I wanted to get printer photo paper for my printer, a Canon. I went to Walmart, They had nothing. Went to Target, they had one pack of photo paper and it was crazy expensive, so I went to micro center. That one was just as expensive. So finally I went back to Amazon, which I was trying to avoid, and saw the price 25 to 40% lower than anywhere I had been. Literally everything that I was looking for, I could find within seconds. Not even Best buy has even close to the amount of inventory or variety, even when you’re shopping online…
Therefore, I think Amazon has a literal monopoly in the tech industry right now, you’re literally forced to buy from them, because unless you have the money and financial fortitude to protest with your wallet, you’re going to be buying from them. There’s no other choice. They have so aggressively and dominantly taken over the supply chain market that no other tech company can currently compete with them in any aspect at all. You will be paying 40 to 50% more on everything by cutting out Amazon, and no one has the money for that anymore unless you’re upper middle class or above
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Amazon is a place where you have to deal with fake items and getting fraudulent returns shipped to you as new. Your reward for this is maybe a 5% discount.
Walmart online is eating Amazon they don’t have a monopoly
Only in the US unfortunately
Walmart online is pretty good for most things. Not everything. But if I can get it on Walmart I do… Walmart plus is pretty good. It currently comes with Paramount Plus, which doesn’t show ads with my pi-hole (so far, Roku), and compared with Amazon Prime showing ads…
Anyway fuck Amazon.
It’s pretty amazing to me that a company hasanagednto become so reviled that Walmart is the better and more ethical option.
It’s like Elon Musk has managed to make Mark Zuckerberg seem like a good person by comparison. Or Trump was so awful that Democrats look back and think “huh, GWB was a decent president”
There are other online shops besides Amazon. I find an alternative for almost everything that I order and it’s not more expensive. And finding the right product inside Amazon is so exhausting nowadays that it’s not more work to compare different web shops.
Ain’t recent data showing amazon longer cheapest?
Sounds like one off here tbh
Bought a RX 6400 for a little windoze game box, and shelled out around 30€ /35€ more at a conventional well known shop here, materiel dot net. Bought most of my stuff there over the years, nice people, etc.
But I couldn’t just go get it, it “had to” be delivered, so I paid for that too (I guess you do the same on Amazon), high class delivery or so I thought. Ordered thursday, scheduled delivery “wednesday 8h-19h” so okay I WFH but man better be there every minute right?
Got a confirmation SMS/Text around 12, we’re delivering your package today! (No more info).
Surprise, they didnt.
Suddenly it’s scheduled “Thursday 8h-19h”.
Grrr
I bet I would have gotten my card on saturday if I had used amazon (+30€ too…).
I mean are brick & mortar stores dead now for real maybe?
Services quality is down across all segments of economy tho this ain’t retail specific.
We pay more, we get less. Entire life is being rapidly enshitified
I recently wanted to get a pre-workout, I looked it up on Amazon and then I went to the company site to just order directly from there. It was like $10 cheaper on Amazon because of free shipping and subscribe & save.
It’s because Amazon requires the seller not undercut its Amazon store through other outlets, including their own website. If you are a seller and you want to take advantage of Amazon Prime, then you have to make sure your Amazon price is the cheapest price available on the internet.
I canceled prime a year ago as I can no longer support the monopoly and destruction to everyone else
It sounds like you went to several physical stores and when their stock on hand was not sufficient you concluded your only option was Amazon. What about the rest of the internet?
I’ve been deeply hooked on Amazon for a long time and trying to wean myself off of it for a variety of reasons. The most helpful thing in this, I’ve found, is Apple Pay.
I happen to use an iPhone and Apple Pay is easy. It is increasingly accepted everywhere, making any online store a one-click purchase. Maybe for you it would be PayPal or Google Pay but whatever your preference is, these payment services have come a long way.
For years I was stuck on Amazon because of the convenience. I am not ashamed - convenience is a real benefit when life is busy. And I had everything set up on Amazon, and they had most things available in their search.
But Google Shopping also has almost everything in the world available and most or all the retailers there accept Apple Pay. So now I just do that. It works just as easily.
You can even search on Amazon and then take note of the name of the seller and search the internet for them and then buy direct. Most have websites because Amazon fees eat into their profits. They would rather sell direct. And easy payment services plus ecommerce platforms like Shopify and Square make it easier than ever.
Amazon is becoming a cesspool of Chinese scams these days. I am tempted to say that I still prefer Amazon because the returns are easy but the fact is that I have HAD to return a lot of things to Amazon because they were not what I thought I was buying or they were just absolute shit quality or arrived broken.
So the point remains: you have alternatives. Use them. If you want physical stores, that’s another matter entirely and I agree those are getting fewer and worse. But Amazon doesn’t always beat them on price. You should check every time and you might be surprised. I was in my local CVS and I saw they had the exact LED bulbs I needed to buy but I thought they’d be too expensive there so I checked Amazon on the spot. CVS beat them by a couple of dollars. So check every time!
You really think that in 2024 - a time when not even school children are expected to print out reports because everything is submitted digitally - the fact that photo printer paper not being ubiquitous reflects literally anything other than we’ve mostly moved past paper as a society?
I’m not saying reddit is better - it clearly is not - but ask yourselves why Lemmy is so absolutely shit at applying Occam’s Razor to their own biases?
You tried three in person places and then went straight to Amazon? Why not trying to buy directly from the manufacturer? You clearly didn’t try at all. Ignoring the fact that there are still plenty of other retail stores, you didn’t even try the online shops of any of your retail stores.
I frequently buy stuff online from Target because they also do free shipping, it usually arrives in 2-3 days, and they have somewhat frequent deals. So I’ll get a similar or lower price vs Amazon and still get it relatively quickly. Oh, and I can check inventory of my local stores if I really need something same-day. That way I don’t have to drive around all that much, I’ll just order for same-day pickup and grab whatever it is on the way home from work (and I pass like 3 Targets on the way home).
So I almost never need to buy regular things from Amazon. Between Costco, Costco.com, Target, Home Depot, and eBay, most of my bases are covered. For the rest, I search a bit before going back to Amazon.
I used to spend several thousand dollars at Amazon every year, and now it’s a few hundred. I’m not “boycotting” them or anything, I just prefer other retailers because I don’t those alternatives to disappear.
I put some of the blame on retailers as well. Retail stores just don’t want to carry inventory anymore, especially tech-focused ones with many of those just turning into glorified showrooms. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard some version of: “Sorry, we don’t have that in stock but we can bring it in for you.”
We needed a short length of garden hose here for the house so I went to two hardware stores and one garden centre looking for one. Nothing. Not even in their dedicated gardening sections. I had to order it off Amazon. A goddamn garden hose.
Amazon has done a lot of damage for sure but retail is suffering from several self-inflicted wounds too. Home Depot, for example, is a multi-billion dollar corporation and even they have a weaker retail presence now. That’s not Amazon’s fault.
Retail stores just don’t want to carry inventory anymore
Retail stores are more than happy to carry anything consumers want to pay for. If they don’t stock it, it means people don’t buy it, and you can’t fault them for that.
That’s not Amazon’s fault.
That’s mostly the fault of consumers who buy from Amazon (and other e-tailors).
That’s not Amazon’s fault.
That’s mostly the fault of consumers who buy from Amazon (and other e-tailors).
There’s quite a few retail stores that don’t keep inventory, even for common things. Staples comes to mind, where it feels like half their damn office items aren’t in stock, so you need to wait for them to have it brought in.
The problem is that those same retail stores can’t compete with Amazon’s shipping speed. It becomes a case of:
- I want to buy a thing, I need it fast, so I guess I’ll check my local retails stores
- My local retail stores don’t have it in stock, but I can order it and it’ll be there in 4-5 days
- I can just buy it off of Amazon at a comparable price, and have it tomorrow
It’s alright if they don’t want to carry inventory, but they need to have the shipping speeds to compete, otherwise there’s no reason for the consumer not to just buy it off of Amazon directly.
The problem with this “econ101” thinking is that it insists that the whole system runs on the choices of actors in a deterministic system.
I don’t know what any of these words mean.
Yes, the system isn’t perfectly deterministic, but on average and over a long-enough time period, it pretty much is. People are going to act irrationally, but generally people will be irrational roughly equally on either side of “rational.”
In this case, the market is probably big enough that if a big retailer doesn’t stock something, it’s because the average person has decided that buying it elsewhere (i.e. Amazon) or not buying it at all (i.e. longer is fine) is preferable to buying it at the local store. It’s not the local retailer’s fault that it’s unprofitable to stock that item, it’s a mix of consumers and online competition making that product unprofitable to stock.
That said, you’ll probably have a better shot if you go to specialized stores. In this case, look at farming and plumbing supply stores, since they’re more likely to service those customers who really need that short hose today to complete a project. Your regular home improvement stores (e.g. Lowe’s and Home Depot) cater to homeowners more than contractors (so having a little of everything is better than lots of something), whereas the specialist stores cater to contractors and small business owners.
Harbor Freight.
When you absolutely need something to work presicely once between the day you buy it and the day you’re late for jury duty.
I’ve gotten some surprisingly long lasting gems there, but you can never be sure. Like you said, I’ve also gotten a number “single use” tools from Harbor Freight. Overall though, it’s almost always been worth it.
Most homeowners don’t need better than HF. If you start getting into more sophisticated equipment their quality can be really problematic but for all the basic stuff a homeowner needs: hammer and pliers, HF is one-stop.
From there you have to be careful, but gems can be found. I’ve been using their 120V 2HP dust collector in my wood shop for years now and it is an insane value for a decent machine.
Yup. Hand tools are generally pretty safe, anything with a motor is sus. And honestly, I respect my health enough to not buy safety equipment there (3M is the way to go most of the time).
Check your local mom and pop hardware store if you have one! I had to get a feeder hose this summer as well, and the only place I found it was a local family owned hardware store.
They don’t want to carry inventory because Amazon doesn’t. The prices are higher because vendors are contractually obligated to sell on Amazon at their lowest price. So retailers, with a need to have a physical presence and having to buy at more or less the same price a product is available for on Amazon, get fucked. Their only hope is vendors who make a “different” product to sell at other outlets. An example of what I mean is, Poppi soda sells for $20/12 pack on Amazon. They sell a 15 pack at Costco for the same price. Because it’s a “different” product they are not in breach of contract.
Mean while my Best Buy has so much crap in the aisles that you can’t pass a person without having to do the weird turn side ways shuffle. Home Depot isn’t much better. Trying to push a lumber carts around is a joke now. So much crap stuck in the middle of the aisles or at the end of the aisles. So I don’t think it’s a lack of inventory but a variety of inventory.
Having worked at a Target like this, I can assure you there is still a lack of inventory on top of these stores being extremely short staffed. Target in particular completely eliminated their storeroom staff a few years ago and just doubled the work load of the floor staff. Both the floor and the storeroom were absolute nightmares to navigate because there were not enough people to actually organize and stock.
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That requires Facebook
I’ll stick to not buying things instead
I feel you. Fortunately, in my area there’s a very popular classifieds section at one of the local newspapers, so I can stick to my guns avoiding Facebook.
So check local newspaper classifieds, Craigslist, and maybe your local library (you never know if they organize swaps).
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He said he didn’t want to use Facebook.
I wonder how much investment it drives in Facebook to be a user who registered under an assumed name on a VPN with an ad blocker enabled.
Unfortunately, probably some.
Totally agree!
Looks like you’ve been hard at work blocking since people actually agree with you now
If it’s sold and shipped by amazon, you should be able to price match it at bestbuy or target. I don’t know why walmart stopped price matching anybody.
It’s hard to compete when you’re basically a warehouse and your market is the literal population of the internet.
Yeah, microcenter, even if it’s the only computer/electronics store for 100 miles, can still only hold so much, and they only reach people in/around their city at most. It’s not like people are crossing state lines to get to a computer store… Unless you live on the border of your state, I suppose.
Amazon has, at the very least, dozens of warehouses across the country that can deliver whatever it is you want with remarkable efficiency because postal/parcel services have been systematically improving over the past 50+ years.
I’m not saying I’m a fan of Amazon, but bluntly, is it really surprising, in the slightest, that Amazon can out price everyone else?
So politely, how does Amazon offering a better price on a niche paper product conflate into them having a monopoly on the “tech industry”?
I’d posit the real thing here is that Amazon’s warehouses allow them to keep less-purchased products around in stock that a brick-and-mortar retail store simply wouldn’t bother with at all, but that’s been the case for decades at this point.
And, yes, printing out images has become an uncommon activity and I can’t say I’d blame any of the larger stores for only having a single expensive option available, but that’s their decision, not Amazon’s.
The long tail has always been one of Amazon’s strengths.
That said, buying anything from them runs a good chance of getting knock off garbage these days.
knock off garbage these days
Yep. I actually order more junk from AliExpress than Amazon now, because it’s the same shit except AliExpress is half the cost so if I’m going to get junk at least I’m paying junk-level prices.
(This is mostly components and other hobby-related stuff where there never really was any difference between AliExpress and Amazon, other than faster shipping.)
Bingo. Temu and Aliexpress. Same site, really.
Woodpecker or the item you can freely drop on the concrete floor without crying due to loss of investment.
Eh, going to disagree that Aliexpress == Temu.
Not that I’m saying Aliexpress is a paragon of virtue, but Temu is full of dark patterns, scammy “discounts” and just nonstop playing games trying to get you to buy now, refer people, and “win” shit. It’s a gambling app that happens to sell toxic trash as a side gig.
Aliexpress really has cleaned their shit up and basically sends you what you expect to get, when you expect to get it, and has made refunds for blatant bullshit (I had to return some clearly counterfeit remarked chips) if not easy then at least something you could actually accomplish.
100% agreed. There’s no way I’m touching Temu, but I do go to AliExpress every now and then. And most of the time, I can line up the Amazon listing for whatever I’m buying with a bit of research, so I can benefit from the reviews there (and not the 5 star reviews, but 1-2 star reviews).
Not only that but Amazon isn’t the only online retailer to sell stuff like this. OP only checked some brick and mortar stores then went straight to Amazon without even checking out other places like Canon directly, B&H, Walmart.com, etc.
Doesn’t look like they went to an Office Max/Depot or Staples either, which honestly, would be my first stop for printers and printer accessories these days, since printers have very much fallen into just office-use shit and that one damn thing a year you have to print because some jackass is still stuck in 1988.
Honestly, you should probably never go to Office Max/Depot or Staples for printer stuff because they often overcharge. Unless you need to print photos, get a reliable laser printer (Brother is great) and then shop around for toner when it’s time to replace in a few years. I found the toner I needed through the MFG website, then searched around a bit to see if there was a better deal. Toner is almost never an emergency, it’ll warn you when it’s low, which means you probably have a few months to order something.
Also, don’t get an inkjet, you’ll pay out the nose for it. If you do need to print photos, I recommend sending batches to get printed somewhere else. Yeah, it’s not as convenient as having the printer right there, but it’ll save a bit of time and headache, and probably some cash as well.
I buy paper at Costco and toner online at whatever retailer is cheapest. For office supplies, I generally stock up around back-to-school sales in August/September (in the US). The only time I go to an office supply store is if I really need some folders or something around tax season.
how does Amazon offering a better price on a niche paper product conflate into them having a monopoly on the “tech industry”?
For starters, it’s typically not “better price” so much as “only people able to consistently obtain supply”. The real price is very likely higher than it was 5-10 years ago when production was prolific.
But also, we saw this game play out with Walmart. The monopoly retailer has an opportunity to outsource to the least ethical producer.
So Amazon gets to be the sole distributor of printer paper, the manufacturer is some old growth harvestor in the Amazon using prison/slave labor for harvesting/processing, and even then you’re paying more for a worse product than when a well regulated and unionized workforce was producing the commodity a decade earlier.
So Amazon gets to be the sole distributor of printer paper, the manufacturer is some old growth harvestor in the Amazon using prison/slave labor for harvesting/processing, and even then you’re paying more for a worse product than when a well regulated and unionized workforce was producing the commodity a decade earlier.
That doesn’t really make sense in this context as this paper is made by Canon not Amazon. You could make the argument that Canon is using rainforest paper, but then the rest of this kind of falls apart.
this paper is made by Canon not Amazon
Rubbermaid had to completely downsize and restructure its workforce as Walmart chewed through the retail competitors who purchased their products wholesale. This was back in the 90s.
Canon is under the same pressure today. Amazon sets the wholesale price point as a monopsony and Canon has to deliver at that price or fail to make the sales.
the money and time you spent traveling to three different stores outweighs the couple bucks more you would have spent at walmart. protip: next time try staples or office depot. also, taking a moral position means sacrifice, and often times that’s financial.
