partnerships. First Discover only, then Amex only, now Citi-branded Visa.
Meanwhile on the internet, and Amazon especially, no one cares about quality any more. 9 out of 10 results are bottom tier unknown brands selling gloves that photograph well. They may be barely 1mm thick, appear to be sewn by someone wearing boxing gloves, and won't last two washes, but look at all that "choice". That's really crap masquerading as choice. Amazon seem to foolishly believe their reputation is immune to the shite on the marketplace and in every Amazon search.
On the internet good enough is increasingly rare. Even a "trusted" brand races to the bottom. For most physical things, clothes and shoes especially, I'm back to the shops and sad that so many of them have closed lately.
It shouldn't be this difficult!
I suspect online dating has some similar effects.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing?wprov=sfla1
It's not that the internet provides too wide a selection, it's that it fails to provide some very basic pieces of information.
How does the product feel in your hand? Is it soft? Does it feel durable? Does the stitching look neat, or haphazard and frizzy?
When we evaluate a product in person, we make all of these assessments without even thinking about them.
It's also why every product is like 4.5 stars -- they just astroturf the reviews by giving away product.
As an aside: I'd love to find the best cat wand toy. I've tried hundreds from pretty much all the major eCommerce sites and they all suck. If someone knows of one that won't break immediately I'd be willing to pay top dollar for it.
But yeah, unfortunately as other commenters have pointed out, in small towns and even where I am in Albuquerque, brick & mortar stores are either disappearing or aggressively shifting their business to the internet, so it's becoming more and more unavoidable to come into contact with reviews and whatnot even for relatively basic items.
I don't know if there is a best one, but after trying several, my cats found one they really like:
https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B01ANUU12I/
We got this expansion kit to go with it:
https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B00UZK5WQC/
One nice thing about this wand is that it has three telescoping sections, so the tip section is thin and wiggly.
It's so wiggly that the cats learned to use it on their own!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46rROBUDPYI
It won’t be The Best but it will have a much lower carbon footprint than buying another plastic one made in China, shipped across the ocean, and then shipped around three or four times while people try to arbitrage costs between major e-commerce sites. And if you have any kind of mystical bent then it can also have the bonus of being charged with you thinking about how much you love your little mouse-murderer, and that will make it far better than any mass-produced toy.
https://www.dabird.com/da-bird
After the last few decades of recessions, stores have gradually dropped their inventory of goods for anybody outside the meat of the bell curve. I will shop for things for months just to buy local and end up buying online because nobody will carry what I want or will fit.
> No.
In two taps, right in front of her, ordered it.
Said she understood. Thanked her for showing it to me.
Is twenty bucks really that precious to you that you’ll throw money out of your local economy into Bezos’ pockets? Right in front of someone who just helped you decide this is the watch you wanted and could have put it in your hands right now instead of waiting for shipping in the middle of the super-busy Christmas season and hoping it’s not gonna end up be a counterfeit copy?
The time of the employee who showed it to you costs money.
Yet I always end up wasting many hours. I can't drive, so it's public transport and walking everywhere for me (that's fine, it just adds to the time). My experience has been that if you know exactly what you want and it's anything slightly off the beaten path, you're going to have a hard time finding a store that will stock it.
Recent examples that come to mind: a certain kind of USB cable, an SSD, musician's earplugs, an induction cooker. Plus almost any book that I want.
This year was the first year that I've done the majority of my Christmas shopping online (I actually managed to get to it early enough!). It's been hands-down the best experience I've had Christmas shopping. Not to mention that I haven't had that Mariah Carey Christmas song shoved down my ears this year as a result :)
Physical stores just can't compete for certain kinds of shoppers.
Also, I hear so much about physical stores treating their employees like shit. Primary examples include GameStop and EB Games. When I think of that, I think that some stores deserve to fail.
Wait until you hear about amazon.
Buying something without actually holding it in your hands and testing it out will never be an awesome experience. You can't really trust reviews and ratings. But you can usually return stuff and I don't see why the author made such a fuss about returning.
> I’d love to only spend $17 except there is no way 17-dollar leather gloves won’t be fake and off color and smell of gasoline when they arrive, and after only a few wears the lining will pill or develop holes. I’d love to just buy the $60 gloves except that seems like a pretty large amount of money to spend on non-weatherproof gloves, and how can I, when there are identical $17 gloves right there.
It could also be that the $60 gloves came from the same factory and are exactly identical to the $17 gloves, and if you buy them you're going to get ripped off by at least $43.
I wouldn't say that the problem of shopping is now "perfect information," it's rather a deluge of information liberally peppered with dishonesty and arbitrariness.
All I want to know is what to expect. Will this item break on me after X years/uses, or should I expect it to last longer? Am I paying for the brand/design, or durability?
Personally, I'm trying to cut down on the stuff I buy and discard, and a large part of that is buying quality items that last. In the past, I could expect that paying more means I'll get a more durable product, but that doesn't seem to be the case anymore, especially when I've purchased name brand items that break far more quickly than off brand items.
I just wish we had a better way of signaling the trade-off between durability and aesthetics.
Any sufficiently small brand is drowned out by knockoffs and other crap.
I can't recall a specific example right now, so this is a fictitious one:
- Search "Allen Edmonds belt"
- Results: belts by anyone but Allen Edmonds. "Brand" filter doesn't appear on the left for some reason.
- Search "Allen Edmonds"
- Go to Allen Edmonds seller page.
- Click through a page with every one of their products and find the belts.
WTF.
edit: I remember the last time this happened was with phone cases.
Amazon is worthless.
- $299.99 - Medium (Brown)
- $299.99 - Small (Black),
- $2.07 - XXXXXXXL (Purple/Green/Orange) (SOLD OUT)
Of course, then she is assuming that Amazon has her best interests at heart, and hasn't just chosen whichever product makes them the most money.
But, by shopping at a store with a more limited product selection than Amazon, you are relying on the same assumption. Also, the assumption is almost certainly wrong in all cases.
Living in Australia, adding ‘ozbargain’ and ‘whirlpool’ instead to another two searches to follow up completes the trifecta.
I just hope Google never optimises for that because then the content of bad reviews will shift to and overwhelm these sites instead. When a metric starts being the target it ceases to be a good metric.
Some interesting notes from follow-up research [2]:
> In a meta‐analysis of 99 observations (N = 7202) reported by prior research, we identify four key factors—choice set complexity, decision task difficulty, preference uncertainty, and decision goal—that moderate the impact of assortment size on choice overload. We further show that each of these four factors has a reliable and significant impact on choice overload, whereby higher levels of decision task difficulty, greater choice set complexity, higher preference uncertainty, and a more prominent, effort‐minimizing goal facilitate choice overload. We also find that four of the measures of choice overload used in prior research—satisfaction/confidence, regret, choice deferral, and switching likelihood—are equally powerful measures of choice overload and can be used interchangeably.
[1] https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780060005696
[2] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1016/j.jcps.2014....
link: https://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_the_paradox_of_choi...
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/satisficing.asp
While obviously there are a variety of incentives involved, the buyer has evaluated a variety of products and found ones that they not only expect to be profitable for them, but that are also something they expect their customers to like and want to buy. Also, it's very unlikely they'll risk selling counterfeits. The majority of Amazon sellers seem to optimize exclusively for profitability, and make up for it by gaming the system with fake reviews and the like.
It is from 2012 by the way.
17, which is too risky, and 60, which isn't 17, which is too risky...
There are probably hundreds of salespeople inside small business abodes in a 20 mile radius who are trained in the diplomacy of breaking out of that loop without making the author feel like a complete idiot.
Not saying a brick-and-mortar is a utopia, but at least the problem of ending up with a 5-star pair of "glarves" goes away.
1. You have the choice of getting any of the options you want, that are not available in store near you in 2 days sitting at home. 2. You can compare prices on each of those items and choose the price point that best suits you. 3. You have an option to get information from people who have previously owned that item and read their thoughts and reviews. 4. You can order as any many you want, and spend 5 mins preparing a return and 10 - 15 mins returning the item (or, just pay a small fee to get it collected back from your house)
Yet, you choose to drive down to a store, a store which probably doesn't have an online inventory index. Try to find an option you want, don't find it, and now you're mad?
Do you see the hypocrisy?
I went to Uniqlo in Faneuil Hall here in Boston yesterday. Simply walking into the store is an _experience_. It's in a historic district, surrounded by quick bites and other fun knick knacks, and the store itself is beautiful laid out.
This is where the physical store absolutely destroys the abysmal online experience. Curation and the human experience.
Of course then the tail began to wag the cow* and the brand became the point; product value became irrelevant. Still it's probably the least terrible way to choose. I want a USB power brick but brand 'N' doesn't sell something that meets my desires: I'll wait.
* chose cow rather than dog because I doubt farmers used to actually brand (German for "burn") their symbol on their dog.
You can (or at least should be able to) go to a store look at the product, try it on, look at the quality first hand and then buy them.
But we've accepted that it's better to save 25% or 50% so that we can avoid the inconvenience of actual shopping.
Furthermore, there are brands that make good stuff and have good customer service, stick to those brands until they prove to be untrustworthy.
Don't reward Amazon just for building a nice website.