April 16th - "Mindless Yammering"
7Mindless Yammering
Probably indistinguishable from any of my posts, today’s topic is lacking focus and continuity. Just a bit of mindless yammering.
I love my dogs. They make a vital contribution to my existence. I have two. Super Belle the Wonder Dog (aka Miss Belle), and the Zoe Monster. I call Miss Belle my watch dog. Not because she keeps intruders at bay, but because she has an uncanny ability to know within a minute or two when it’s meal time. Particularly annoying when I didn’t get home until 5am and she’s used to having breakfast at 7:30am sharp. At 7:29 I had the pleasure of waking up to the sound of Miss Belle’s 5 pound paw smacking at my bedroom door. Heaven forbid I could get a few extra minutes of sleep!
Stealing a page from Irk “Maybe it bothers me more than it should”. I find it particularly objectionable when retail companies play the pricing game. Like those shops in New York that have the perpetual “Going out of business!” sales. Amazon in particular is very bad about this. List an item “sale” price, and list the “regular” price as some fictitious inflated number. “Save over 55% off the regular price!” Well, sure Amazon, maybe off the MSRP price, but that’s not the “regular” price you sell that item for, is it. Also very prolific among Amazon Marketplace sellers in the daily Lightning Deals on Amazon. I see the same stuff in there for days and days on end touted as a Lightning Deal. Well, that’s now the regular price then, isn’t it.
Today is Easter, so to all those who celebrate, Happy Easter!
To those who don’t celebrate Easter, Happy first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox! Even if you don’t celebrate Easter, there’s no reason you can’t grab those after-Easter candy sales at the market. Last year I grabbed a bunch of after-Easter candy for the office. They killed about 10 pounds of candy in one day. Guess I shoulda got more?!
It’s possible the lack of sleep is catching up with me. I seem to be making less sense than my usual nonsense.
Anyhoo, happy Sunday. I hope, whatever you celebrate (or don’t celebrate) your Sunday is great!
- 6 comments, 20 replies
- Comment
@woodhouse
In lieu of a Twilight Zone episode, enjoy this clip from the Twilight Zone “movie”:
@PlacidPenguin Easter bunny!
@PlacidPenguin Although sort of Twilight Zone in name only, I did enjoy the film. Released in the early '80’s when the tongue in cheek vignette fantasy-sci-fi-horror genre was very popular. Twilight Zone, Cats Eye, Amazing Stories, Tales from the Crypt, Creepshow, all were great fun. Reckons me back to the days of primary school sleepovers with pizza, way too much soda and a couple video cassettes rented at the local independent video store.
@ruouttaurmind
Followed a few years later by the rise of Blockbuster.
How did you train your dog to eat at the same exact time every day? My dog just eats whenever I wake up. Occasionally she’ll wake me up to go outside if I’m sleeping in ridiculously late.
@RiotDemon I have a pretty regular routine, and feed them on a regular schedule. Miss Belle, a Lab, is super sweet, but kinda simple, so when her schedule is disrupted she has a hard time dealing.
Zoe Monster is more of a free thinker, and deals more rationally with variables.
ugh pricing. camelcamelcamel helps, but they dont track digital goods.
some say i have a positive and verifiable gift for the mindless thing and the yammering thing. FTW!
@f00l It was Camel3 that initially made me aware of Amazons pricing games.
Yesterday afternoon the pricing game was on my mind because of a trip to Safeway. They stock a store brand of potato chips. The 7oz bag has been “on sale” for $1 for about a year. I happened to notice the shelf tag yesterday says the regular price is $2.99. WHAT? For a small bag of generic mediocre quality chips? In a market region where the national brands sell a 9oz bag for $2.50? And what’s up with the year-long “sale”?
Oh, sorry about that. I guess I’m not over it yet.
@ruouttaurmind
Pffft. That’s nothing.
You should see the pricing games played in some local stores over certain common (and easy to obtain) products.
@ruouttaurmind
@PlacidPenguin
Amazon’s Gold Box Deals are frequently decent deals, but that is not the same as they’re actually being “excellent” deals. You just have to check slickdeals or camel*3 to see.
When it’s a really good deal, Amazon will usually put both the list price and Amazon’s prev price right up front to be seen. When Amazon only puts the list price up, that can mean it’s not much of a discount.
The Lightning Deals are way worse. The whole point of a Lightning Deal is to game your mind into an impulse purchase. But some of these are jsut barely discounted off Amazon’s regular price, perhaps just dollar or a few dollars.
Plenty of us would purchase useful or intriuging stuff we don’t need but might use at half off or something. Amazon is trying to get us to do the same, for something we might never use, for a discount often of pennies.
I never look at the lightning deals unless I’m after something specific I’m going to buy anyway.
Amazon’s Warehouse and Outlet can be quite useful. I’ve never gotten bad electronics from them. Everything looked new, with perhaps a slightly crunched corner of the case or something.
Even then you have to check camel*3 to be sure it’s worth the buy unless you have to buy one anyway.
Right now amazon and ebay between them own the “everything” playing field. I’m surprised that Rakuten hasn’t tried much harder to occupy this space worldwide. I expect that Alibaba Express or whatever Alibaba calls their retail, non-bulk-sales market, will go after the “everything, worldwide” customer base in a big way. I wonder if anyone will try to challenge Amazon on logistics?
@f00l I like to browse Lightning Deals just for fun. I seems to be dominated mostly by Marketplace sellers, which brings a unique assortment of unusual items. Often I’ll SMH about the stuff Amazon offers in LD. Very specific fiment auto parts, replacement pieces for unusual laboratory equipment, accessories for long discontinued retail merch… like the sellout stuff listed on Woot these days.
@f00l BTW, I recently discovered some pretty large data flaws in Camel3 that has me searching for an alternative to correlate price data. Are you aware of any other similar sites?
@ruouttaurmind
What kind of flaws at 3camel? That’s always a risk. But I don’t know anyone else who is doing scraping all of amazon they can scrap, and who also has price history data.
The things I dislike most about 3camel are the outdated clumsy interface and the outdated, clumsy search, and that search results are often so inaccurate. And why don’t they do some decent apps already? I might actually pay a small subscription to them if they would just do a better job.
As for bad data: I wonder if Amazon is trying to mess with them somehow? Data warfare?
Re search results and search order, and trying to eliminate junk, I suppose they are just passing their own search parameters over to Amazon’s search, which could use a lot of improvement.
Because 3camel isn’t exactly fun to use, I mess with it normally only for major purchases, along with checking price history via slickdeals and dealnews, sale price history at Ebay, and if I’m looking for electronics, checking at least a few more retail sites, esp for open box etc.
@f00l
I bought a pair of shoes from Amazon. Before making the purchase I checked pricing history. Current price was well enough below any previously recorded price, I decided to buy. About a week and a half later I noticed the shoes were still the same low price I paid. Just out of curiosity I ran a C*3 search and received the same data they reported 10 days prior, with no record of the recent lower price.
I’m speculating: in cases where items are available with variables (color, size, etc) the C*3 data parser doesn’t seem to be smart enough to understand the variables. Since Amazon and Marketplace sellers frequently sell variations at different prices, this can be relevant. For example an immersion cooker available in 5 color choices, each at a different price.
@ruouttaurmind
Yeah I’ve noticed that with colors. You have to be really careful with 3camel and colors.
Amazon on site is making it a bit easier now. Click thru to the alternative sellers page, and you will get options to see lowest price for each size, each color, each config, etc.
Like this:
https://smile.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B01BRWH8G8/ref=olp_twister_all?ie=UTF8&mv_color_name=all&mv_configuration=all&mv_digital_storage_capacity=all
@f00l
I’ve been using that option for a while now.
Happy Easter to you, goat!
@mikibell Thank you! To you and yours as well!
Happy Easter, happy Passover, happy spring festivals, happy tax weekend, happy failed test missile launch, happy whatever else I forgot to mention!
/giphy happy
@f00l
I miss Snapple. I’ll probably need to buy one of those big bottles later this week just to calm myself down.
Except… Somebody will most likely either get killed, or get sent to a work camp.
It’s "Yammer Time"
@mfladd Haaaaaaaaa! Love that gif!
@ruouttaurmind If you stare at it long enough there is something really creepy about it.
@mfladd I didn’t even have to stare at it and it looked creepy to me! It reminds me of a giant sea slug I saw while diving in the Sea of Cortez once.
(Borrowed image; not me)
@mfladd That is so repulsive. If it were slimy I’d barf.
@OldCatLady Stop your yammering.
