What are your standards for quality?

I’m an enthusiastic amateur home chef. I have ordered some of these “trash” whetstones.

My knives get sharp. They aren’t damaged. The whetstone works over time.

If you are like a knife artisan, yeah I guess Amazon won’t work for you. But I’m guessing the results work for 99.9% of people.

Is a generic AliExpress whetstone good enough for most home chefs? I don't know, probably. But if I'm going to spend $40, I would rather do it on a high quality Japanese unit than something I can get for $20 on AliExpress. On Amazon they're priced and presented as alike, and that's a problem.

Realistically, that $20 difference pays for the product being in a warehouse near you, rather than a warehouse 5000 miles away.

But Amazon has both in their warehouse

I dunno how to square “tons of quality products from legitimate brands” with “entirely enshittified”…

Good quality stuff mixed with a lot of shit = shit

I could also make a more graphic analogy, but I don't think anybody needs to read that.

Having to care enough and educate yourself about how to tell the difference adds a lot of friction to the shopping experience. I have no qualms about buying from Amazon if I know exactly what I’m looking for and I’m shopping in a category where I’m at least pretty confident I’m not going to get counterfeit stuff (Apple accessories? Forget it).

But when I just need some basic household thing and don’t want to become an expert on the category, I often shop from other retailers where I can just be pretty sure they aren’t selling garbage.

Any porcelain measuring spoon someone like Crate and Barrel sells is probably a decent porcelain measuring spoon, but if I buy that on Amazon, I have to worry about which brands are legit so I don’t end up getting a spoon with porcelain-look paint that will flake off or something like that.

A marketplace where almost anybody can sell almost anything has a completely different level of trust than a store where professional buyer is making a conscious decision about what products they should carry - the presence of many low quality products dilutes the entire marketplace, even the quality products from legitimate brands

Google search results still have -some- useful links.

(I'm still having good results from amazon but I can understand 'entirely enshittified' as an opinion from people getting a similar thing there)