I go out of my way not to buy from Amazon. It’s not some altruistic move - about 3 or 4 years ago I started noticing how little oversight Amazon was placing on the products listed, and you’d be lucky if anything (especially tech) was actually what you’d ordered and not some knockoff or used.
I think I’ve only bought one or two things from Amazon (other than digital books) in that time frame. I always look to buy directly from the vendor, if I can.
What concerns me is that I’ve started noticing more and more companies seem to only sell on Amazon. I see this as a mistake, as it hands over more control to one sales channel. I understand a new company doing this, but companies who are well established should maintain their own sales channel directly with their customers, even if they also sell on Amazon.
Recently I bought items from Wahl, Nike and Anker, directly from them. Wahl has products you can only get from their site. I always feel more comfortable just ordering directly from the company when I can, and I notice some companies seem to get that.
If I order directly from the company, I also get better support. I have an actual order number from the company, and correspondence/confirmation from the company. Special deals work better (the same deals on Amazon sometimes have hiccups).
They hand it over to them because of how Amazon operates.
Let’s say you’re a small shop and you ship out oven mitts. Paying for storage of your oven mitts can get expensive. So instead of paying for storage, you can actually have Amazon store them in their warehouse and allow people to buy directly from there. You don’t have to pay Amazon extra for storage, just their standard fees.
It does make sense if you have a business model that doesn’t support storing your products.
I don’t like it, but it makes sense for businesses.
Unless it’s changed, I’m pretty sure you do have to pay extra for amazon to store items. It’s not a lot, but when i dabbled in selling on az using them to store and ship had an extra fee involved.
And they only ever ship via UPS or some courier that fucks you with extra fees at the door and won’t deliver if you’re not there to receive it. Also they conveniently deliver only during regular working hours when people aren’t home. Also they cost twice as much as Canada post. Also they’ll simply return your item to the seller and keep the money you paid for shipping without even fucking delivering it because they “tried” to deliver it when you weren’t home.
I will buy a company’s product on Amazon instead of on their own site just so it can be shipped by Canada post and show up in the mailbox like a normal fucking parcel.
I’m shopping more and more on aliexpress. Same stuff pretty much. All made at the same places. You just have to be patient about the shipping (though that’s definitely getting quicker).
I’m happy to bag on Amazon any day of the week, but most of what you buy aren’t cheap knock offs. No I wouldn’t buy Micro SDs or other generic electronics but for the most part you get what you pay for.
I’ve completely switched to eBay for most purchases. Yes they are also a giant company, but more focused on used goods and small sellers.
It’s often cheaper than Amazon too, and most major brands have their own official store page. Certified refurbished items come with a 1 or 2 year warranty. I always buy used if it’s available, and from the smallest seller, so it recirculates products and helps everyday people who are trying to declutter.
Selling fees have gone up over the years (about 13%, but still much lower than Amazon). And eBay does a lot more advertising for new products now, so I’m not so hopeful long-term. If there was a smaller company offering the same benefits I would switch, but so far nothing comes close (in the US at least).
I’m telling you what - eBay seems to really care about its buyers. In every dispute I’ve had I’ve generally came out happy. Keep the item and full refund or return free of charge.
Almost every time I find something interesting and unique on Amazon I can find it from the manufacturer at their own site for less, even after shipping
There’s been some fantastic work in tech about electronic peripherals mostly being rebranded Asian stuff. If you want to follow the rabbit hole there’s stuff you can get for insanely cheap that’s the same as American brand name quality. (because the insides are literally the same)
If you look closely you can see who fulfills the order and what “store” is selling it. An official brand store will usually be reliable if the brand is.
Due to amazons stock mixing practices, You could still get a counterfit/return/broken item no matter what seller you order from if its fulfilled by amazon
That’s why I mentioned fulfillment. However official store items are supposed to have a unique identifier to stop anyone else’s product getting sent. If you buy (for example) an Anker phone battery and get an Ankre phone battery instead then it was because Amazon specifically injected that. And if true that’s another thing to go after them for. But I’ve never had that problem as long as (in the case example) I buy from the official Anker store front on Amazon. Now if buy from 123Electronics it gets bad. And worse if fulfillment is through Amazon on that third party seller.
the problem isnt getting an Ankre Phone battery when you order Anker
the problem is getting battery that says Anker, but came from a ripoff factory with no safety and ends up burning your house dow, because the box and the internals are identical, thus counterfit… not knockoff.
Or, like one motorcycle guy on youtube got, an official box with a precise weight of rocks in it…TWICE.
Okay that’s literally theft at that point. I highly doubt Amazon has a policy of replacing products with a weight of rocks meant to fool their own sensors.
No ones claimed amazons the one putting fake stuff in boxes… I’ve said, repeatedly, that the issue is their stock mixing. Private sellers, returns, brand names, all their stuff is mixed together, without any indicator of what originated from who, Which leads to cases like this.
Have you seen how their system works? Everything is individually tagged. Sitting it next to other things isn’t an issue. And getting a box of rocks is something that can happen to any retailer.
The voting ratio seems to indicate that yes, this is in fact considered a relevant news item by the community but you can and should downvote it if you disagree. Now that we’ve cleared that up, do you have anything to contribute to the discussion or are you just here to whine because I posted an article in two relevant communities?
For those complaining about the short sentences many of these folks are getting, the silver lining is this is a felony on their records, forever. Decent jobs will be nearly unreachable, once they get out, and federal prison sentences has no (drastic) “released early for good behavior” crap like state ones. No “sentenced to ten years, out in 4” at the federal level.
Yeah. I’d rather they get proper sentences and have a chance to rehabilitate and get back to a normal and non criminal life after prison. But then again i am not American, so the whole “vengefullness over prevention and rehabilitation” seems rather stupid.
My biggest reason for wanting separate bathrooms is the propensity for women to squat and spray the seat. I know guys can make a mess too but usually the women’s restroom is dirtier than men’s. Also women’s restroom is more likely to have a line.
But I’m sure building-wise it would be easier to just make one big bathroom so it should probably be that way, long as it’s big enough.
Idk about them, but my transition experience was the opposite. Neither is free of animals who were never taught how to operate their bodies in a public space, but my men’s room experiences were gross way more often than my women’s room experiences are. And now that I share a single toilet bathroom with men at work again, piss in weird places all the time. I understand that there are some places where the women’s room is routinely worse, but the average has been the opposite in my experience.
Online discussions I’ve seen on this subject make it sound like it’s very location specific when one is routinely worse than the other. I switched public restrooms when I transitioned ~4.5 years ago. My experience has been that both peak at the same level of gross, but men’s restrooms were gross more often. A busy enough restroom will inevitably have a user who doesn’t know how to manage their body in public, but men’s restrooms always seemed just a little more casually dirty. So maybe you should have been wondering who the fuck among your coworkers kept blowing up the women’s room x_x Because it’s not a gender thing. You just had a serial wall shitter who happened to be a woman.
In areas with lots of people it’s also about efficiency. Single stall toilets don’t work at a train station. A better option is to have two toilets … one with urinal and one without. Use whichever one you want.
Yah, this is not the men making this an issue. I couldn’t give a fuck if woman walks into the mens room, I’m here pissing and I’m not going to worry about anyone looking. Gods help you if it went the other way, you’d end up on a list.
Boomer retirement plans and savings aren’t enough? Sheesh what hope do any of us have, then? They are the wealthiest generation this country has ever seen…
It doesn’t matter how much money you make if you spend it all after you’ve already exceeded your ability to earn income through work when you still have decades left to live .
I don’t subscribe to “all boomers blew their money.” My parents worked hard all their lives, and were as successful as any average couple. They are fortunate enough to have a roof over their head and some assets to liquidate, but there’s no question they were not where they anticipated being financially entering retirement.
It’s just hard out here. Every year the rug gets a little longer, the treadmill runs a bit faster. Even if you get ahead, do everything right, it just takes one market downturn or medical diagnosis to still lose.
In a stunning, pre-trial win in New York attorney general’s all-out war on the Trump Organization, a Manhattan judge has found that Donald Trump committed fraud for years by inflating his worth to banks and insurers by as much as $3.6 billion a year.
A strongly-worded ruling by state Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron rejected outright Trump’s request for a range of pre-trial victories, calling his arguments “rehashed” and “erroneous.”
Instead, the judge gave a major victory to Attorney General Letitia James, immediately revoking Trump’s license to do business in New York.
“It’s the corporate death penalty,” said Diana Florence, a veteran financial crimes prosecutor for the Manhattan district attorney’s office, now in private practice.
“This ruling essentially dissolves his company,” she said, though she predicted that years of appeals may pass before anything actually happens.
sigh that last quote about it getting tied up in appeals is the shitty part. It’ll hang in limbo and trump will die without ever seeing a consequence. He’ll die thinking (and largely correctly) that he won.
The EC can work but make it a contest for each electoral vote, and remove the states from the equation entirely. California being safe blue and Texas being safe red don’t matter, each district is counted for one electoral vote, and the states don’t get extra votes anymore.
That just seems like popular vote with extra steps. I’m not sure, but I feel like mathematically there would be no way in which the result of the EC would differ from the popular vote under such a system. I suppose it might still be possible to skew it far enough to shift the outcome using some extreme gerrymandering.
It is a popular vote with extra steps. That’s literally what it is.
The extra steps mean that politicians can’t purely focus on population centers, rural communities would count for the same vote. each district should be of similar population size, and every district counts for one.
each district should be of similar population size, and every district counts for one.
seems to run counter to this:
The extra steps mean that politicians can’t purely focus on population centers, rural communities would count for the same vote.
As an example, lets say you have a rural area with 1000 people in it, and you decide that each district should contain 1000 people, so that entire area is one gigantic district. Nearby you have a city with 10,000 people, so you split the city into 10 districts. That city still counts 10 times what that one giant rural area does. The only way I can see where you could make the rural area count for more is with extreme gerrymandering where you snake little bits of every rural area in to include a chunk of the city population thereby diluting the strength of the cities vote by smearing part of it over the rural areas.
I see absolutely no reason why we should adopt a system that exists solely for the purpose of making gerrymandering possible, and I see no reason why doing things this way would make any difference over just using the popular vote if you aren’t gerrymandering.
Many democracies don’t have the people directly vote on their leader. Parliamentary systems typically have the people voting for a representative who will then vote for the Prime Minister on their behalf.
This would not really change the two party system. All it would mean is that you genuinely need a majority of votes and not the majority of a weird convoluted combo of states.
First-past-the-post voting systems result in two conflicting parties. This would entrench the two party system. The current system is not good, but popular vote is only slightly better.
news
Active
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.