• Hyperreality
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    2111 months ago

    Don’t automatically buy stuff on Amazon. They’re often not the cheapest and they’re a scummy company.

    Not on Amazon, but I bought myself a nice t-shirt. It got me compliments and made me feel better about myself.

    • @tal@lemmy.today
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      11 months ago

      They’re often not the cheapest

      No, but they’re consistently reasonably close to that. I’m not likely to pay drastically more on Amazon than elsewhere.

      What they do have is a very large selection, which is a major benefit; I don’t want to deal with eight different retailers and eight different orders when I can just hit Amazon.

      At a lesser scale, this is what made department stores do so well.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_store

      A department store is a retail establishment offering a wide range of consumer goods in different areas of the store, each area (“department”) specializing in a product category. In modern major cities, the department store made a dramatic appearance in the middle of the 19th century, and permanently reshaped shopping habits, and the definition of service and luxury.

      Amazon’s basically done the same, writ large. They can offer pretty much anything you want from a consumer standpoint at a single location.

    • Deceptichum
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      311 months ago

      Alternatively, do always look on there because they’re often the cheapest and all companies are scummy.

      Amazon regularly beats out the brick and mortar stores in my country who reamed us for decades before we got access to the global market.

      • Primarily0617
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        411 months ago

        just wait for the reaming you’ll get when everybody but amazon goes out of business in your country

        • Deceptichum
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          211 months ago

          It’ll be exactly the same as it was before than, the maximum people could pay before it affected sales.

          • Primarily0617
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            311 months ago

            Yes I’m sure the prices will be the same after there’s absolutely no competition at all.

            • Deceptichum
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              311 months ago

              There was no competition before, which is why it would be “the same as it was before”.

                • Deceptichum
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                  211 months ago

                  Pretty much everything was a duopoly and as the market was so small they just grew to mutually exist without need to compete.

                  Shit most of them are all owned by the same parent companies now.

                  • Primarily0617
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                    211 months ago

                    My point being that while a duopoly may seem like a worst case scenario, it very much isn’t.

    • paulcdb
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      111 months ago

      Maybe thats the problem with people these days!

      People only care about price so now everything is built as cheap as possible, corners cut everywhere so now everything is shit… because it needs to be cheap! It’s getting harder to find anything that seems built to last more than a year.

      As scummy as Amazon might be, they’re still the only company that offers anything that resembles convenience. eBay could’ve challenged Amazon but profit over service and those in charge walking round with their head up there arse’s and now it’s a poor copy of aliexpress that seems to be 90% chinese crap in the UK! I’m not wasting an hour trawling every online store when I know Amazon has it… so what if its £3 more!

      And sadly the cheap money has gone and no-one wants to offer a better Amazon because there’s money in it because… everyone wants everything cheap! 🤦‍♂️😞