Jeff, why'd you have to go and make things so complicated?

@ruouttaurmind And packages didn’t arrive with a little card that offered something free from the seller in exchange for a 5-star review of the product on Amazon.

@dave There is… sort of. If you select Amazon as the seller. But you’re still gonna have promoted items in the mix.

@f00l

weren’t counterfeit

THIS! I bought some DeWalt grinding wheels from Amz, Amz was the seller, and they were absolutely Chinasian counterfeits! How’s Amazon gonna sell faux stuff? HOW!?

@f00l @ruouttaurmind They mix inventory with items received from third party sellers. Even if the item is sold by amazon you are rolling the dice as to what item they pull out of the bin…what they put in or what the scammers sent them which they did not check before adding to the universal item bin. Items can no longer be trusted no matter who the seller is (not that this practice hasn’t been going on for years, just keeps getting worse as time goes on).

@f00l The only thing that keeps me going back to Amz is the ability to order something in the morning and have it waiting at my door when I get home. Usually. Ok, sometimes.

@RiotDemon Where do you put your legs? They look kind of small.

@RiotDemon Thank you for the Chewy suggestion. I always forget about them.

I looked at the same Furhaven products at Amz this afternoon. The price is a bit too dear for what I had in mind. I bought her current bed (30”x40”x4”) at the local Kroger affiliate about 6 years ago for $15. I was expecting to have to spend at least twice that. I didn’t expect more than 4x.

PerSmart didn’t have any bigger beds in the store I stopped at. I’m gonna check out the selection at Chewy and Foster & Smith.

@ruouttaurmind I didn’t realize they were on such a good sale when I bought them. You can usually get chewy coupons online. I use the honey browser extension when I’m at home.

If they were the same price I paid, they are completely worth it. (Even more expensive, I still say worth it.) These have the upgraded thick foam. I actually have the same bed as my first link but with the egg crate type foam and the orthopedic is much more substantial. I took a gamble on the foam because I’ve been using the one with the egg crate foam for quite a while and it’s held up really nicely in the wash. The egg crate just wasn’t as thick as I wanted. My old lady is 80 pounds so I wanted to give her something with more support.

@mehcuda67 what legs?

@mehcuda67 @RiotDemon HAHAHAHA! You crack me up RD! “What legs?” she says HAHAHAHA

@RiotDemon @ruouttaurmind Y’all know Chewy is owned by PetSmart, right? Has been for a while now. But please, keep shopping there - I own some Chewy stock.

@cinoclav @ruouttaurmind I like chewy’s awesome customer service. I used to shop at PetSmart but then they stopped carrying my dogs food in the store.

PANS! GLANDS! CRAYONS! AWESOME!

@RiotDemon @ruouttaurmind Many, many years ago I was a manager at PetSmart. What a shit job that was.

@cinoclav @RiotDemon @ruouttaurmind
Wow, look at that… I learn something new everyday! I had no idea Chewy was/is owned by Pet Smart! Nothin beats having that 40lb bag of kitty litter deliverd right to my front door, thats for sure!!

@cinoclav @Lynnerizer @RiotDemon @ruouttaurmind I didn’t know that either. Now if PetSmart would have the same, in the store, prices that that have online at Chewy that would be nice. I presume they probably price match but that is always a pain to have to do it that way.

@RiotDemon I used to shop at Petco as their cat food was the cheapest in town (well once you factored in their rewards program). Then they went all “high end” brands and dropped it. Now I only go in there when their cat litter is on sale. I do wonder how many customers they lost when they did that.

@mike808 they also have The Best staff, way friendly, overly helpful without being pushy. I stopped going to anywhere else or buying online just because of their staff and being local-owned.

@f00l or TJ Maxx/Marshalls/Home Goods. They usually have a great selection for cheap

@f00l @tinamarie1974 All good suggestions. If I don’t see what I need at Chewy or F&S I’ll try Big Lots and Ross/TJ Maxx tomorrow. Thanks!

@f00l @ruouttaurmind @tinamarie1974
We’ve had pretty good luck at Ross as well.

@f00l Also BJ’s Wholesale Club sometimes does too.

@f00l @PhysAssist

Also BJ’s Wholesale Club sometimes does too.

Yah, but with BJ’s you have to sort thru 2-3 currently active coupon books or pages and pages online or in their crappy app with their crappy sort/search functions… so you don’t miss a fucking coupon. BJ’s = Coupon Hell. And don’t get me started on their crappy corporate customer service… and their not secure credit card promo and credit card application pages - made worse by them pre-populating your personal info on that application page.

@f00l @RedOak Whoa, chillax!!!
I never said they were a paragon of corporate responsibility, I was just commenting on dog bed availability and pricing…

@compunaut Yeah, AMZN works pretty well for me too, but I probably order fewer items than folks w/ families, so I can just buy stuff I’m sure is gonna be good. When you’re shopping for me people, sometimes you just gotta get something quick, maybe?

Anywhoo… Even having said that, I still agree with the main points above: things are worse than they were, and I’d guess that Amazon is now Too Big Not To Fail.

KuoH

@compunaut @UncleVinny I usually start with a google search, open pages from that, and then click the google shopping link- I find that this gives me a pretty good cross-section of the pricing schemes used by various sellers, including fleabay, off-beat suppliers, and Amazon, and makes comparing the free shipping offers and the low price loss leader offers with [sometimes crazy exorbitant] additional shipping more like apples and apples, than the apples and cantaloupes it usually represents.

@compunaut @PhysAssist @UncleVinny
+1 Just a regular internet search is faster than trying to find something on Amazon.

@compunaut @therealjrn @UncleVinny Yeah, not that google does much better at finding something you are specifically looking for, or at sorting results well by prices, etc…

I was gonna try to link it but they have lots.

@djslack Thanks for the linky. They actually have a couple that look decent. But I don’t have a Sam’s Plus membership, so the shipping brings them back up to Amz price, where I could have it tomorrow or Friday.

@thismyusername I do not remember that. Last time I attempted that approach, I think I resorted to a binary search by manually editing the URL…

@thismyusername

Remember when you could sort by low to high, and the actual item would be in the low end instead of pages of random garbage that has nothing to do with the item?

THIS. Exactly this. I do a search. Relevant results are there. Something like 3,000 results. But the results are loaded with $150 items at the top. My budget is 1/3 of that, but of course I want to spend as little as possible.

So I change the sort option to Price: Low to high. Now one of two things happen:

1. Suddently I’m only seeing 27 items (WTF happened to the other 2,973 items?) and a dozen of those 27 items share barely a fleeting similarity to what I searched for
2. I now have 40,000 search results (where were those other 37,000 items in the first sort??) and 95% of those items are in no way related to my search beyond the fact that they are for sale on Amazon.

That one single search example is a clear indication that Amazon’s search/sort options are either broken, or being manipulated. Or more likely, it’s combination of both.

@ruouttaurmind @thismyusername

While I can’t explain or illuminate the intended strategy gains, I believe this “broken search/sort” experience is deliberate Amazon customer manipulation.

Am guessing that, somehow or other, this bad search/sort experience drives the customer conduct, not often than not, in the direction Amazon prefers.

Perhaps, because, many customers just give up on this and buy stuff from the first page or two of the default search results. And, perhaps, lost sales are (%-wise) a relatively uncommon result in amazon’s estimation.

Dunno. They lose sales to me over this as well.

But … if they wanted it fixed, it would be fixed. So … I suspect they like it this way.

I would love to have a real search-sort at Amazon, along with a “limit results to terms in the item listing title” option. And a no-third party-seller option.

Right now, these don’t seem to be options amazon wants us to have.

@f00l No doubt there are more people who either don’t bother to do extended searches, or are not aware they can (should be able to anyway). My mother is an excellent example of this kind of Amazon customer. She orders something nearly every day. She definitely does not do any sorting or extended searching or price matching. She types “Glad kitchen trash bags” or whatever and buys from the first returned results.

@f00l @ruouttaurmind it is amazons way of using the middle shelves at the grocery store but in a digital commerce way.

@djslack To be fair, refrigerator filters are made to fit a raft of manufacturer model numbers since people search by their refrigerator model number, and not by the filter part number. And every color and minor feature change gets its own part number, not to mention specific models for Lowes, Home Depot, and Best Buy that only exist so you can’t price match them.

As the saying goes, if you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.

@mike808 while what you say is true, I don’t follow from there to where searching for one part number should return everything in that field jumbled together. It would be like if the library got rid of the Dewey decimal system and just gave you access to shelves where all the books were. I mean, you’re looking for a book, right? There are all the books, go for it.

The thing I can’t tell is if the responsibly party is Amazon or the third party seller/information editor for products. It’s equivalent to the old eBay or Craigslist trick of putting a block of keywords in your listing that aren’t really what your item is so you can show up in more searches. Because yeah, right, maybe the person that searched F150 is interested in seeing your 1992 Tercel. I mean it got you more views, right? So did every third party seller get in this arms race where they filled every water filter model number in a related keywords field for their product for every listing so that their items would not be “hidden” on virtual shelves? Or did Amazon’s machine learning decide that when someone searches for item X, I can maximize additional sales by determining what item X is and generalizing that, then presenting all the related items, essentially turning what would have been a quick targeted item grab into a forced browsing session where you must be presented with all the related items?

Both parties are incentivized to do so. In a perverse way, because humans will respond to this crap, our buying behavior has brought it on ourselves. The failing they have is recognizing the difference between a targeted search (I need this item number) and a browse (I need pencils, but I might as well pick up pens, erasers, paper clips and a hole punch, there’s a sale on right now). They probably won’t implode from it, because there are plenty of people that enjoy or tolerate the browse that will keep them afloat.

@djslack @mike808 Yeah, I had a very similar Amazon-refrigerator problem: When I moved into my current apartment, half of the ice cube maker was missing (the tray with the screw). My new landlord says “order it and take the cost from the next months rent”. After some sleuthing, I found the exact model number, but it’s $150 on the manufacturer’s website.

In a major error, I typed just the part number into Amazon, which somehow recognizes that it’s a refrigerator part and then proceeds to shit all over the search results. 75% of the results were for water filters for random makes and models. none of which appeared to be for my refrigerator (not that I wanted a water filter). The remaining results were for random pieces and parts, mostly for different manufacturers, none were ice cube maker trays, and none shared parts of the part number.

I cannot believe that every item posting had somehow included 10s of thousands of unrelated refrigerator part numbers. The only explanation is that Amazon has a database of refrigerator part numbers and when it gets a hit, it vomits all over the search results. Why is anyone’s guess. If I had accidentally ordered anything from at least the top 100 results, it would have been a 100% guaranteed return to Amazon, which must cost them money. So why deliberately build a system that confuses and angers the customer and costs you money?

@djslack @fibrs86

Amazon has a database of refrigerator part numbers and when it gets a hit, it vomits all over the search results.

This. It looks for your exact/best match, and if it doesn’t find enough to fill the results with enough items, Amazon decides to vomit crap they want to sell baswd on factors like advertising revenue, margin, low sales volume, distribution facility inventory costs, and anything else related by keywords and/or “department”.

It is the arms race in the third-party sellers in that the item description gets included in the search, in Addition to sellers loading up model numbers in their item “title” or “subtitle”.

Yes, people will crap where they eat and pee in the drinking water. 'Murica! Thriving on ignorance, stupidity, and greed for over 200 years!

@djslack @fibrs86 @mike808 There is OCCASIONALLY an advantage to some of this:
Our vintage (?; it’s really high-quality, and was already installed when we moved in about 20yr ago) Craftmade ceiling fan remote control had long since died. Finally (I’ve been known to procrastinate) got around to searching for a new one. Almost all the issues described above happened. Results that were actual Craftmade remotes cost almost as much as a new ceiling fan, and they didn’t even resemble our dead control. However, SEVERAL of the ‘unwanted’ generic universal remotes that made up the majority of the search results and allegedly work with “most popular brands, such as Hunter, Harbor Breeze, Hampton Bay, etc” (no mention of Craftmade) looked suspiciously like the one we were trying to replace. I ordered one of those for $16, incl Free shipping & Free returns (because Prime). Arrived 2 days later and WORKS LIKE A DREAM.

TL;DR Sometimes when you least expect it, Amazon knows what you need better than you do

@therealjrn God, this reminds me of every CEO/Upper manager that I’ve dealt with:
What do you mean <blank> doesn’t work?

<blank>?, you mean the same <blank> that 30 users/customers/employees complained to you about? The same <blank> that you received report after report about? The same <blank> that 6 weeks ago you said “<blank> works fine”/“We aren’t spending money to fix <blank>”/“What do you mean <blank> doesn’t work?”? Yes, <blank> doesn’t work, and we are going to have this exact conversation in 6 weeks where you are going to claim that you didn’t know that <blank> doesn’t work.

@cinoclav You should try figuring out keywords for finding Kindle ebooks as either a customer or an author.

The problem is so many greedy fuck third parties have shit all over search engines to game the system and cheat their way to the top results that they’ve ruined it for everyone. And then Amazon and Google “monetized” it.

The same has happened in political speech, where money buys the loudest speech. And where there is money, there is corruption. Thanks to the activist right-wing judges on the Supreme Court for Citizens United decision.

@cinoclav @mike808 Does the book’s name not work? Then there’s a Kindle button on the book’s product page.

I have to do a little shilling myself here - when sis-in-law signed up her charity Distributing Dignity (please support!) for Amazon Smile she of course let us know - that they don’t get a lot from Amazon, but if you’re ordering anyway, every little bit helps! So if you buy off Mr B, and you don’t have a charity selected already, it’s a good cause.

@aetris

that they don’t get a lot from Amazon

But Amazon gets a lots for positive associations from them!

@Limewater Those trivial amounts add up. My chosen charity, the ASPCA, has received almost 7 million dollars and overall Amazon has given charities over 156 million.

@cinoclav $156 million since inception for a company that made 70 billion for Q3 2019. And they brag about it all the time.

Wal-Mart gives away more than twice that in cash, plus tons of other in-kind donations to top a billion dollars every year. And they don’t enlist every recipient to shill for it, AND they don’t crow about it like Amazon does.
And I’m not saying this because I am a fan of Wal-Mart. Amazon Smile is just that bad.

@Limewater Walmart doesn’t give you a choice where they’re sending their money. Point is, Amazon doesn’t have to do it at all. So even if it’s not as much as it could be, they’re still doing more than most. Y’know, gift horse/mouth thing…

@cinoclav

Point is, Amazon doesn’t have to do it at all.

Amazon doesn’t have to advertise? They certainly seem to think so.

And yes, they are doing more advertising than most. Good for them? When I buy my horse you’ll be damn sure I’m going to look it in the mouth.

@Limewater Amazon doesn’t have to donate to charity/run the smile program at all.

Of course, it makes a lot of sense for them to do so, but they don’t have to.

@djslack Amazon doesn’t have advertise, but the obviously seem to believe that marketing is very important.

That is what the Smile program is. Advertising.
Amazon gets non-profit organizations to whore themselves out for them in exchange for the promise that, if a customer jumps through enough hoops prior to spending $100 with them, they’ll buy that organization a coke.

It’s not “donation.” It’s paying these organizations a pittance to do their advertising for them.

And it’s FUCKING BRILLIANT. Whoever came up with it must be a fucking wizard, and I hope they paid that person millions and millions of dollars.

But no, Jeff Bezos does not have some deep-seated personal commitment to the generic concept of a 501c3. Amazon absolutely comes out ahead on the Smile program, while charitable organizations thank them for letting them do their advertising for them.

@Limewater ok, we’re speaking the same language, I just hadn’t made the leap to call it advertising. Thank you for connecting the obvious dots for me.

@Limewater Would you be angrier if Amazon didn’t run the Smile program at all? You really need to relax…

@djslack @Limewater Sort of like paying to have the Nike swoosh on your shirt…

@cinoclav
Of course I wouldn’t be angrier of Amazon didn’t run the Smile program. As a commercial corporation I can’t possibly blame them for implementing it.
But it’s not a net positive for the world, and I would argue there are strong indications that it’s a net negative.

It takes effort and resources from other fund-raising opportunities, with little to indicate that it’s really a net positive for any organization.

It funds organizations with opposing missions, funding both planned parenthood and pro-life pregnancy centers, for example.

It causes people to feel like they’re exercising some virtue by shopping for crap they don’t need, thus making them less inclined to actually make charitable contributions.

People don’t recognize that it’s just a commercial advertisement, so now you end up with people unwittingly presenting Amazon marketing materials in church.

I could go on.

@cinoclav @Limewater I’m not sure Smile works exactly as you’re describing. Kid’s school PTA is recipient of our Smile pennies, but there’s no Amazon ‘advertising’ at any PTA event. There is a single message at the beginning of the school year that if any parents are already Amazon shoppers, to please consider signing up for Smile - there’s no marketing campaign; nobody is conducting an ‘Amazon sign-up’. Is anyone really making purchases just to drive their Smile contribution? That seems a little like giving away all your worldly possessions just for the charitable tax deduction.
I should check to see if the PTA actually got anything from them last year…

@cinoclav @compunaut

An e-mail sent to every parent of the school about Amazon IS an advertisement.

David Olgilvy, the “Father of Advertising,” said “A good advertisement is one that sells the product without drawing attention to itself.”

An advertisement that people don’t even recognize as an advertisement is pretty much the epitome of this.

And you’re right—they don’t have “Amazon Account Signups” or anything. And the announcements usually begin with “If you shop at Amazon…” These are more reason people don’t identify them as advertisement.

But the thing is, Amazon isn’t really after new customers anymore. That hill has been climbed. In the U.S., just about everybody who would potentially be an Amazon customer already is. But that’s only one small part of marketing. A much bigger part is customer retention and getting existing customers to do more of their purchasing at Amazon.

Amazon doesn’t win when you “create an Amazon account.” They win every time you choose to purchase something from them. They win when you have positive associations with their brand—“Amazon supports my local PTA!” They win every time you could buy something from another retailer but choose instead to purchase it at Amazon “So that the PTA will get the Smile dollars (pennies).”

They especially win when you make such a decision without doing a price comparison. They especially especially especially win when you make all of those positive associations and decisions but then forget to jump through the hoop of clicking through the Smile link when actually making the purchase. In that case, you get a dopamine hit, you think Amazon is supporting your cause, AND they actually get to keep those extra pennies. That’s probably a bit part of why Smile isn’t just an option you can set to always be on in your account, and why there was no way to do Smile at all in the Amazon app until, like, last year.

And sure, I’m sure there are a couple of people who buy crap they don’t need just for the Smile donation. People do dumb stuff all the time. That’s not what Amazon is after. They’re trying to get you to move more of the “boring” purchases you make regularly to them over other retailers. That’s why the offer (expensive) groceries and (expensive) home goods, like laundry detergent. They want you to say, “I need to pick up more of X. I could buy it the place I always buy it, but I’ll just order it from Amazon so the PTA will get Smile money.”

@Limewater Traditional advertising is an operating cost but the money for the Smile program is deductible as a charitable contribution for Amazon. Advertising which is a deduction and builds customer loyalty. Brilliant! I hope the person who thought this up got a hefty pay raise from the money Amazon is not paying in taxes.

When I find products/sellers on Amazon that I want to do repeat business with, I do a search on the name and almost always find a website. The prices are almost always the same as the ones posted at Amazon, but I get more choices and things tend to ship faster. I still use Smile when I can’t do better elsewhere, but I don’t feel at all bad when I don’t because I already give more per year directly to my charity than Amazon does.

@sammydog01 I find every time I go there it is far too much work searching thru pages and pages of crap to find something we actually need.

@RedOak Wait, you only buy things you need?

@sammydog01

only buy things you need

What? Is that even an option? What?

@ruouttaurmind @sammydog01

Our hoard closet full of Meh shit taught me (mostly) a painful lesson. #GriefFromSpouse

@sammydog01 Lucky ducky! Amazon Warehouse is currently offering 20% off select items.

@ruouttaurmind My daughter (19) has been playing with the Kano computer kit I got here last year. She seemed to be having fun so I just ordered this:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01D8KOZF4/ref=ppx_od_dt_b_asin_title_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

I hope it’s fun too.

@sammydog01 That’s a good deal with the extra 20% off!

@memini based upon routine Amazon pricing for staple items vs our (medium large and very competitive) local metro market, Amazon must be making their nut on rural customers. Their prices generally suck big time.

The only way we buy on Amazon is via careful price-watching.

@RedOak I really didn’t expect it to be two hours. But like many things, I was hoping I could trip across a deal and save 50% off the local B&M price. I definitely should have given up after 20 minutes, but my stubbornness wouldn’t let me be beaten by a simple effing search engine. Two hours later? Search engine: 1, ruouttaurmind: 0

@ruouttaurmind haha, good point. But that wasn’t the intended poke. .

on the way home…

(From at least 2 hrs doing what at the office?)

@RedOak One of the perks of working for the establishment when you are the establishment.

@ruouttaurmind yes indeed. That would be one perk that drove me out of the fucking soul-sucking corporate world after 25 years.

@RedOak @ruouttaurmind I think they euphemistically meant ‘self-employed’

@walarney You’re late, but don’t worry, I don’t think it gets used by most people. And I don’t think all of the kinks have been worked out too well.