[HN Gopher] The Death of the Smart Shopper
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The Death of the Smart Shopper
Author : marban
Score : 25 points
Date : 2023-02-12 18:55 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theatlantic.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theatlantic.com)
| durnygbur wrote:
| At first I was like "I hate malls and shops with their ads and
| upselling, I don't want Coca Cola, Lays, Snickers, and chewing
| gum with every purchase, I'm buying everything online", and now
| I'm like "they asked for my birth date and mobile phone number,
| somehow I managed to order without installing their app, then
| finally the item which arrived is nothing like the item on the
| photos and in the description, and it stinks".
| glitchc wrote:
| My theory is that what Amazon has allowed is for people to cut
| out the middle-men, and this is ultimately good for the consumer.
|
| Most of the well-known brands (e.g. Hamilton, Cuisinart, Betty
| Crocker in kitchen supplies) were essentially resellers sourcing
| from the same pool of Chinese manufacturers. Now the Chinese
| manufacturers are directly selling to consumers and competing
| with each other, and the business model for these reseller brands
| is suddenly defunct.
| Avshalom wrote:
| A quick look at Amazon shows that's part of the problem is that
| now instead of a few well known middlemen it's now several
| hundred to several thousand. That's part of the article's
| point.
| cvccvroomvroom wrote:
| Partially. Mostly, it's to be able to fold up and relaunch
| whenever. There's no need to keep or invest in reputation when
| it's disposable or not positive. OTOH, shill purchases of cheap
| items, SKU reuse, and nagging customers to leave reviews can
| inflate an items's rating.
|
| Also, it's too much work for most manufacturers and vendors who
| are essentially selling low-end "flea market" items that they
| themselves wouldn't purchase. AliExpress and drop shippers on
| Amazon, eBay, and Etsy are guilty of pushing low-end items with
| barely / no concern for regulatory standards. I mean, have you
| seen the flaws in the USB deathdapters sold in the US and the
| "shower heaters" and "baby water heater" sold to South America
| that expose live wires.
| Ancalagon wrote:
| So funny you mention the shower heaters. I experienced them
| first hand in two air bnbs I stayed in on Costa Rica a couple
| months ago. Live wires just hanging on the side of the shower
| I was using.
| twoWhlsGud wrote:
| I naively expected to see the same thing. However, it turns out
| that brands were (at least in some cases) useful intermediaries
| - especially where consumers are short on time. And if
| reputation fails, you can sue brands when they screw up. The
| host of ABCDEFG brand frying pans or whatever seem to rather
| create a race to the bottom where the only thing that is left
| is the price signal.
| mattzito wrote:
| https://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/ar...
| akira2501 wrote:
| The fantastic irony of using archive.is to remove the paywall
| on an article about the supposed modern lack of consumer
| sophistication.
|
| Aside from that the article seems to completely fail to take
| notice of the fact that Amazon enjoys a rather extensive
| monopoly across most of it's operation. Of course the seller
| will always have more information than you, but if there's a
| large selection of sellers to choose from, then there's zero
| incentive for them to use that information _against_ me or to
| prevent me from having it.
|
| Consumers don't lack savvy, the marketplace lacks options.
| CognitiveLens wrote:
| I might be misinterpreting the article, but the first two
| paragraphs specifically describe the over-abundance of
| marketplace sellers offering similar and sometimes identical
| products. They're using the same seller platform - Amazon -
| but that doesn't seem the same as lacking marketplace options
| as a consumer.
|
| Not sure if it's a perfect analogy, but if we compare the
| Amazon marketplace to a giant flea market, I think the claim
| that consumers need a reasonably high level of 'savvy' to
| operate effectively is pretty easy to defend. When there are
| lots of sellers, lots of noise, and difficulty verifying
| quality, the consumer will frequently lose out despite the
| surplus of marketplace options.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| > Aside from that the article seems to completely fail to
| take notice of the fact that Amazon enjoys a rather extensive
| monopoly across most of it's operation.
|
| Well, it depends. Walmart's quarterly revenue is still
| higher, though they don't have quite as broad a selection of
| merchandise.
| msla wrote:
| The actual title is: It's impossible to know what you're buying
| online
| cvccvroomvroom wrote:
| It's not even so much as online or off, it's the platforms who
| have interposed themselves between consumer and producer.
| Online, one has to actively seek independent retailers or
| manufacturers because the convenience factor even witb Shopify
| is still a discovery problem.
| ThinkingGuy wrote:
| Relevant term: "Confusopoly"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confusopoly
| fmajid wrote:
| Scott Adams may be as obnoxious as Dogbert in real life, but he
| is a visionary.
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