Looks like I’m spoiled for choice. Temu has exactly the same for 11.29. Not that I’d be purchasing from either place; it’s just another example of Amazon’s enshittification.
I always love the nonsensical order of letters that these companies use.
It’s because of the US patent and trademark office. Not many people are competing with those who slam their heads on the keyboard for their brand names.
Amazon required a US trademarked brand name after the first bout of “el cheapo boot leg” products hit the news cycle (the pajamas on fire and hair curlers that would kill you), so we had these alphabet soup brand names ever since.
I read that it’s to avoid internal competition.
A Chinese company manufactures a product (or parts of it) for a Western brand with high quality control standards.
Half the production output meets the standard and is sold under the Western brand name for a higher price.
The other half is sold much cheaper, with a brand name that sounds unappealing to Western customers but can still be sold to Asian markets or people who don’t care and only look at the price.So the English name sounds bad on purpose to steer Western buyers towards the more expensive brand with a higher profit margin.
Amazon does not require a brand but having a brand allows the seller better access into amazing seller’s tools.
Amazing incentivizes this shit and does not give a fuck about it. They could be easily detecting this using LLMs but they don’t because they only care so it profits.
My favourite of these company names is still BOIFUN who obviously sell DVD players, baby monitors and door bells.
The one that really stuck with me was COCKFAIS
FOCMKEAS (19mm reamer) SCHNITPWR (12V power supply)
deleted by creator
I’m pretty sure CTIRCHIU is a Lovecraftian monster.
Hoement sounds like a word, at least. A… Hoe moment?
I don’t care what the Hoe meant, she’s still a hoe.
She’s having a hoement, letter.
„went to the bar last night with my girls and met this guy. a few hours later i was having a hoement with him in the bathroom.“
I was thinking it was a movement for sex worker rights, or something
What you mean? HAFSBEVCZ is a totally established, reputable brand.
Looks more like a randomly generated password.
Looks vaguely eastern european
There’s a reason for them! I can’t find the original video I saw about it, but this one explains it pretty well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UrqlMfwUC4
I also like how sarcastic this person sounds (at least to me) during their sponsor segment.
edit: Removed the timestamp from the YouTube link.
You’re probably thinking of the HAI video.
That seems very likely. I guess my YouTube search skills aren’t what I thought they were. Thank you.
My favourite one so far is “Hoement”
“CTIRCHIU” sounds like an eldritch god
People need to realize that Amazon has them locked in.
I needed a tall mini fridge for a garage. Cheapest I could find was fucking $700.
I went into a nearby home appliance store and got the same one for fucking ~$200. Granted I had to pay for an $80 delivery, but it still beats the shit out of every option for a 7 cu ft fridge on Amazon.
Every dipshit with a freshly minted MBA thinks they’re going to go and disrupt the appliance industry by putting it online and snatching it out from under all those antiquated local dealerships run by out of touch old men who can barely operate a computer. They think they’re going to go from zero to nationwide tomorrow, and they’re so smart because nobody’s thought of it before.
It turns out that dealing with the final mile with appliances is killer, and extremely difficult logistically. That makes the entire operation much more expensive than anyone thinks at first glance. Not just in terms of raw dollars and cents paid to disinterested common carriers to move your product from A to B (who also won’t install the stuff or even bring it inside your customer’s house) but also in damaged and returned products and angry screaming customers who will be initiating credit card chargebacks all the time whenever anything goes wrong.
All of those little local dealerships have had decades to figure out how to move a refrigerator from their warehouse to your kitchen and how to remediate the situation if it all goes pear shaped on delivery day, and all of them only service their local territory for a reason. The further you stretch without some physical presence in where you’re stretching to, the more impossible it becomes to control the logistics.
So yeah, that’s probably in no small part why your fridge would have been so expensive. Amazon is among the latest figuring this out the hard way, and you can’t just slap a refrigerator or a stove in a bubble mailer and dump it on somebody’s front porch.
Local appliance dealers likely also have a dude who in a pinch can just carry most appliances where they need to go.
Tangentially, this reminds me of some advice I read on whole home water filters. Get this one or get that one. but get it from a local business who’s been in your area for years and years. You will have a problem with it. You are going to need someone to call. And they say, just plan for that from the start.
Not to be that guy but there’s no way in hell that $700 is true. There are pages of fridges for less than $400 that are 7 cu ft.
I mean, fuck Amazon and all that jazz, don’t get me wrong - I just feel like it’s worth noting the hyperbole. It’s not that bad, at least from an end consumer perspective.
Amazon is admittedly powered by greed and the tears of the proletariat but they do a good job keeping the customer happy.
my 2 cents… not everybody sees the same prices at Amazon… that is part of their dynamic gouging
Just to add an anecdote… My friend is beyond millionaire as her father started a retail giant. Anyways, she has money coming out her ass and the prices Amazon shows her are almost consistently 30%-50% more than what they show me. Because they know she’s rich AF and they know I’m fairly poor.
e: grammar
Yep. Amazon knew my gf and I were moving in together.
I don’t know what kind of setup my GF’s phone had going, but she loved hands-free features like “hi Google” or whatever it was.
I specifically remember having a chit chat verbal conversation with her on her patio while her phone was laying there… and the next day products started getting recommended to me on my phone based on that convo.
My phone at the time was turned off and in my backpack in the house. Somehow the back end logic sewed everything together.
I was studying classical guitar. I was practicing piece and literally YouTube video results on my PC for learning the piece before searching for it.
Only network traffic to indicate was downloading a .PDF on my chrome browser on my phone. This was in like 2012.
Everyone is free to set their own priorities, but for me, I’ll just not purchase a thing at all, rather than buy it off Amazon. Most people buy too much crap they don’t actually need anyway.
Some stuff is more, most is less, at least in my town.
Honestly, my strategy for buying goods online is to look up the relevant wikipedia article, read the list of manufacturers, look at their own wikipedia pages or read customer reviews, then finally go to the company site and ordering directly.
For used items or niche items not widely produced, ebay or craigslist.
Amazon always had funky shit with how they recommended things - now people just know how to game it more, so winning move is not to play there.
Check out an app called Karrot. It’s basically craigslist but you periodically have to confirm your location, so you know all items are local. It also has a shockingly accurate photo identification and pricing feature.
I usually start with a google image search, find ones that look good and then try to track down where I can get them from.
Ah, I degoogled my life, so I use Wikipedia instead. Although considering that google images may be flooded with AI slop now that strategy might not work for much longer. Creative tho!
Well yes to be honest it’s DDG image search usually
Try https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ – it really cuts down on the slop, even for images.
I do use noai ddg, but I never tried the images function. Guess it’s worth a shot.
I’m not going into such depth (unless it’s technology I don’t understand), but I usually shop on Amazon after I figured out what exactly I wanted, and what price below other stores I was willing to pay. I found that only two categories I still overwhelmingly purchase from Amazon are books and branded art supplies.
I don’t know where you are located so this may not apply to you, but in the US for branded art supplies I always go with DickBlick or Jerry’s Artorama, because in addition to the usual “stick it in a bubble bag and see how damaged we can make it before it arrives” Amazon shipping policy, branded art supplies are now being counterfeited on Amazon, like so many other things.
I already could not safely buy liquids (Gamsol, OMS, etc) or soft supplies (paper or canvas pads, single watercolors) because of careless shipping, but now I won’t even try because of counterfeits. If you want the branded version of something that already has budget knockoffs, say an item like Holbein or Caran d’Ache colored pencils where the real thing is vastly more expensive than others in its category, you’re taking your chances on Amazon. Amazon has been selling counterfeit fountain pens for years, even low end pens like Lamy Safaris which always blew my mind, but now it’s a lot of things in the art supply world.
So now I only get cheap knockoffs there, anything under $50. Anything over that, or anything liquid or bendable/breakable, I go with a real art supply store. It’s absolutely worth it, they pack it all very carefully, excellent return service when I’ve needed it, and I can still pick up deals better than Amazon without ever having to worry about the possibility it’s a counterfeit and I just wasted hundreds on a scam.
If you’re not in the US you may be having a markedly better experience, so disregard. But in the US, Amazon for branded art supplies is a big NO for me.
I’m in Ireland, shopping mainly in the UK Amazon. I buy there mainly mid-range supplies, and I have a few physical stores in continental Europe where I get the more expensive stuff. But flying with anything liquid or large paper pads is almost as risky as having them shipped from Amazon, with the added bonus of my wife complaining that I take up too much weight in the suitcase with my “useless toys”.
Yeah, you’re definitely getting a better experience in Ireland with both Amazon and Temu/AliExpress, so I don’t blame you. Kinda have to cross your fingers and hope for the best, or have it shipped with all the added shipping costs: no truly good options. But people who don’t do a lot of art will never understand why you have to have so many different supplies, or why one paint is not the same as another, or why paper isn’t just paper, and “But you already have fifteen blues!” Yeah, and now I’m about to have sixteen, lol. Just the way it is.
This shit frustrates me to no end. These days I just look on Aliexpress first, just so I’m aware what the usual drop shipping item actually goes for.
It’s very annoying that platforms like Amazon tolerate this. Because it’s actively driving me away from them. I want to see good quality items, not the same Aliexpress shit priced ten times higher. But I can’t FIND the good stuff because the platform is literally full of garbage.
That’s what’s driving you away from Amazon?!!
Take a step back for a second. They’re complaining about Amazon, and your response is “that’s the wrong complaint”.
“You’re not complaining right! Why are to complaining that way, you should be complaining this way!”
Typical Linux user
Are these linux users in the room right now?
I use arch btw
Linux user here. I want to read dramatic complaints. Any kind, if it’s dramatic. Or write a boring one and I’ll move on. Starting a flame war for complaint style is boring. Better topics for flame wars exist.
Lol who is even talking about linux here?
People have no morals. Most people only care about the cheapest price, and after that getting the best item for the cheapest price
It’s also a question of availability. Looking at my last ten purchases, simply none of those were available locally here. We don’t HAVE a camera store here to buy things like lens caps. The stationary store where I went didn’t HAVE large elastic bands, only small ones. Nor did they have the specific Pentel gel pen that I use for work. The shoes I bought (US size 17) are not available, since stores don’t stock past size 13.
I did buy a laptop stand, so technically I could’ve bought say, a plastic box or some books locally to do the same thing. But the stand is nicer.
For me, it’s not about the price. I’d rather spend 10 for something great than 1 for something that sort of works. I am by no means cheap. But I do have specific needs and tastes that my local stores don’t cater to.
And hey, if they won’t sell me what I need, I’m not going to feel bad about buying it somewhere that will 🤷♂️
Local vs amazon are not the only 2 options. And let me be very clear. I am not simply saying “Buy local”. Conflating that with ethical shopping is wrong.
Well ‘buy local’ tends to be the solution most people offer when this particular discussions arises. But I agree that only solves some issues. Especially since local shops also get that stuff from the same sources.
I’m more of a ‘there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism’ kinda guy.
But frankly, I’ve got too much going on to worry about the ethics of where I’m sourcing pens and notepads. I’d rather focus on the big things.
Exactly my philosophy.
I try to buy in this order (time and money is of no concern):
Local shops -> domestic Online shops -> AliExpress (electronics) or Amazon (branded electronics like storage) -> Amazon (anything else).If it aint available for a decent price and I don’t need it, I won’t buy it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It’s missing the random “Amazon’s Choice” badge on one of the 20 identical choices 🤣
Amazon is just a drop shipping marketplace where everything comes direct from the exact same warehouse in China.
Exactly. Once you know about “white box” goods and the robust Chinese manufacturing chains that support it, you can’t unsee it.
What blows my mind is that Amazon is just accelerating this, and at times, embracing it with their own brand. They’ve gone from being a whole-ass shopping mall to end-of-days-K-Mart in just a few years.
How do they drop ship from China in 2 days?
Not everything on Amazon ships in two days. In the picture, the dates vary quite a bit.
Because Amazon pushes sellers to use Amazon warehouses and shipping their product in advance
…so they’re not drop shipping the product to the customers.
Easy, they don’t.
One of the many reasons I canceled my prime subscription is a lot of stuff was not coming in 2 days.
Hey now. China’s been churning out much higher quality merch of late. And the American Tech Giants have been increasingly wrapped up in US trade war politics. So a lot of this shit now comes from the Philippines, India, and Bangladesh.
Honestly, I stopped buying on Amazon 3 years ago. Apart from an enshittified experience I don’t want to pay for Jeff Bezos next Helicopter. I go to the store or buy on alternative web sites which are 10€ more expensive, but fuck Jeff.
ebay. You get pretty much the same offerings but at least on ebay the people selling actually care about looking good since negative reviews really tank your scores and those actually matter.
Just a week ago I got victim of Amazon dropshipping on eBay. The product was delivered by and from Amazon, but the ebay seller used a weird tracking service so it isn’t too obvious. He put the 5€ difference directly into his pocket. I complained to eBay, but they decided “based on automation and the use of artificial intelligence”, that no rules were broken. So be careful with using eBay as an alternative. Negative reviews can be more or less easily removed on eBay, better give a neutral review in these cases.
Negative reviews are not easily removed on eBay. My husband has been a seller for years now. People will complain about the wildest shit that was clearly addressed in the listing, then you spend 2 hours on the phone with eBay, and likely they will keep the review.
On Amazon, on the other hand, vendors will personally reach out to you if you give anything less than 5 stars and basically “work” with you u til you change your rating (giving you free shit). A lot of people end up changing their review.
vendors will personally reach out to you if you give anything less than 5 stars and basically “work” with you u til you change your rating (giving you free shit)
Not the one I had a problem with. They sold me a bunch of reman hard drives that were listed as new. When I returned them and gave them a shitty review about how they lied they tried to bribe me with 1 used drive to take it down. I was like, “no, give me what I actually ordered or fuck off” They fucked off. Amazon also didn’t do shit to them for there fraudulent listings as far as I can tell.
Good call.
I will say, I do go out of my way to buy from local spots. I’ve thought about trying to negotiate with some Local Game Store types about prices. I want to buy from LGS but if the price is twice that of Amazon I do find it challenging, if it was like 50% up from Amazon I’d do it, but double is a bit too big of a difference to me in some cases.
Especially if it’s just one extra trader in between who drives the price. Jeff Bezos is evil, but let’s not act like local electronic stores are charity. In the end it’s all produced in China…
Their b2c stuff isn’t what’s making bezos rich. It’s AWS, which is difficult to avoid as it runs over half of the internet. But I get the sentiment.
Man it’s fallen off a cliff. Many years ago I bought a knockoff Chinese messenger bag from Amazon. It’s fantastic, great materials, good quality zipper, it’s held up to daily use for years and looks even better than when I got it (leather developed a nice patina).
So, I needed another bag, went looking for the same brand as mine. No longer there, but there are 75 identical looking but weirdly named brands instead. I found one that looked as similar as I could to my old bag, and this one is an utter piece of shit. I mean, I’ll use it, it’s a duffle bag so not as much use as the messenger bag, but the difference is stark. Stiff, cheap cloth, leather sure, but probably harvested entirely from cow buttholes, zippers look brass, but one zip and the color wore off…
Everything, even purchased goods have enshittified. Everything looks cool but just absolutely sucks.
I wonder what enables this business model to survive? 🤔
People being afraid of AliExpress
A market of lemons
leather sure, but probably harvested entirely from cow buttholes
lmao
The internet was so good in 08. You searched for stuff, found exactly what you needed, and were done.
Poor kids today will never know anything other than ad ridden bot corponet.
The internet was so good in 08. You searched for stuff, found exactly what you needed, and were done.
Shit was bad in 2008, too. The degree to which drop shippers had consolidated down to one mega-wholesaler rather than a dozen crappy fly-by-nights hadn’t happened yet. You got a dozen different flavors of crap rather than just one. But it was still crap.
Poor kids today will never know anything other than ad ridden bot corponet.
Under an Amazon keyword search, sure. You can still find good quality products outside of Amazon. You can even find it inside Amazon if you know what you’re looking for.
The difference between 2008 and 2025 is primarily that Amazon’s algorithmic tools have degraded to the state of Yahoo or Sears.
You think normal people today go outside the 5 walled garden corpo sites?
They dont.
They are terrified of an html website. I dont have tech friends irl, so trust me. The real internet, the original non corpo net, is only for ultra nerds now.
If you seriously think the internet is better now than 08 ish, well I dont agree.
If you seriously think the internet is better now than 08 ish, well I dont agree.
I think it’s heavily predicated on what you’re using the Internet for. In the business world, we’ve improved system redundancy, backup/recovery, and transfer speeds by leaps and bounds.
Back in 2008, I was in my car driving to Dallas to escape Hurricane Ike, with a trunk full of server hardware needed to keep our business running. Datacenter proliferation has fully eliminated the need to do anything like that again.
We have significantly more high speed broadband. We have superior wireless connectivity. HTML5 is much better than it’s predecessors. We’ve modernized APIs and broadly adopted JSON for transmission. The hardware is so much better, from phones to routers to raspberry pis for self-hosting.
I get you don’t like the current content of big Web 2.0 publishers. But you’re really missing the forest for a few big ugly trees
In 2008 you could do a web search and have relevant real results right on the first page. Maybe an ad or two.
Now it is effectively:
- AI summary
- ad
- ad
- ad
- link that is effectively an ad
- link to AI generated website
- link to AI generated website
- link to an actual decent result
- link to a questionable result
- link to AI generated website
You can change search provider and have the experience back ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I use DuckDuckGo and it is better in general, but still has a big pitfall with AI generated websites. I’ve used some others like SearXNG but those feel experimental at best. I’m willing to hear about viable alternatives.
Kagi is where it’s at. Changed my search experience for the better like crazy.
In 2008 you could do a web search and have relevant real results
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bombing
Google had (mostly) solved this problem by 2007. I couldn’t name another search engine that could claim the same.
But the process of Spamdexing has been an ongoing war of the websites since the nineties. Google never fully solved it, they just did a better job than most up until the big executive shift in 2018.
The spam site takeover of your search results in the modern day is as much a consequence of modernization in Spamdexing as it is any search engine’s own failures. None of those AI content mill sites existed to index 20 years ago
I forget the exact proposed bill, it might have been SOPA (or something else threatening net neutrality), and it might have been around 2010. That made me think “they want to make the internet into cable TV”. And we’re pretty close to that being reality in a way.
- driven by AI-slop
(For real: all those products and descriptions/titles are so bad, it has to be AI-slop)
I deleted my Amazon account last month. No more Goodreads and IMDb is just another plus.
Extracted my ebooks from my Kindle with Calibre, so I am fine.
Feeling good and less targeted and bombarded.
Having really hard time converting Kindle books lately, especially since last time I tried this, the deDRM plugin couldn’t handle the newest Kindle for PC versions. Is there an easy way that doesn’t involve getting a physical Kindle device? Does the Android thing work?
I suppose the easiest way is installing an old kindle for PC version, if that’s the problem (not through the kindle website)
Cannot say. I had a very old Kindle and all my books on device.
Does that work for Google Play books? Is it an app?
Google Play Books allows publishers to set the DRM policy. Some titles are not protected and can be just downloaded as EPUB. For the DRMed books, it can send them to Adobe’s ebook reader/sync app, which (last I checked) can be decrypted by the Calibre deDRM plugin.
Calibre is a program for Windows/Linux. To be able to export books (and deDRM them) there are different plugins, but I never heard about one for Google Play Books.
Thank you.
More expensive AliExpress…
It feels like Amazon is flooded with dropshipping beyond repair.But you know that capitalism is so good because the free market ensures that there’s so much variety and choice in quality and innovation.
What we have isn’t even capitalism. The supposed free market doesn’t exist when the big players pocket the regulators to use as a weapon against smaller businesses and secure their own market positioning.
Incidentally, this is typically the end result of capitalism if you don’t reign in and break up these companies.
I know. It’s how what China and the Soviets had wasn’t communism. A relatively small group of people climb up top and ruin everything, as they always have.
It’s like we have a centrally planned economy but dumber.
I don’t know what the solution is.
The first thing I would do if I had a magic wand and could just change reality to see what happens, would be to get rid of Citizens United and whatever they called that decision that said money=speech. That’s the kind of thing that could actually happen without requiring wholesale societal change. Add in some strong campaign finance laws and maybe you could get some politicians who aren’t putting themselves up for auction to the highest bidder.
What we have is exactly capitalism. A “winner-takes-it-all” system breeds oligopoly, and oligopoly breeds corruption.
the big players pocket the regulators
That’s the entire point of capitalism, it’s how it’s always been, and it’s how it will always be. It’s class analysis: the capital owners have the media, the political power, and the repressive force of the state apparatus behind them.
There are two factors necessary for a truly free market that prevent any capitalist system from actually being a free market. They are:
-
Consumers need to have perfect information about the products and the companies that make and/or sell them - in other words, companies must not be able to hide their sins.
-
There needs to be zero friction for new entrants into the marketplace, whether that is from costs to start up a business, or anti-competitive behavior from other companies with money to throw around.
It is impossible to achieve either of these in the real world.
-
They don’t need to pocket the regulators.
They just need to buy up or out-price the competition into oblivion.
These practices are exactly the kinds of behaviors that regulators should prevent.
When a business gets huge it shouldn’t be allowed to buy up all of its competition. Regulatory authorities should block these acquisitions. For example, Sprint should never have been sold because it concentrated power even further and gives customers less choice.
It’s not simple price competition either. A company like Walmart can afford to sell products at a loss to drive other businesses out on purpose and then jack up the prices when they’re the only game in town. Dollar General has been accused of strategically placing stores to block businesses from making a profit.
Sprint is an interesting example because I believe regulators did block previous merger attempts on exactly those grounds.
It’s yet another case subject to the whims of whatever administration is in charge, and we’re stuck with the fallout
It used to work. When something no longer sold, manufacturers would diversify. Now they force you to still buy the same product with the help of politicians and bribes.
Are you looking for something which can actually take a beating? I have bought like four of these cheaper bags on Amazon and they all fall apart in a year or two. And before then they all have shitty strap adjustments which slowly slip over time.
I’d strongly suggest getting something like a chrome or timbuk2 bag which will be like 5x more expensive up front but will actually last decades instead of years. I have been dailying the OG chrome citizen messenger bag for five years now and it’s barely broken in.
Timbuk2 isn’t as good as they used to be. If you can find a used one it’s worth it, I’ve had mine for like twenty years, but I wouldn’t gamble on one made in the last five years. (They closed all their physical stores and cut costs on manufacturing by moving offshore)
"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet."
GNU Terry Pratchett
I agree. I have several timbuk2 bags and the only one with significant damage is the pet carrier that my cat clawed the shit out of. The company repaired it for like $10 to cover the shipping
I second this. I am currently still using the waxed canvas bag from the distilled collection and all I’ve had to do is replace the strap from wear. Its seen rain, snow, and shitloads of abuse that would cause these cheaper bags to just disintegrate. Its old as shit by now but aside from being well worn - is still perfectly functional.
Do Amazon companies count in Scrabble?
If hoement wasn’t a word then now it is.
We are totally making hoement happen
About to have a ho moment with my Business Messenger Bag. 💅
Probably not but “zoomer” and “yeet” do!
Once again capitalism has bred all sorts of innovation in the space!
