And with some electrical stuff, such as power strips and chargers, there might be safety issues/fire hazards too.
Prime was one reason - I always hated it and I felt that when Prime came out, the general service elsewhere declined. I could not accept to be a second class citizen now. Either I'd have to also use Prime - or stop using Amazon. I opted for the latter.
But there were also more complaints that people made online, which was different before Prime. The opinion of others does influence me a little bit; I try to not let it influence me, but truthfully when there are many negative comments, one becomes suspicious too. Perhaps one reason Google disabled downvotes on videos, as this was a quality control step by some users, which helped a bit; I would not waste my time on horrible videos. And for the most part, users voting was working ok-ish.
I browse on Amazon, and then go to the company's website directly for the purchase. USPS, UPS, and FedEx will still deliver it just the same.
Insidious.
It perfectly described what Bezos did.
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Sorry, I can't quickly find the article explaining the unique history of Kenyan coffee. Will add later if I do.
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This org's page hits all the same points:
Kenya Coffee, Quality Decline & the Systemic Truth Behind the Cup https://kenyacoffeeschool.golearn.co.ke/kenya-coffee-quality...
The article I read was written by a (western) coffee buyer explaining why he can't buy beans directly from Kenyan farmers. Whereas buyers can directly in every other country.
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u/jrjeksjd8d found it. Woot!
Thus doesn’t feel particularly evil to me - though it treats beans as fungible.
Something similar is done with milk sales from individual farms in England.
It seems like the collective washing and grading system was effective at producing high quality coffee (but not paying farmers a living wage) until the system got so extractive and climate change got so bad that farmers cut costs and started producing worse strains. In other markets buyers would go direct to the farmers for single-origin beans to encourage higher quality but in Kenya this was prohibited.
What these systems rely on is a governing body that punishes producers that don’t meet the body’s standards and ruin the party for everyone else. Amazon is the governing body here and has previously shown no interest in protecting legitimate producers from counterfeiters.
Personally funny example to me, because, at our anti-counterfeiting tech startup, 3M respirators was the prospective customer I championed.
(Right before Covid hit, we'd launched our first MVP factory deployment, and there was soon news of counterfeit N95 masks. Which is just evil.)
You may not be Attorney General, but you do have a computer access and the Internet, where you could have shared this more publicly.
This is the same company who creates internal systems that encourage wringing out every drop of effort no matter how many piss bottles litter their work environment. When a faceless program uses gamification and comparison estimations to keep their employed serfs always working, constantly fed a sense of being behind. The stress of it all without the minimal of a “good job!”
You’re telling me THAT style of company isn’t capable of achieving this goal for another 2 months? If the company is going to use reprehensible practices at least use it to achieve good quicker.
To me this feels like releasing a press announcement to generate good PR and waiting until everyone forgets before not actually doing the thing… That’s my cynical take.
Is this really what we want capitalism to look like?
I've been saying for years, Sandisk makes the best Flash cards but never buy them from Amazon, just for this reason. Too many counterfeits out there.
Exactly. From the modern perspective, it's a function purpose-built to abet counterfeiters.
However, look at their origins as a used book seller. When my sister went off to college, I got most of her books off Amazon for a third the price of the university bookstore, and they were all from third-party sellers promising they had a particular edition and printing of a given book. All the same ISBN regardless of where they came from. It made sense in that context, to consider all sources of a given item to be the same item.
However, at that time (2005), all the books shipped from their individual sellers, there was no opportunity for stock commingling. If one had turned up counterfeit, blame would've been trivial.
So I don't think "3rd-party sellers" is necessarily the cutoff point. I don't think they should've allowed multiple suppliers for the same ASIN to all have their stock *in Amazon warehouses* until individual supplier tracking was in place.
Source; a career in higher education where I've seen most publishers entice faculty to use proprietary platforms so students have to pay hundreds for ebooks.
Just a couple days ago I was planning to buy some supplements, which Amazon had. I went to the actual website of the company and bought from them, because the idea of getting a knock off was a bit scary. To my dismay, I received an Amazon shipping notice after making the purchase outside of Amazon. This brought back my skepticism. I’m still waiting for the package to arrive and will end up inspecting it closely.
A few months ago I bought some headphones from Amazon, because the official site was out of stock on the color I wanted. I ended up going on YouTube and finding a video on how to spot authentic pairs vs counterfeit ones to make sure I got the real thing.
This all stemmed from when I bought a water bottle, and the reviews mentioned this commingling issue and how to spot authentic real one vs a fake. I double checked that I was buying from the company’s listing and not one of the other sellers on the item. I received a counterfeit one. Thankfully this review tipped me off. I lost a significant amount of trust in Amazon that day. A random bottle isn’t something I even thought I needed to worry about counterfeit version for.
Amazon has a long way to go to rebuild trust with me. This is a step in the right direction. The fact that it took this long is pretty sad. Amazon is the only mainstream store where I’ve ever had to question if I was buying legitimate goods or not.
I’ve had quite a few repairs over the last few years for household appliances and pool pumps and such. It’s very common to find a listing for a heating element for a Samsung dryer or a Heyward filter diverter being listed with a misleading title and often further listing the manufacturer as, say, Samsung itself.
I got screwed after buying a dryer heating element for $80 recommended via a reputable YouTube DIY channel. Silly me neglected to check the comments and lo and behold 50%+ are complaints that this heating element dies after 6-8 weeks, just past the 30 day refund window…
This looks like a signal that Amazon's fulfillment network has reached a saturation point where the 'distributed cache' model of commingling is no longer necessary for speed. Ten years ago, commingling was a necessary optimization. If seller A (county A) and seller B (county B) both sold the same widget, Amazon treated them as a single distributed liquidity pool to guarantee 2-day prime shipping nationwide without forcing every small seller to split their stock across 10 warehouses.
Now that Amazon has moved to a highly regionalized fulfillment model (where they aggressively penalize sellers who don't have stock distributed across regions), the computational and reputational overhead of commingling outweighs the diminishing returns on shipping speed. For all intents and purposes, they have traded the operational complexity of physical sorting for the software complexity of forcing sellers to manage regional inventory better.
Also total warehouse capacity and warehouse-warehouse freight capacity. +X% inventory duplication (to achieve regional inventory) at Amazon-scale, along a long tail distribution of products, must be non-negligible.
100s people a day or even an hour is not a lot of people. It might feel like it is because in person it is but for the over 20 million packages they deliver daily it is rounding error.
This affected returns as well. For multi-sourced products, we could never guarantee that overstock or damaged items were returned to the original supplier—only that the product matched. Suppliers complained about this a lot.
I was recently using ChatGPT and Perplexity to try to figure out some hardware glitches. I've found LLMs are way better than me at finding relevant threads for this kind of problem on Reddit, company support forums, forums of tech sites like Tom's Hardware, and similar.
The most common cause of the glitch I was seeing was a marginal Thunderbolt cable. A Best Buy 15 minutes from me had a 1m Apple Thunderbolt 5 cable. Amazon had the same cable for the same price with overnight Prime delivery.
If I'm spending $70 for an Apple cable I want it to actually be an Apple cable, so I asked ChatGPT if an Apple cable sold by Amazon was sure to be a genuine Apple cable.
It told me that it likely would be, but if I wanted to be sure buy it from Best Buy.
I bought from Best Buy.
The brand hit from this must be massive, with the amount of people now avoiding Amazon. But perhaps it won't matter with their size, most people won't have any other options anyways. For me, it was counterfeit dental stuff that made me quit buying from Amazon. A faulty SD card is annoying, stuff I put in my body is no-go.
just change it to "xcancel" for mirror
wongarsu•1h ago
Seems like Amazon finally agrees that the counterfeiting issues from commingling are worse than the logistics advantages
xattt•1h ago
The cynical perspective is that they are facing a serious financial penalty either from the manufacturers themselves, or a large buyer that got burned by co-mingled products, or both.
indymike•59m ago
rhplus•47m ago
While high value resale brands like Apple and GPU manufacturers would be the obvious choice here, I’d be tickled if it was LEGO Group that finally forced their hand, given how many stories there are of people receiving faked parts, missing mini figs and straight up bags of pasta.
ninkendo•6m ago
Noaidi•53m ago
wongarsu•33m ago
lazide•5m ago
I know they do sometimes put it back in stock, because the item I received back (as the ‘we’ll ship you a replacement) was literally the same thing I shipped back to them. :s
prewett•12m ago
I'm not sure if it is fraud, but it definitely aided and abetting counterfeiters, and I think it is a travesty that Amazon has not been fined for it. I also actively avoid buying from Amazon partly because of this (and this decision will make no difference; I have no interest in patronizing a company that does this, unless I see some repentance), although there really isn't anyone else for a lot of items.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-has-ceded-control-of-its...
itopaloglu83•42m ago
We only realized the issue after using it for a few days and needing to use an advance feature.
So, it’s not just one sellers product mingled with another, but also sellers combining similar looking products together as well.
brohee•38m ago
dev_l1x_be•23m ago