I am going to trash talk Amazon for a bit.
One of the great things about brick and mortar is that you can go in and see, in person, the items you want to buy. One of the worst things about online shopping is when someone’s clearly trying to sell you something that looks very similar to what you want to buy, but is a knockoff. The knockoffs are often cheaper - but inexplicably not always cheaper - and are always of incredibly poor quality. Amazon’s marketplace is at the forefront of these cheap, useless knockoffs.
This is a problem for consumers. People are shopping online a lot lately because they don’t particularly want to either contract or spread COVID-19 - a parking lot full of unfamiliar plates might give you pause and make you retreat to the nearest computer this year - so there’s a tendency to just go online instead of going out. While there are plenty of local businesses who have an online option right now - and I’m growing to love curbside pickup as a result - people will naturally navigate towards the big monolith in order to pick up their non-essentials. And they will get garbage.
It’s irritating even if you just use the site for research. Reviews on products that look like what you actually want are mostly talking about how they’re knockoffs and the traditional failings of knockoffs - poor quality control, misleading marketing and so on. Not particularly useful if you want to know if the product does what it says it does on the box. You don’t get any clue about the general price range, because the manufacturer isn’t actually suggesting the retail price here. For people who tend to plan Christmas shopping at 1:00 a.m. - it’s when I get my best ideas and you have to be efficient in real life in 2020 - this tends to be less than helpful.
This is also a problem for legitimate businesses. Let’s say I find a set of utensils for a suspiciously cheap price on Amazon. Sure, spoons will all bend in a week and the knives won’t cut butter, but they’re cheap. Then a store selling quality utensils has a problem, because there’s a perception that what they’re selling should be much cheaper. The brands getting knocked off gain the perception that their products use low-quality materials and are poorly made, when they’re actually not.
You quickly realize how important it is for a business to curate their stock when you encounter one that functions on the idea that this curation doesn’t matter. You see a pile of products that are superficially what you want or need, but in reality not something that you would ever actually want in your home. It shouldn’t take an in depth look at reviews and 20 minutes of research just to hopefully buy a shower curtain that isn’t made mostly of lies. I don’t want to think about a shower curtain, I especially don’t want to do in-depth research on a shower curtain.
I suggest just avoiding Amazon. Nothing they sell can’t be purchased elsewhere, and most of the time other stores will have the actual product you want. If it’s a local place, you’re actually paying the wage of someone you know who is putting in a lot of effort to succeed, instead of a con artist who is trying to make a quick buck drop-shipping poorly made shower curtains or something. Shop local campaigns are really missing that vital information - it’s way harder to get ripped off.
