This was exactly my problem with the dash buttons, and with Amazon's recurring order system.

And I'm not certain, but I believe that sellers game this system- you can see certain things that make sense to order on a recurring schedule have unconscionable prices. Once you have a certain threshold of recurring orders, why not increase the price 10x? Especially because Amazon puts so many dark patterns in the way of a user canceling a "subscription".

I just reordered something I order fairly frequently today. The price is pretty predictable but, yes, I like to just double-check it hasn't doubled in price. Not a big deal to order every few months and confirm it's still what I want to order at the right price as opposed to just putting it on an out of sight, out of mind subscription.

Blind ordering only made sense when Amazon customer service was top notch. That ended when Amazon started having profitable quarters and started Day Two.

Now I have to be paranoid about checking product details like if there are 3rd party sellers using FBA which potentially signals fakes. There’s no longer blind trust in Amazon for a lot of customers. I can’t just mindlessly buy stuff with the hope that Amazon customer service can take care of anything going wrong like they did years ago.

I can't come up with a single item that I would blind order. At most, I could ask Alexa to add an item to a shopping list and then verify the list and place the order myself.

I could come up with a few. And they are all sold exclusively by IKEA.

Never occurred to me before that vertical integration can be a positive factor in consumer trust. Usually I see myself girly in the camp of "oh noes! Sooner or later they will use it against us!"

I put baby diapers on recurring order every X weeks, it just worked, and Amazon would inform me that there was an upcoming order and give me the time to either move the date or cancel it. Super convenient for working parents!

That’s the exact opposite of blind ordering though. You’re planning your orders way ahead of time.

That’s not to say that it isn’t useful, but it doesn’t do anything against the narrative that Amazon is not trustworthy like it used to be. It’s a common theme in the comments here. When I think about it, it’s been a common theme on HN for years now, ever since commingling destroyed Amazon’s reputation

I would love to order a bunch of things - toilet paper, kitchen paper, toothpaste, mayonnaise, sriracha, foil, dishwasher and laundry tabs. Anything that isn’t a weekly purchase that I find myself out of when I want to use it.

The problem isn’t that I don’t want to blind order it, it’s that I don’t trust blind ordering it from Amazon.

"Alexa, repeat my last toothpaste order" with a confirmation if the price has gone up would be good.

With the exception of foodstuffs, where I don't want to have to worry about perishability and storage, I've got most of these on scheduled deliveries - toilet paper every 4 weeks, laundry tabs every 6 months, etc. Once you figure out the appropriate rate and with a little bit of buffer stock to account for variability, you never run out of anything.

I don’t want toilet paper every 4 weeks, I want it when I have 2 rolls left. If we’re away, that might be 6 weeks. If we have family visiting it might be 3 weeks. If I buy toilet roll in the shop, my subscript still comes unless I cancel it.

To be clear, these are minor complaints, but they are the things that asking Alexa to order should solve

And at that point, there's no real value-add compared to a general todo-list application with simple voice commands.

Yeah, this is the more salient detail.

I would consider (something equivalent to) what Amazon envisions if it was products from my local grocery store, at the prices of that specific store. But Amazon? I can't trust they'll be any of: in stock, with the exact same product, at basically the same price.

This a million times.

I swear I will never understand why Amazon's supply, organization, and pricing for household goods is such a disaster.

Because their experience for mainstream books is mostly perfectly fine -- there's a single listing for each book, and the price doesn't change much, just some discount from list. It works.

But for things like paper towels or Tide or whatever, it's utter chaos. Multiple listings for the same item, sizes and quantities that mysteriously move from one listing to another, prices that vary 10x or more...

It's utterly baffling to me why Amazon created this consumer-hostile nightmare. I buy a lot of stuff from Amazon, but everything home and toiletries I buy from Target online, simply because the listings and prices are totally consistent. Even though I have Prime! I don't understand why Amazon doesn't figure out that Prime consumers like me buy from Target instead because Amazon's household supplies listings are such utter unpredictable garbage, while Target just works like a normal store.

It's ridiculous that I have to have a spreadsheet with pricing information and links for household goods just to spot check and make sure I'm getting the actual price per quantity that I want due to the multiple dynamic listings that change every day nightmare.

Don't ask how many times I receive more or less than I thought I would or something came in 10 packages of 3 instead of 1 30x package.

It'd not even that I care much about small deviations--I just don't trust that something really crazy won't happen if I put it on autopilot. If I walk into Walmart and grab a big armful of Bounty I'm fairly confident things will be fine.

I'm in the process of moving. I thought maybe I'd give Prime Day a try and send some soaps ahead to my new place.

In my last apartment, I used Method's pump-dispenser laundry detergent and their basil-scented kitchen hand soap.

Amazon is selling the laundry detergent for $75 and the hand soap for $15. I'm guessing Method discontinued the SKUs I was used to, and there's some leftover stock on Amazon with crazy prices.

Or: There's third-parties that are selling the stuff at seemingly-outrageous prices just because there aren't other sellers moving them in large, efficient [at least pallet-sized] quantities on Amazon.

People sometimes want whatever they want, and some people are willing to pay a lot for whatever that is. That is not necessarily abusive.

eg, I like sardines, and there's some very particular sardines that I'm rather fond of. I'd love to pay $1 or $2 per tin for them, but I'll also pay $6 per tin for them if I must when they just aren't available otherwise for whatever reason.

Much of this can be explained with just supply and demand.

Don't even ask me about the price of Heinz canned beans in tomato juice or bottles of HP Sauce in grocery stores in my part of Ohio. They're inexpensive staples in some parts of the world, but if I can even find them here they're ludicrously expensive.

Amazon (and third-party sellers using Amazon) are no different than my local grocer is in that particular way.

Back in context of TFA: The problem isn't that things can be expensive; the problem is primarily that one must be able to easily compare prices and products, and an Alexa device is presently a terrible interface for letting that happen. (The Amazon website is also sometimes not very good at this, even on a real computer.)

I switched to Walmart a few years ago and their online experience has been more consistent.

Although I detect it’s starting to drift as they switch to a “marketplace” approach similar to Amazon.

The marketplace stuff is the killer and downfall of any online shopping experience. Right now Walmart is easy enough to search and target and Home Depot are pretty good too, but once they start really focusing on the marketplace where they just make money with no expenses then it all goes to hell.

Ordering items from the system where you are buying products from a local Walmart store for pickup or delivery works very well. I find their Amazon-style marketplace chaotic, high priced and fairly useless, though.

Prescription drugs have something called "NDC number" ( National Drug Codes ). What we need is NDC numbers but for consumer goods.

Ironically, this is probably why books don't suffer the same problem. ISBNs

European Article number

Like a UPC?

Are UPCs stable at scale and over time? It's been a minute since I was in retail, but I remember there being a bunch of asterisk-but's around them.

They're not perfect, and I think Amazon does combine listings for the same item (see "other sellers"), but the bigger issue is that the system prioritizes getting you exactly what you ask for over warning you of weird market shenanigans or out of stock sellers meaning prices are way higher than usual.

If Target is out of the brand of paper towels I like I don't go to the next store and buy them no matter the price, I get a different brand or skip it. If I had a human shop for me, they would also get a different brand of skip it. But that logic doesn't work with Amazon so it's not safe to trust it.

Last time I looked at it, they fell prey to the region-locking-franchise nonsense. Something like each country had a registered office that would manage their namespace of codes with some sort of segregation or grouping.

Ofc what inevitably happened: same product from same company had two codes because because. Heinz Ketchup in Germany is not the same as Heinz Ketchup in Australia...and no one can tell you why.

Different recipe? Labeling? Different sizes... 160ml vs Country Z standard of 13.2oz, etc.

Oh and different codes for different groupings. Pack of 6 somethings got a new code VS the item itself as the barcode.

Not sure if you encountered the same shenanigans but I just stayed away. This is ultimately a people co-ordination problem and everyone thinks they're special. Meanwhile China spams all our market places with "Wish Wonder Elements Store" sellers that sell "40mm 1/2/6 pack of nail screws, woodworking, drill, conical shape, amazing product $1.22" and 5000 variations across all their sellers.

No, they aren't. GS1 - the organisation that administers retail barcodes - has rules about when to change the Global Trade Item Number for a product. The GTIN is what you probably mean by 'UPC' but GS1 now distinguishes between the abstract product number (the GTIN), and the concrete barcode symbology containing a 12-digit GTIN (UPC-A).

The Guiding Principles are:

* Is a consumer and/or trading partner expected to distinguish the changed or new product from previous/current products?

* Is there a regulatory/liability disclosure requirement to the consumer and/or trading partner?

* Is there a substantial impact to the supply chain (e.g., how the product is shipped, stored, received)?

- from https://www.gs1.org/1/gtinrules/en/guiding-principles

Every consumer product has a UPC.

We're building that spreadsheet as a product. I'd love to show you. I'd message you a private link to a prototype but you have no contact info on your profile. If you are interested, can you email or DM me using my profile info?

You also don't have an email on your profile, for what it's worth. I don't use Twitter. I'd be interested in something like this as well.

Oh, thanks! I added my email to my profile. Look forward to replying to your note!

Oh wow, I’ve had that idea for 14yrs but never wanted to start coding it

This creates the opportunity for a start up offering such spreadsheet management as a service to flourish in the ecosystem whether or not Amazon ends up acquiring them. Yes I am being facetious. (obvi)

Unfortunately, another commenter is indicating that they’ve done just that. This is truly some darkest timeline stuff.

Vote for politicians that campaign on consumer protection legislation.

Here in Europe, it's been mandatory to show a price related to a reasonable common base point (e.g. liter, kilogram, piece, usage-unit for laundry detergent) adjacent to the actual product's price for many years now. You can go and use 1/10/100 grams/milliliters though for small scale packages where that is reasonably common (e.g. spices), and that's it.

Fun fact, that piece of legislation significantly contributed to Brexit propaganda, the campaign was based on "the EU wants to take away our pints/stones/pounds/whatnot".

Here in the US with Amazon it will usually give you a price per quantity, though that can vary between "each", "oz", etc... The real issue being complained about is that there may be 10 listings in Amazon for "Tide Pods", so if you say to Alexa "Order Tide Pods" you aren't sure what you'll get, what quantity, or what price.

Amazon REALLY needs to do some product normalization.

It is true that if you go into a grocery store, you're literally presented with a whole aisle of detergent, and even if you are as the section for "Tide Pods" there may be quite a few options (larger/smaller, "stain blaster", "fresh", whatever), you very quickly get a pretty good view of what the options are and their differences, plus prices and things like "on sale" cards.

The shopping experience is absolutely inferior with Amazon for things for which there are many alike products.

One could even imagine some sort of mega page for "slim network cables" where you'd select the standard and color and length and be presented with a few options. They try this with things like screws, though I can't believe they have one option for star drive 5/8" wood screws...

Even if you search for the exact item, including the brand name and the size, you get pages and pages of choices, many of them just wrong.

I just did a search for "sprayway glass cleaner 19 oz 1 pack". This contains all the information you need to uniquely identify a single product. Brand, Product, Size, Quantity. Yet Amazon returns 3 pages of crap, including Wrong Brand, Wrong Product, Wrong Size, and Wrong Quantity. I can't make the query any more specific, Amazon, what the hell is your problem? This query should return one and only one result.

Pretty sure that's Amazon selling your query results, not a failure in search algorithm.

For the sponsored returns to the search query, sure. But for the rest, isn't that the fuzzy search crapping the bed in the face of our expectations?

When I specify what I want I want the search to return what I searched for, not a lot of kinda similar junk. I've tried to explain the concept of fuzzy search to my girlfriend a few times and she still gets annoyed when a search for "24"x24" shadow box" returns a whole bevy of standard picture frames at an utterly random spread of sizes, for example.

Or is fuzzy search a convenient excuse for "we consider sellers who advertise with Amazon and subscribe to more of our seller services a valuable factor in search rankings"?

There is that

Their search result page is just a ranking of whatever they predict will sell best based on your query (based on units, not dollars). It’s stupidly simlistic, actually: if we sell more for a given search term because we’re advertising hard on that search term, our organic ranking for that term will rise almost immediately. So in your case, what’s going on is that basically other people who search with the same term end up buying other products. Thats bad for you, but perhaps its actually good for them?

that's your guess and what they tell investors.

my guess is sheer incompetency hidden by sales volume.

at some point they had the idea of translating the search to categories and showing alternatives. it got both unmaintained and other products teams added their own self interest on top of the algo and now you have the worst search on the planet which nobody have the political power to fix because it touches everyone revenue, even if for worse

But think about the corollary where places like McMasterCarr have exact products in known quantities, types and breakdowns because they used to be a catalogue. I will go to McMaster 9/10 times because it's just easy to find exactly what I want and so they get my money.

Amazon seems hostile to this very idea, that I know what I want, will spend 15% more to have it tomorrow and will not by the random stuff it smashes in the search results because I know what I want.

Oh I get it. I actually think there’s a huge opportunity in online retail to gate off categories and brands that are already in, say, Walmart. Then do the Amazon algorithmic model for everything else.

I think you’re missing how crucial Amazon’s algorithmic model has been as a way to connect shoppers with 2 day delivery for an unimaginably long tail of products. We sell a technical product that would be at home on McMaster. On the 2nd largest retailer in the US. It’s incomprehensible that our products would ever be in Target or Walmart stores. Yet we have access to the same customer base at the same place where they can buy Tide. Amazon’s purely algorithmic approach is what allows companies like us to do product/market discovery for them (and their customers).

Did you know that Amazon has a section that drives to compete with McMastercar? It’s somewhere in Amazon business they have parts and stuff and it’s just a horrible shit show.

It's not stupidly simplistic. It's ads. Random no names bid for keywords to be placed on those pages, the higher the better. Good luck discerning actual ads from the real listings.

Payola.

Fundamentally, Amazon seems to have a problem with not understanding priority. It's especially terrible at associating numbers with units. While I have no access to how Amazon actually works I think it's just counting matches and thus "sprayway glass cleaner 19 oz 1 pack" and "sprayway glass cleaner 1 oz 19 pack" would score equally and "bogus glass cleaner 19 oz 1 pack" would score higher than "sprayway glass cleaner 19 ounce". Remember, most quantity 1 items will not say so in the description, "1 pack" is asking for trouble.

I think the only real fix here would be for Amazon to separate out brand, product, size (or sizes in a few cases) and quantity. And the parser needs to attach numbers to the following word if that word is a unit word.

While I've never done it at any real scale I have done a routine that predicts what's related to what. It required giving it a fair understanding of the data (for example, Xabcde is probably related to X despite the distance between them) to get it to quit spewing out whoppers. It's hard even in my case where I could afford to run the test against all reasonable candidates. Amazon simply can't do that. (My routine runs in length * length * table size. You simply do not implement anything that even resembles O(n^3) at scale.)

Trying your search, I'm not seeing a pile of crap.

First hit differs from your search term only in 2 vs 1. I believe Amazon doesn't consider numbers as as much of a mismatch as other things.

The third hit is obviously what you want, but it doesn't have the commas and the unit is "1 pack (packaging may vary)". Apparently that makes it score slightly less. Going down the page I find it in 1, 2, 3, 4, and 6 packs, fresh scent vs unscented and there's also "blue". There's one clear typo of 15 oz, and you get a bunch of things where it's a multi-pack bundled with some other cleaning item.

Farther on down I start seeing different sizes and related products. Is there any harm to it displaying lesser matches farther on down??

The big difference with a store is that if tide pods should be ~$8 for a pack, the dtore is incredibly unlikely to have one pack of tide pods on the shelf for $70

In some cases the retail store just doesn't list the price and the store owner may just come up with a highly marked-up price when asked. 10x would be very rare though indeed.

What store doesn't list prices? Isn't that illegal in most places? In my country even the tiniest ancient village stores I've been to have prices listed on items (sometimes simple labels attached to the items, such as "10", but still there).

Some stores won't let you near the stuff they sell, you have to talk to somebody. Maybe that's what the GP is talking about.

Anyway, it's expected that you'll ask for the price and may go away after hearing it. So crazy mark-ups are risky business.

That only happens in shady mom and pop corner stores where laws are not enforced. Most countries force price listing and it's trivial to get caught.

You will see 10 X but it’s in places where it’s considered emergency go to the 24 hour gas station and look at the price of diapers or butt wipes compared to Walmart.

Yeah, but it's different if they list the price and it's huge, compared to no price listed at all.

I'm not saying Alexa would be used more, but what if it confirmed with you on either the quantity or the last quantity of the item you ordered?

"The same order of Tide Pods as last time?"

Except then you have to wonder if the price changed. Or if something else about the listing changed.

It seems the simplest form of code for software that says the last time you ordered tide pods it was $10 for 1 pound now it is $10 for 1/10 of a pound. Do you want to continue?

The kind of organization that is politically capable of creating something like this could successfully run Alexa the way Amazon is trying to run it too. Or in a lot of different ways.

But Amazon can't.

You can get burned real bad by this if the specific product SKU gets discontinued and the price spikes 10x because now they're called Tide Pods Original.

> They try this with things like screws,

“Try” being the key word, because it is useless. It maybe could work if vendors populated the metadata correctly, but they don’t, and amazon put far too many similar categories into it, so you can’t actually filter on most of the parameters without filtering out most of the options you wanted to see, or selecting dozens of options.

The concept of a marketplace just isn't compatible with the concept of Alexa.

If you do both, at least one will fail. Every time.

You can probably mangle one of those concepts enough for them to become compatible. But you'll end up with something very different.

Fun fact: my local store uses different units for the comparisons. Not that you can choose from that many different units, but for example brand A corn flakes comparison price is price/serving while brand B corn flakes is compared by price/kg. Sure, the serving is based on weight but I still need to do some math to figure out which one is cheaper :)

This is one of the biggest food chains in Sweden.

Incredibly common in the US as well to use different units per item. All the better because our garbage measuring system can make unit switches significantly trickier.

I had to do a double take a few weeks ago when I found the price/unit to be drastically different for the name brand to the store brand of something, until I realized they strategically switched the <unit> (# to oz I think it was) to make the store brand look astronomically cheaper instead of just slightly cheaper.

> strategically

More like deceptively...

If a person did that, I would consider the behavior antisocial.

The one I’ve seen a couple of times recently is where the bigger item is more expensive per unit volume unit weight.

This is sneaky as hell.

"Serving" is the biggest vector for manipulation ever. They can make up whatever they want. I still remember looking at a small bag of potato chips that had 3 servings.

Nah. Just choose to buy the way you wish to. Vote with your money and don’t artificially restrict where there’s zero issues. Everything works out in the end.

I’d much rather transact in the US than Europe. The entire retail customer experience and return policy is unmatched. The last thing I want is for some government regulation to make it suck like Europe.

> The last thing I want is for some government regulation to make it suck like Europe.

Are you aware that Europe has a mandatory 2 year minimum warranty period on consumer purchases? A mandatory 14-days no-questions-asked return window on all purchases?

In the US, AFAIK you're fully at the mercy of whatever the vendor so graciously offers you.

[1] https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/shopping/gua...

> mandatory 2 year minimum warranty period

Such regulations make products more expensive.

I'm constantly offered warranties when I buy online. I don't want to be forced to buy them, as I don't need them.

Not sure why you're downvoted. There is material difference in prices of electronics due to whatever reason (taxes, warranties, low scale, etc) to the degree that my European friends often purchase laptops and iPhones when they travel to US.

Do those products have worldwide warranties? Often not. That is a real issue with buying electronics outside your home country.

They usually don't, but that only strengthens their point. People are choosing, instead of paying a European price and getting a very long warranty, to pay a cheaper US price even though they likely won't even get the benefit of our awful 1-year or 90-day warranty.

Anytime you get something "for free", you're paying for it one way or another. No amount of legislation can change that, they might as well legislate pi=3.

those times have long been gone. Warranties were not the driving factor, but taxes and exchange rates.

Today, the price difference is negligible on most hardware (smaller than $50 on MSRP on an iPhone if you compare New York to Paris for example)

Yes I am aware and I stand by my statement. Have you actually returned stuff to stores over there?

I have returned half eaten cake that I did not like the taste to Costco and didn’t have to face a weird looking employee. No law and regulation necessary just capitalism.

That's not capitalism, that's culture. In the USA, it's very common to return products because of a change of mind and/or complain. That isn't universal.

The fact that a retailer is willing to accept it despite not being forced to is absolutely the result of capitalism. If they don't, you buy from a competitor. This is not some hypothetical. People in the US routinely choose retailers based on their service experience.

In any case, the overall retail experience is much better on west side of the Atlantic and prices are generally better too, without the need of too many "customer protection laws" so I don't think a good case is to be made to copy from a failed continent.

But, the usual case is that the major companies in the market collude to strip away these kind of offerings, as "free unconditional returns" hurts bottom line of all companies in the market. This is the real power of capitalism.

Think about it, for example the TV sector: All companies colluded to reduce the selection of TVs to "Smart" TVs only. I can't just go and buy from a competitor, because it simply does not exist!

The problem here is just the group that wants them is minuscule. Nobody wants to admit it, but the smart TVs are what people want. You can buy dumb TVs that have no smart features or smart TVs with the smart feature can be completely ignored. Vizio is good for this, but nobody wants to pay for those except commercial units.

TV companies do try adding features that go beyond dumb display panels. Ask them how that worked for 3D, which people didn't adopt. Yes most TVs are "smart" but I'm pretty sure most people won't pay much of a premium and many use something like an Apple TV instead anyway.

The premium paid is the $20-50 that the TV manufacturer gets for preinstalling shit on their smart TV.

Which is why (currently) Vizio is my doge because it just turns on with ARC and shuts off when the Apple TV does so I don’t even know it’s smart.

The stupid Samsung (praise be to the toddler, destroyer of shit tech) wouldn’t even let you switch inputs without being connected to WiFi, or if it could I couldn’t figure it out.

Is that the "usual case" really? I find it very rare actually.

You really think "Smart TV" is some collusion/conspiracy and not emergent from the market behavior? The most malicious theory I can come up with is that Smart TV makes more money for the manufacturers due to the ad opportunity, therefore they sell an inferior product to the consumer —in our minds— similar to bundling crapware in Windows laptops, but that still does not make it collusion or market distortion.

Under that theory, it just means dumb TV would have to be a comparatively more expensive product and I am willing to bet even the nerds who care about dumb TV will be buying the smart one, airgap it, and connect an Apple TV. Effectively no one would be paying even $50 more for dumb version of a TV.

In reality, I believe the average Joe & Jill actually strongly prefer Smart TV.

How many half eaten cakes would you have to return to monetarily make up for, say, a PC or washing machine that stops working after 4 ½ years? Because you can get that device replaced or repaired in much of Europe, for free. I'm not aware of any US company that offers such a warranty window and actually keeps its word (look at crappy fridges where the company will replace one faulty unit for another with the same problem once, and then you're on your own). And even if some did, they are by far the minority. The voluntary "I'm a good brand, choose me" freebies offered by a company will almost never outmatch that mandated by regulation.

The reason is simple: the companies have a fiduciary responsibility to make as much money for shareholders as possible, and if it's marginally cheaper to shorten the warranty period (whithouth seeming out of touch with the rest of the market), the bulk will choose that. Whereas the aim of regulation is always to secure the interest of the consumer. I say "always", but there are exceptions in cases of regulatory capture, which admittedly is much of the US...

Interestingly, the particular retailer in question, actually offers at least "second year warranty" for free to products you purchase from them at no explicit additional cost, so you don't have to make a trade-off by summing all the halves of poor-tasting cakes. The point is there is a choice of retailers. You don't need the regulation hammer for everything.

So? You’re stuck with a warrantied product that you know has the same defect, unless they’ve changed things since last I saw it. What’s a two-year warranty on a product that breaks after three? The market is not fixing this particular issue. Sure you can choose another manufacturer next time but you’ve already been screwed by one. There was no need for that in the first place.

Consumer laws are always a benefit!

I will almost always choose to buy a product if offered at a cheaper price if I can do so by declining longer warranties, so, no, it's not "always a benefit". It's not a fairy tale. Someone has to pay for things.

You’re just being taken advantage of. At every step and every service level they are fleecing you, because they can. Think the non-warranty option saves you money? It may on the margin but your easily parted money subsidizes those that do get the warranty. And they still get screwed for the profit. You can’t win in a rigged system

This is fun.

The person you’ve replied to has stated a concrete (what they perceive to be) benefit of consumer protection regulation. One that doesn’t seem to limit choice at all, but rather improves visibility.

I’m also inserting my own personal experience here. The country I live in, which isn’t in Europe, has similar regulation in place.

In response you’re throwing around some vague notion of “freedom” and vague implication of a “better experience” without really explaining how mandatory unit pricing is a bad thing for you as a consumer.

Has John Gruber got you all upset about the EU?

I’m currently booking a trip to the US and the consumer experience is absolutely terrible. Tax-exclusive “totals”? Resort fees? Give me a break.

It sounds like the US consumer experience is more aligned to your obvious libertarian ideology, and that’s the end of it.

Can you think of any downside of that proposal at all?

Tax inclusive total means government can screw the business and the end user and hide behind the tax inclusive price tag. Jack up the tax it seems the business is doing it.

Funny, given that the product most US consumers are familiar with tax-inclusive pricing (gasoline) is the one product that hasn't had its tax rate changed in decades.

Where? They’re constantly futzing with the taxes on it in my state.

Nothing says you can’t put ($40 of this is government taxes) in the receipt.

Tax-exclusive prices hide the true cost and encourage overspending by making things falsely appear cheaper. Their purpose is for businesses to squeeze more from their customers.

In NZ the price you see is the price you pay. The sales tax amount is always clearly stated on receipts, invoices, checkouts, online carts, etc. (by law) and the rate has changed twice in history, so everyone knows when it happens and who is responsible. Everything is explicit and nothing is or can be hidden (we don't do tipping either). In comparison when I visited the USA I never knew how much I would be paying for things, which felt fundamentally unfair and customer-opposed.

Tax rates are easily discoverable (more so than currently hidden things like tariffs).

...the receipts show what tax is charged in the total. This is a total non-issue. Tax-exclusive pricing is ridiculous.

The government can not "screw the business and the end user" because tax rates are public. VAT changes don't just happen in secret. Tax changes to specific product categories (such as extra taxes for alcohol in some countries) are publically debated. And if you want lower taxes you try to vote in a more economically right-wing government. The framing of your statement makes it clear you just don't trust/like governments. That's fine, I guess, but it's an incredibly strong bias in your arguments

The tax exclusive prices lets you know how much the government is soaking you, rather than hiding it and blaming it on the business.

That's irrelevant. Give me the total price, so I know how much something will cost. I don't care what percentage of it goes where. I only care about easily evaluating whether something is worth the price.

Seriously. I don't care if the total price consists of 100% tax or 0% tax. I care only what it is. I don't ask to know how much you pay the cleaners, how much it costs to operate the pool, how much corporate profit you're booking, or how much the CFO is embezzling. The amount of tax is equally useless to me. I care what it costs me.

Looks like I'm not the only European that has seen a price tag of $9.50 on a product I wanted, only to find out that the $10 bill in my pocket was only two thirds of the amount needed!

Look at us poor Europeans with our metric-system money-math

Was the markup just sales tax or did it include tips or extra fees? A 35% plus sales tax seems awfully high where in the US was it?

A ~10% sales tax is normal, and that will bring $9.50 over the $10 limit.

I'm American, actually. I've just managed not to have my brain poisoned by Libertarianism. (The capital L sort.)

> The amount of tax is equally useless to me.

Not if you are voting someone in a political office in the next election.

Then you can look up how much the tax is when you are making your voting decision. This isn’t secret information.

The government routinely hides what you're paying in taxes. Case in point - the so-called "Employer's Contribution" to your social security taxes. There's no such thing. That comes out of your pocket, too.

This is because employers have no interest in what your paycheck amount is. They care about "total compensation", which is what it costs the employer to employ you. Seattle added some "payroll taxes" and successfully sold the fiction that it was the businesses paying it. The businesses did indeed write the check, but it was the employee's money.

Indeed - UK the same. The government makes so much hay out of persuading the electorate that businesses are somehow entirely separate from them.

Do you really think people don't know that the tax deductions on their payslip are actually their money?

The "Employer's Contribution" is not listed as a deduction on the payslip.

Actually, no... At least not quite the same way.

In the US, a lot of people think of tax day as a "good day" because they get a refund from the government! Psychologically it is very different if you steal the money before they even see it than take it from them once they have felt it under their tongue.

Plus, I think the OP is referring to money that is technically paid by the employer but effectively passed through to the employee, because that's what happens, not some item on their payslip.

I can look it up if I am already motivated, but it is much easier for me to convince you to take a collective political action if you feel the depth of the government's dong in your rear end every day.

Nope. Don't care.

I care about what effects the policies are having, not how much I pay in taxes. The impact of the policies is what actually matters. The tax rate is one tiny detail. I'm not wired to automatically assume collective action is evil, so I only care about it in the context of the effects of all policies combined.

Everyone always blames price movements on the government anyways. And when it is tax inclusive--gasoline--the government hasn't dared to change the rate in decades!

Washington State added a 50c per gallon gas tax. They did it by taxing the oil companies, so when the pump prices went up 50c the politicians adamantly blamed the price increase on the oil companies.

There's no reason they couldn't also list the tax as a separate line item. That's what they do in my state with liquor and cannabis.

Do shops usually show both prices, so you can see before you have it rung up "how much the government is fleecing you"?

No one would blame the business. Receipts should show sales tax clearly.

I would very much blame the business for leaving out tax, concealing how much I'll need to pay to try to get me to overspend. Businesses claiming they don't want to be blamed for sales tax existing seems like misdirection from the real reason: it makes it look like you're spending less.

So you believe that prices are set by supply and demand and nothing else in all of your other discussions, but when it comes to taxes, it's the government's fault?

When a tax hike happens, businesses don't automatically have to increase prices they charge by the same amount: they can take a hit to their margin instead. So, the price they choose to charge is not "price + tax". It is "supply-and-demand price, of which we pay X to the state in taxes".

Taxes are not set by supply & demand.

> they can take a hit to their margin instead

Not for long. Low margin businesses tend to go out of business. And if you can earn 5% buying bonds, why run a business that has an ROI of 4%?

The point is that supply and demand works on the final price, not on "price before tax". Especially when taxes are proportional, so if you offer a lower price than your competitor, you also pay less of it to the state in taxes. So the tax level is irrelevant to the value of the market price, if you believe in supply & demand as the price setting mechanism. Showing price without tax is then obviously a scam to try to attack your psychology to think it's cheaper. They could just as well show price - marketing costs.

Of course, if businesses actually set prices as cost + margin, then it does make sense to separate tax from the price, as the value "price before tax" is a meaningful part of the price setting algorithm.

And lowering your margin is not the same thing as running a low margin business. If your margin was 20% at a tax level of 10%, and taxes go to 15%, then reducing your margin to 18% doesn't make you a low margin business now. Regardless, if you believe in supply and demand as the sole mechanism for price setting, this is all moot: the state increasing taxes won't increase demand or reduce supply with the exact same level as the tax increase, so the price can't move the exact same as the tax increase in this model.

I'd also note that it's not strictly true that taxes are completely decoupled from supply & demand. States do compete on attracting businesses through lower taxation.

> supply and demand works on the final price, not on "price before tax"

That's correct.

> So the tax level is irrelevant to the value of the market price, if you believe in supply & demand as the price setting mechanism.

Taxes raise the price, which reduces demand. If the prices don't rise, then the margins decrease, which reduces the incentive for the business owners to continue.

> doesn't make you a low margin business

It makes you a lower margin business. It reduces the margins on all the businesses, and the marginal (!) ones are no longer viable, and a new set of businesses become at the edge.

Agreed on all these points. But none of this means that the price before tax is a meaningful number that people need to be aware of or care about.

I tried to book a small-group (~12 people) conference room at a US hotel and when I asked for a flipchart, they added "resort fees" and a $200 staff "service fee" to bring the flipchart into the room.

This was on top of renting me the flipchart for $107 for 6 hours.

    > renting me the flipchart for $107 for 6 hours

Next time, just ship it from Walmart or Amazon and throw it away when done with it.

This is just how hotels make money. The key is to be very nice to the person who actually brings out the flipchart and asked for it on site. Then it’s on them to actually record that they did it and you know what people are lazy enough and failed to record it.

Thanks for the tip, I'll try it next time! I mean even if I had to tip a $20 I'd still be saving a few hundred

How will the government enforcing a minimum bar on return timelines lead to a worse experience at stores that already exceed those metrics? It might be unnecessary, but how would it hurt?

Various negative consequences but off the top of my head:

- Any regulation needs to be written, read, analyzed, made sure to comply with, defend in court, etc. which costs money.

- I might want to be very generous and voluntarily take back items from my legit customers because I find out it was good for business, but also have mechanisms in place to prevent abuse by a small minority of bad customers (restrict a subset of products, limits on the number of purchases you can return, etc). Once you codify it in law, it forces my hand in many ways, increasing prices making experience worse for my good customers.

- The regulation may change and the retailer may need to suddenly adapt to comply.

- It may not hurt those particular stores, but prevents cheaper competitors from emerging, which is a bad thing.

To show this whole thing is kind of stupid, where does "two years" come from? Some asshat in European parliament? Why not twenty years? Why not two months?

> retail customer experience and return policy is unmatched ... make it suck like Europe.

Maybe it's great in the US, I don't know, but it far from sucks in Europe. Amongst other things for returns policies you have a guaranteed 14 day return period for online orders even if there's no issues. Plus there's a minimum 2 years warranty, and a few years more if there's a reasonable expectation for the item in question to last longer. I'm not seeing the issue.

> Here in Europe, it's been mandatory to show a price related to a reasonable common base point (e.g. liter, kilogram, piece, usage-unit for laundry detergent) adjacent to the actual product's price for many years now. You can go and use 1/10/100 grams/milliliters though for small scale packages where that is reasonably common (e.g. spices), and that's it.

That's pretty irrelevant to the discussion at hand. It's about blind ordering without worrying about the price.

No one complained that Amazon was hiding prices or making price per quantity hard to discover.

Even with the legislation you suggest, wild price swings are still entirely legal.

Amazon is kind enough to include unit pricing on many UI elements.

It does seem to be less than consistent about the units, though. $/count, $/oz, $/g, $/lb, all on the same search page? Yes, and more :)

The point was that they're _not_ kind enough when you buy through Alex. The instant coffee you bought last month could have doubled but if you say "Alexa add [the coffee] to my cart ot just work… and if my anexcodes extrapolate at all, LOTS people use this feature.

I worked at Amazon when Fresh was rolling out in Seattle. A coworker thought he was ordering 10 bananas but when his order arrived he received 10 bunches of bananas.

Generously, he brought them in to share along with the story. I’m sure they made a lot of banana bread the following week.

All stores have problems with produce. Is that 2.99 a pound for peaches, bag or each?

They typically list out the unit but what ticks me off is when adjacent items have different units. One is in ounces, the second is per unit, their third one is per bag.

Was that the origin of the banana stand?

For a little context, Amazon has one or more “community banana stands”

For more info: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Banana_Stand

I don’t think it was related. This incident would predate those by 4-5 years.

Same, but different.

I once ordered qty. 6 bananas from Instacart, expecting one fairly-medium bunch of bananas to show up with about 6 fruits in that bunch. The listing clearly showed that it was for "quantity", not "weight."

But I got 6 pounds of bananas, which is a ton for a single person living by themself. [And I don't bake, so I got plenty of fresh potassium that week.]

It only happened once. After that, I started leaving careful notes that describe each item where quantity/volume/weight might be confusing and things have been fine.

(I could have complained and Instacart would have rubber-stamped a refund for that part of the order without discussion, but it wasn't worth that much effort.)

It’s not only Instacart. The first target that I ever went to that had a grocery store had turkeys that had been labeled at $.25. Not $.25 a pound. I pointed it out to the cashier multiple times and she couldn’t understand what I was complaining about so eventually, I went home with my $.25 turkey.

I've seen fixed-price turkey before. But not 25 cents.

On the flip side, many local places have gone to pricing bananas by the each.

Each has significant advantages - it means you do NOT need a state-certified scale for transactions; you just count.

It was obvious that that Target had never priced anything per pound before (it had just been remodeled to have a supermarket) and an employee fat-fingered the label. But the cashier had no recourse and I wasn't going to fight it hard.

(The same Target also had some clearance steaks for like ten cents a pound because they were close to expiration because none of the customers were expecting a supermarket in their target and weren’t buying perishables.)

funny, bananas were the only thing they greatly lowered price (and quality) when they took over wholefoods.

before you had .8/lb and 1.2/lb true organic from south America. after you had both bins failed with the the same Asian chiquita, but the fresher ones labeled organic and they cost .8 and .6 per lb.

At least he didn’t order a truckload like Shiv Ramdas’ brother in law:

https://cheezburger.com/12444421/twitter-thread-frustrated-h...

Ironically, doesn't AMZ Seattle supply bananas freely to all staff already?

I buy a lot of household stuff from Amazon. I also buy a lot of household stuff from lots of other places, mostly bricks-and-mortar.

I don't keep a spreadsheet. I find that when I buy a thing enough times (a particular size of a particular shampoo, say), I get a vague feel for what it "should" cost, and I definitely have a range of values around that expected cost that may be acceptable to me. I don't need a spreadsheet for this. (A spreadsheet wouldn't hurt at all, but it just isn't necessary for me; I don't want to spend the time to get that level of accuracy since the return on my time isn't there for me.)

But sometimes, an item is relatively unfamiliar or the price "feels" somewhat high or low -- whether at Amazon or locally.

When this happens, I comparison shop. I've gotten pretty quick at it.

Charts of historic Amazon pricing for things -- often pretty good but sometimes with large granularity -- are available at camelcamelcamel.com, which scrapes Amazon pricing and has done so for quite a long time.

So I look there to see if Amazon's price is good, relative to Amazon's previous pricing.

And then, if I still haven't found clear direction, I fire up Instacart's website. This lets me search many local stores all at once. (Their prices are often [but not always] inflated, but that's easy to get a feel for as well.)

After that, I have enough vaguely-accurate data to say to myself "Self, this shampoo is a terrible deal at Amazon and I'll just pick some up at the store," or "Self, this shampoo is a fantastic deal at Amazon, and I should order one or two extra bottles while it is cheap."

I wish Amazon's prices were more consistent (why is it $13 this week for a 24-pack of cans of V8 juice delivered to my door, and $60 the next week?), but meh. I can deal with it, as long as I have a real computer or time to fiddle with my pocket supercomputer. It's not so different from conventional "shopping."

I just can't deal with it using an Echo speaker and the limited interactions possible with Amazon's broken Alexa "AI". That's a non-starter, as things are today.

---

In terms of quantities, I don't think I've ever been surprised by Amazon. I do not think I've never experienced a thing on Amazon like my parents once did, where they bought mustard at a wholesale club ("Wow, 208 ounces [or whatever] of mustard! What a great price!") and wound up with several hundred individual packets of Heinz mustard loose-packed in a cardboard box.

They were pretty surprised by this. Discussions were had. "What will we ever do with these mustard packets? Should we take it back? What if they refuse to accept it? Is it even worth the money to drive over there again just for this? We still need mustard right now, too..."

They elected to keep it, and that wasn't the end of the world at all: We had plenty of mustard for a very long time, and it was indeed priced right; it just wasn't packaged in a particularly good way for what we were using it for.

(But then, maybe that experience when I was a kid made a lasting impression on me. And perhaps this was reinforced every time I went to retrieve some mustard from that huge box, wherein: I looked at that box. And when I looked at that box, I could always see that it was neatly labeled from the factory and that the contents wouldn't be surprising at all to anyone who was actually paying enough attention.

It is entirely possible that I might automatically scrutinize the offerings at Amazon, and also at the local grocery store, more than others do.)

You have one supplier of a book. You have many suppliers of generic products. Target gets from one supplier.

The multi vender estore offers something different. The low prices, large selection more supplied inventory are some benefits.

Not just many suppliers of generic products, but suppliers come and go on an almost weekly basis thanks to always choosing the cheapest, suppliers going out of business, etc. Hooray capitalism.

See I don’t understand how they have multiple vendors for Kraft or Johnson and Johnson products. There are no multiple suppliers.

Coca Cola I can understand, but those are all franchisees and the parent company watches them like a hawk. Mostly what they make is purified water to mix with the syrup they got from corporate to reduce shipping costs and losses.

For branded products a seller would need an agreement with Kraft or Johnson and Johnson as a reseller before Amazon will let you list. Many companies do have multiple reseller (most with geographical limitations) but some like shoe companies are more strict.

Then you have Apple and Amazon creating the brand Amazon renewed to sell watches.

I gave up trying to purchase Nikon OEM batteries on Amazon. It's easy on B&H, but I cannot (or do not know how to) exclude the hundreds of cheaper knock-off batteries that are inferior in every measure. I also tried to get an OEM battery grip for my Nikon D850 - but again near impossible on Amazon. This grip is $380 from Nikon, and its possible to get a knock-off for $29. Why get the original? It increases the camera's max frame rate for stills. it is also far more durable.

B&H is one of the places I check first before ordering on Amazon, which is about fifth on any list because fuck Amazon.

There’s a CS book I want to read but because the author self published I can only find it on Amazon. I need to try the book store at his university, and I’m not going to buy from Jeff until I’ve tried that avenue.

Third party sellers make up most of the inventory. Means Amazon has less inventory risk, but the buyer experience is terrible. Really unfortunate.

Nothing on Amazon is going to work like books on Amazon do.

Amazon is, originally and primarily, a bookstore. Amazon has long-established direct contracts with all book publishers (and in fact, a stranglehold over those publishers.) Any time you see a book listed on Amazon, it's a book sold by Amazon, attained directly from one of these publishers.

AFAIK no third-party sellers are even allowed to sell "books" Fulfilled By Amazon; if you see a third-party FBA "book" on Amazon, it's because the seller slipped it in under some category other than "books." (The "novelties" and "calendars" sections are often abused for this.)

But for categories other than books, Amazon never built up this same direct logistical pipeline to suppliers, let alone the sort of stranglehold over suppliers in other categories that they have over book suppliers. So Amazon doesn't have the ability to force constant, even, predictable supply with contractually-set pricing in other categories, the way they can with books.

Often, this means that Amazon's first-party supply chain for something, might just run out of that thing entirely.

Part of the reason the FBA program exists is that it allows Amazon to take advantage of third parties' connections to suppliers to compensate for their own supply-chain deficits. Amazon-the-asset-holder might have run out of e.g. Kleenex, but that doesn't mean that Amazon-the-site or Amazon-the-pool-of-warehouses has run out of Kleenex, because Amazon has allowed some third-party FBA seller to stock stuff in their warehouses, and that seller happens to have brought in some stock that have the UPC code for Kleenex. So hey, there you go, we have Kleenex after all! Only now Amazon has to follow the seller's dictates on pricing and discounts — and your experience on availability (unless/until first-party supply comes back) will be dictated by the seller's (usually much-less-predictable) ability+desire to resupply.

There are situations where this model actually makes sense! Some mid-sized OEMs that Amazon doesn't feel are worth their while to engage with directly, instead sell their products directly through Amazon as FBA sellers. In these cases, buying the product on Amazon is just like buying the product through the seller's website, but you get it faster because it's already in an Amazon warehouse.

That said, despite FBA having times where it makes a lot of sense, I also find Amazon Marketplace distinctly baffling. A thing sold by a third party, shipped by that third party, with returns handled by that third party, shouldn't be able to be conflated with an Amazon.com/Amazon FBA listing just because of a shared UPC code! Those are two very distinct experiences and are not fungible, and it's bizarre to pretty much everyone I know that Amazon has tried to conflate them.

I am fairly certain that you're incorrect re: selling books with FBA.

Source: I've self-published books and sold them on Createspace, KDP, Amazon Advantage, and all of their old systems before switching to using my own local printer and shipping the books to FBA.

I've gotten both novels and textbooks from Amazon that I'm not certain aren't counterfeits. (The textbook one is especially fuzzy, as sometimes you'll actually get an "international edition" which isn't necessarily fake...but may not be what you actually ordered either.)

These days, I'm not sure books are much different from any other good.

Don’t be baffled… “worlds largest selection” pivoted to worlds largest fence. Financially, the third party product is better for Amazon (no inventory - the third party stuff is a revenue generator!)

How exactly does Spooky23 have the buying power to price competitively with a major retailer? The answer is pretty obvious. It’s cheaper to pay crackheads to loot CVS than to troll for clearance blowouts.

> It’s cheaper to pay crackheads to loot CVS than to troll for clearance blowouts.

Is that where all the crazy stuff on Amazon is coming from?

Wouldn’t be surprised

https://nymag.com/news/features/tide-detergent-drugs-2013-1/

Probably not all but it’s well known they’re just stealing consumer durables because they’re easy to convert to cash

You lost me when you said their processes for books was "fine" -It may be good in some ways, but my experience of how they wrap it for consumer use is a giant mass of anti-patterns.

Charles Dickens should be the top match on the actual author, or at the very least biographies. But no. Amazon want us to go to "in the style of" or "related to a series which tangentially discussed Oliver twist" linkages "for your convenience"

Amazon will no doubt have A/B testing which shows net beneficial to revenue overall.

Amazon gets a lot better with an ad blocker because most of the crap is sponsored results at the top of the search which if they’re gone, you get stuff that’s closer to an actual result for your search.

The crazy thing to me is that you’re confused about this. These companies make huge margin fooling consumers who aren’t paying attention. Nearly all the consumers I know are barely conscious, the first promoted link on Amazon is the one they buy. Losing customers like you who actually inspect the listed price is a pittance to the Amazon machine.

How much time have you spent in physical stores observing the physically listed price per volume labels? These things are all labeled specifically to fool people who are alive but not conscious. Again, we are just a rounding error to these monoliths

It’s a slog to do the “which one of these is least a ripoff” calculation, at the grocery store or online.

I try to do the calculation nonetheless. But every time I just need to buy some ordinary staple, I’m up against the Relentless Spirit of Pure Deception, who attempts an ever evolving and always brand new form of trickery, at every engagement.

Sometimes, I simply make the $1.00 donation to P&G or whoever just to avoid having to think of strategies to outsmart. This too feels terrible and exhausting in a different way.

> It’s a slog to do the “which one of these is least a ripoff” calculation, at the grocery store

Where I live price labels must carry the per liter or the per kilo price too. It's printed with a smaller font size but it's visible and it's often the only price I look at.

The unit price labels here in the US are hilariously messed up. The items you want to compare will be say, a pack of 6 granola bars or a 10 pack. The unit prices will be like:

#1: $0.37 / ounce

#2: $6.50 / pound

or even:

#3: $1.82 / each (a price per item)

This will even be common within the same exact brand too. The stores seem so bad at picking a consistent unit for a product category that it seems malicious, but it stretches my belief that they have the time to get it so wrong intentionally.

In many places in Europe: Normal price per item big letters, price per Kg small letters. Problem solved

Comparable unit-pricing: A mandate brought to you by the European Union. You know, this allegedly evil entity that always hassles with the free market and annoys global companies. /s

This is not just EU, in our here Middle Eastern country there's the same law. (And also mandatory "high sugar" warning stickers on unhealthy stuff.)

Customer-friendly regulation sure feels nice.

Whilst I am waiting for my number in a chemist, I kill time by finding the highest price per litre. It's normally some anti-aging cream at well over €1000 / l.

The same with this "metric system"

> and annoys global companies

Lol... Meta is doing a huge campaign here in Brazil about how they won't provide us their AI services because they are annoyed by that entity.

It has been quite a help to the government popularity.

In Europe Apple follows the same strategy, but in a more subtle way than a full campaign.

And sadly, it seems they found some audience...

I've seen the "unit price" be per 100g (Especially so you don't notice it's a ton of money per kg) so there's still some screwing around...

Sure but multiplying by ten to get the price per kilo shouldn't be the most complicated thing for even those folks that aren't math savy. It means to move the decimal point (or comma) one place to the right IIRC.

If you had to convert from arms to legs or feet like in certain areas of the world, that might be much harder, of course.

I prefer prices per 100g because I mostly buy food that's under one kilo. I'm sure they show prices per 100g just to make them look cheaper but in my case I actually prefer it this way.

It doesn't even matter what unit is chosen as long as it is kept the same across.

Comparing Smarties to M&Ms is super easy if both have to use price per pound, price per oz, price per g or price per kg. Who cares if the price per kg would be $0.031.as long as I can see it's $0.028 for the other for the same unit without doing math.

Australia too.

Ah, sensible internationally recognized easy to divide units of weight? No thank you comrade!

It's malicious compliance. They probably wouldn't show anything other than the pack price if they had a choice, so there's something forcing them to show unit prices. So given that they have to show them anyway, they have an opportunity to inject profitable confusion.

Non-metric units are just icing on the cake.

I remember that around year 2000 a coworker from England told me that petrol pumps changed the prices from pounds per gallon to pounds per liter when the cost crossed the one pound mark. There is some malice in that too. Something like that could be the origin of using different units in those USA shops, not to cross some psychological threshold.

It's been a long time since I went to the UK so I can't say if petrol is really sold by the liters there. Maybe somebody from the UK could confirm or refute the tale. Anyway it's probably way more than one pound per liter now.

The UK switched from selling petrol in gallons to litres in the 1980s. I think I just about recall petrol prices suddenly changing dramatically when I was fairly young - I used to help my Dad keep records of how much fuel we'd bought at what price. I'd write down the figures in the book while he went to pay (it was always self-service) so I must have been old enough to be left alone for 5 minutes!

This Energy Institute statistical series - https://knowledge.energyinst.org/search/record?id=58969 - says that their records changed from "new pence per gallon" to "new pence per litre" at the start of 1989. That seems late for my recollection.

Looking back at historical data from https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/oil-and-..., it appears that the average price for "4 star" petrol (97 RON) crossed the £1 per gallon threshold some time in 1979 (Table 4.1.3, and multiply by 4.54609). I'm not old enough to remember that!

By 1989, prices were at 168.8 pence per litre (i.e. £1.68). So I think the story about the change being because it had gone over £1 per gallon has to be a myth. However, retailers certainly weren't complaining about the price displayed being less than one quarter of what it had been! In contrast, they were much less happy about prices per kilogram being more than twice the price per pound (weight).

Prices crossed £1 per litre for 'Premium Unleaded' (95 RON) in November 2007. They fell back below this level in November 2008 but went back up over it in June 2009.

The change-over was actually driven by the technology at the time - namely the outdoor road-facing price advertising panels, as well as many of the pump displays.

Simply - they were only designed to show 2 numbers so when the price-per-gallon exceeded 99 pence many had to stick a static "1" in front, and many point-of-sale terminals and cash registers couldn't handle it.

Since there are ~4.5 litres in a British gallon displaying pence-per-litre brought the displayed prices back to 2 digits and allowed for a gradual transition to 3 and 4 digit displays.

And yes, at the time the switch from pence-per-gallon to pence-per-litre occurred some retailers did take advantage to 'add some profit margin' but it wasn't universal.

It is, and everything is required to be sold in metric units. Except for things like pipe fittings and screw sizes, but even those have to show the metric somewhere.

There's an effort to switch car efficiency from mpg (higher is better) to "l/100km" (smaller is better), because the latter has more intuitive scaling as well as being properly metric.

There were definitely people complaining about the price hike when the currency changed, but that was back in 1971 so it's only boomers who'll bring it up.

I can see bearing a grudge for 50 years over that one, though.

Some pipes are in imperial units in Italy too. For example, from my memories of few days ago at a store: we have metric series of rigid PVC water pipes (32 mm, 40 mm, 50 mm) and imperial series for the flexible ones used for watering plants and grass. I remember sizes of 1/2" 3/4" 5/8" 1" 1 1/4". But there are also metric ones that more or less can fit with some of the imperial ones. Of course there are two series of adapters, hoses, etc.

Gas pipes are imperial. I think they never changed to metric because of safety concerns or because the number of meters sold is lower than water pipes (gas pipes last forever) and it's not worth splitting the market in two. But it's just my suppositions.

Petrol is around £1.44 a litre at the moment, varying a bit geographically.

Gallons are larger than litres, so in Canada you'll never find anything sold by the gallon. However, pounds are smaller than kilograms, so produce at the grocery store is commonly advertised with per-pound price, with the per-kilogram in small print.

Or it’s in weirdly sized containers. Like 227g of coffee, or something similar (UK, not Canada)

Love that phrase: ‘profitable confusion’. Basically the business model of commodity box shifters

"They probably wouldn't show anything other than the pack price if they had a choice"

The absolute dream would be to price it like health care. You only find out the price months or years after buying the item and multiple phone calls to clear up errors. And for one person it would be 50 cents and for another person 200 dollars.

it has to be intentional. almost any two products that you might want to compare are always using different units. haagan Daaz pints are always shown with different units than the larger haagan daaz.

When money is at stake, never attribute to incompetence what could be attributed to greed.

Nice twist on the incompetence version of Hanlon's razor... does it have a name? "Nerdponx's razor" will have a hard time catching on...

EDIT: I see esmifra on Reddit said this six years ago... but not sure "esmifra's razor" would catch on either. https://www.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/8itqf5/comment/d...

And I see there is a similar but less catchily-worded concept, "Hubbard's corollary" from 2020 mentioned in the Wikipedia entry for Hanlon's razor... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor

I actually thought I made it up, and almost called it "Nerdponx's Razor", but I thought it would be arrogant to name it after myself. Hubbard can take the credit!

Oh, they have plenty of time to do it. We have created lots of MBAs...people who want to take advantage of their education, and to do so they want to squeeze a little more profit. And they're bored. And they need to stand out from their coworkers. Therefore 'price per net weight' becomes a thing. And Surge pricing.

(Peanutbutter M&Ms are an egregious example...the share bag price varies 20% depending on the calendar, as does Hilshire Farm Kielbasa...which now comes in 14 oz packages...which is a choice and means a family of 4 needs to buy two of them now to make a meal.)

> as does Hilshire Farm Kielbasa...which now comes in 14 oz packages

Your grievance reminds me of this classic phone call:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4RNb3tt0LM

Well, Peanutbutter M&Ms are sacred manna, so they are a bad example.

At my Ralph's (=Kroger), all the large bags dissappear minutes after getting loaded into the shelf.

but even with the label you don't know if the cheaper one is full of sugar or is mostly water etc... there's no escape.

At my store they are free to choose their unit and they strive for unit heterogeneity within a specific product you might want to compare

That's a good store.

My store has a few different brands of coconut milk. Some of the unit prices are per pound, while others are per quart. I make the approximation that coconut milk has the same density as water, which is two pounds per quart. The unit prices are all odd three digits numbers. It's a pain.

You could have one person who works in an office somewhere who's responsible for itemizing inventory for the whole grocery chain. They could solve this problem (maybe automatically!) with a spreadsheet. They could also solve the problem of tomatillos not being registered in the self-checkout catalog. But what is that person's salary paying for in the company's eyes?

To be fair, maybe the real explanation is "lots of stuff, shit happens." And it's only a factor of two (for watery goods, anyway).

Where I live, labels get these price per amount labels...

But they don't keep the denominator consistent, even across the same category of product.

So I get to compare a price/oz, versus a price/lb versus a price/serving and all the while, I contemplate why nobody's interested in burning the whole store down.

They have to do that in the UK too, but unfortunately the law doesn't seem to standardise the unit for these comparison values(or it does and is ignored).

If you have two packs of coke cans next to each other, and one gives you a price per 100ml, and the other per can, it doesn't help that much(yes you could multiply the value per 100ml by around 3x, but at a glance the difference isn't obvious).

My mum has told me about her shopping habits in the 70s, she would have a list of everything they needed, she would walk around the first shop writing all the prices down. She would walk around the second shop buying the items that were cheaper, then return to the first shop to buy what was cheaper there.

I was excited about the brief wave of startup grocery stores that were selling zero/minimally packaged staple goods, like “The Rounds.” But it seems like they’re just not able to hit a level of scale to where they can be price competitive with the sneaky dark patterned stores.

So I guess I’m sticking to Aldi.

We will all end up having to walk around with an AI shopping assistant that can do all these pricing calculations and comparisons for us.-

(Other than biases, them AI's being "mindless" might be an advantage here ...)

  PS. Until we go so so multimodal that they start to be influenced by packaging size, bright colors, rounding, and big breasts.-

  PSS. Heh. Perhaps the ultimate Turing test is when them AI's start to be influenced by marketing, and shady practices thereof.-

If a company makes something like Meta's ray-ban smart glasses but with the one function of being an AI shopping assistant (preferably offline), it would instantly make the case for why AI is good for the world. I think it could quickly become an unicorn startup, if it can deliver.

The company would have to make a compelling case of not selling itself to brands, and I am not sure such a company exists. Maybe we need an open source project, but it will be constant battle as with ad blockers.

The base features we need are: 1) price comparison: scan all unit prices of products on the shelves, compare and covert, then use AR to superimpose the comparison charts/prices.

2) filter by feature: e.g. food restrictions (allergy, halal, etc.), flavors, etc.

3) ad block: for the real world. Block misleading prices (3 for the price of 2, etc.), to avoid being primed with biased triggers in our choices.

What you describe would be a game changer ...

An AR, AI assistant with marketing and advertising IRL-blocking.-

If by "these companies" you mean the third party suppliers, then sure, but Amazon obviously loses business when a customer can't trust the branded microphone cylinder they bought to place the desired order for them and make the program profitable. This is especially evident in the failure of Amazon's bid over the past decade to replace the big box supermarkets and grocers: clearly customers aren't pleased enough with the service quality to select it over physically picking their "essential goods" themselves, even when their probable prime subscription partially went to setting the system up. What good does Amazon get in hamstringing its own ability to acquire new markets in exchange for enriching someone else? The argument that they've arrived here out of some rational, intentional economic calculation that they can but choose not to change is clearly penny wise but pound foolish.

It's absurd that you have to become a being of continuous price comparison in order to be considered conscious. This is predatory behaviour loaded with decades of psychological research around manipulation strategies to increase purchases (e.g. price anchoring, physical positioning on shelves, store layout).

These things only work because of innate human biases and cognitive defects. The idea that anyone less than a pure rational being lacks consciousness is just silly. There's a huge power imbalance which is systemically leveraged against the consumer and it's more useful to see this as a designed aspect of the system rather than the collective individual failures of "nearly all the consumers"

Behold: The Market doing Market shit.

PS: Even the conscious consumers loose, as they spend a ton of time at minimum wage scrolling prices for goods and services. Basically, yes, you get pay less, but for that you have to work 24/7 in the mine-defusing sweatshop.

Feels like winning to me. Feeds into my hunter-gatherer complex and every cent I keep from them gives me great satisfaction. Though, you are right, it does get old but then my defiant and vengeful nature kicks me right back into.

I know it doesn’t matter to them, it matters to me and it’s a win and winners keep winning, right?

Train an AI on it? Resell an market conscious agent and beat the opponent with artificial consumer endurance? Defect in all games played?

If you look at the list of top online stores after Amazon, many are brands with also physical stores. One would assume they are less shammy. I know if I go to a regular supermarket here, great effort has been spent by the buyers and the organization to ensure that everything is actually of decent quality. Even the cheapest alternatives. That cost of course I then have to pay in the price of the products.

I prefer not to buy things from unknown sellers which I can get from known sources. Sometimes you need something special like a car spare part that has local markup of 300% so then online is worth the risk (not safety critical parts).

I just don't understand the situation where a person decides to buy a regular product from an unknown seller, especially from a system that incentivizes something that is not in the interest of the buyer.

Probably stuck in a local optimum.

On the other hand, hearing you refer to the people you’ve met as “consumers” before criticizing them sounds pretty dehumanizing.

It leaves me wondering if you were able to connect with them on a personal level at all, or if perhaps you were also “barely conscious” during these interactions.

Yeah, but I don't know anyone that will just blindly order stuff from Amazon using Alexa like this. They all know that they have no idea what item will be shipped or what price they may be charged. So I'd argue that they are leaving money on the table from potential sales.

What the replies seem missing is that books are not just the thing Amazon started with but also subject to regulation around pricing in places like Germany, which Amazon sells in. The reason they seem to have good and consistent data on many books is that it's necessary in order to avoid violating laws and regulations.

To be fair, Amazon didn't create this. Even supermarkets position products at different height to steer their sales, and the majority of customers grab the laundry detergent from the mid-shelf with the most sensational pricing-tag.

A specific book is also a far more unique product than i.e. "laundry detergent".

To be comparable, you would have to compare laundry detergent to a genre of books, and maybe also the publisher.

And then the absurdity of some of Amazon's "Smart Shopping" strategies becomes quite obvious: Is there a market for an Amazon Dash-button that blindly ships i.e. a "fiction book from Penguin publishing"...?

I wonder how true that is. I guess it’s your first time buying detergent it might work but most people I know have a specific detergent and they buy the same one no matter where on the shelf it moves.

Your choices are influenced by exposure, and I don’t mean Tuesday. I mean your entire childhood and adolescence as well.

How did you decide on that brand, really? And what was your second choice? Even if you narrowed down to three options by pure rationalism the tiebreaker is often emotional. Then we convince ourselves the decision was objective even when it was not.

At least with TP the choice was blind, as I was buying whatever was cheapest and receiving complaints until I just started trying every brand until a specific one “won out”.

> I wonder how true that is.

The fact that the middle shelf of a supermarket is usually the first one to be empty is quite compelling evidence.

> I guess it’s your first time buying detergent it might work but most people I know have a specific detergent and they buy the same one no matter where on the shelf it moves.

Just to validate that assumption: Would you say this is the same for toilet paper? Soap? garbage bags? Sponges? Pencils? cooking-oil?

There are lots of commodity items I use where I don't know the brand, I cannot even tell how often I switched the supplier of them in the past year...

Subjectively, most people _I_ know buy out of a pool of detergent-brands, all looking quite similar (and most belonging to the same parent company). If they are bombarded with advertisement inside and outside of the shop, and maybe a stacked palette of a different brand of detergent, many of them will "try" this new product instead and end up expanding their pool of brands they will buy.

For most of the items like toilet paper and paper towels and soap, we have specific brands that we always get the only differences which size seems to be the cheapest to me at the time. The wife is very adamant about those.

This means, at one point in time these specific brands used the same techniques to turn you into their dream customer: A buyer who is loyal to them no matter what competitors and even the retailers are offering.

I don’t think Amazon created this on purpose. They did create a system where individual vendors are incentivised to scam consumers though.

The most common and irritating one I see is making a listing for a product at a low price, selling lots of said item and getting people lulled into reordering, then bump the price, change the per-order quantity, or even change the brand or product sold under that listing, 10xing your profit on residual reorders, while you relish the original deal on a new item number. Rinse and repeat.

Plus, Amazons search is garbage. Available items that exactly match the query get ignored. Actually the query only vaguely resembles the results. There is basically no filter functionality (even simple things like which item I can get tomorrow), and the few filters that do exist are ignored. It's like they're playing some funny psycho game with you in order to make you buy stuff that's not quite what you want, even though they do have what you want.

Cory Doctorow has a good blog post explaining why Amazon is so bad. Amazon is now an ad business

https://doctorow.medium.com/how-monopoly-enshittified-amazon...

Agreed. Everytime I order supplements, I have to create a spreadsheet to compare the price per active ingredient weight. Hard to standardize such a thing, of course, but for a lot of other household articles it would definitely be possible.

I believe an awful lot of it is due to allowing third party sellers.

And I think a lot of it is third party sellers uploading their catalogs without trying to sanely de-dupe it vs what's already there. And Amazon certainly doesn't help in how they organize their search results. Please give me a simple size and quantity separate from the description. So often I have to open up a bunch of entries because the description is long enough to push that off the summary you see on the search page.

I also think there are a lot of entries on there where the main objective is to get accidentally grabbed when the main supplier is out of stock.

Yes there should be a simple test such as "show me the cheapest three meter hdmi cable including shipping". Both ebay and amazon fail it spectacularly. Perhaps they don't want a race to the bottom?

I’d argue their app is so good and reliable that these other things don’t add enough to make them worth it. If I see something is out or I need something it only takes a second to buy it on my phone.

The added dynamic of Amazon is they might not even be Tide pods but some counterfeit or perhaps a batch that didn’t pass quality control to sell in more traditional brick and mortar.

My latest in a long list of WTF was I ordered a medical device (new). It came in a package that had once been sealed but the seal was cut. Upon removing the product, it had clearly been used by someone and returned. It was a sling for my arm, and I intend to use it for 2-3 weeks until things feel better but I wouldn’t return it like the last person did. I returned it immediately. I’m not accepting open box items of that nature.

On top of that, when you consider how often Alexa plays the wrong song, it's pretty hard to trust it with purchases. The equivalent of asking for a pop song and getting heavy metal would be trying to order some pens and ending up with a canoe or something.

LOL, makes me think of something more like putting in an order on a stock exchange:

Alexa, what's the current price of a small box of Tide Pods?

A box of 10 Tide Pods costs $5

Alexa, place a limit order for a box of 10 Tide Pods at $5 to expire at the end of the day if not filled, and notify me when it is filled.

If I can order you a box of 10 Tide Pods for $5 or less today, I will do so and notify you.

...time passes...

I have filled your order for a box of 10 Tide Pods for $5; they are expected to be delivered within the next two days

Not that this would necessarily be a good thing, but it seems to me like it would generally beat having to pull out my phone or fire up my browser and do it that way...

[Edit: formatting]

I love this idea.

Yes, the absolute deluge of options for price and shipping speed is one of my chief concerns as well, even outside of voice based orders. This plagues the web interface as well, requiring you to either try and refine via search options (not always available!) or basically doom scrolling. Even a simple sort option, like Ebay has had for years on price v distance, would be a welcome change.

But it seems that, much like Google search and the glut of questionable sites gaming the system via SEO, I think Amazon too will always be fighting against sellers clamoring to be 'above the fold' of results.

Put another way, I don't trust amazon to not screw me. Many people have concerns, some based in reality and some completely imagined, about Amazon and other large corporations trying to screw them for just a few more cents.

Why would I give up what little control I have?

Buying purely on voice commands is new and different. In an environment of trust that is novel and exciting. In an environment of fear or concern that is scary and burdensome. Why would I choose burdensome?

They need more trust, which means being more trustworthy. That likely means losing some profits for consistency.

They need a smooth voice purchasing experience and I have no clue what that means.

You also might get counterfeit Tide full of melamine or lead.

Exactly... I'll order an item a few times a few weeks apart... then the next time it's suddenly 50% higher priced. No real reason why. I've taken to actually ordering direct from a few different mfgs for a few things Amazon has had that local stores haven't simply because Amazon's pricing is sometimes unreasonable.

That they outright lie about "retail" when doing sales is also offputting. The irony is I've started to appreciate Prime Video, and now they charge extra for that without commercials. It's infuriating all around.

That doesn't even begin to cover counterfeit, expired or other problems on fulfillment such as saying it'll be there tomorrow until the order is placed and you get it 4 days later, or maybe not at all (lost?).

Being in Canada makes Amazon seem entirely unhinged. I'll see something on Wirecutter or some other review site, click through to Amazon.com and see that it's only $64. Great. Switch to Amazon.ca and it's $350, presumably because of some bot that sees there's no one else selling it so it lists it for some huge price to take advantage of arbitrage.

Some things will double in price, or just suddenly be out of stock for no apparent reason. They tried to push groceries but a case of Kraft Dinner came out to several dollars per box, compared to about $1.50 from my extremely expensive local grocery or half that from Costco.

They never sold those dash buttons in Canada, but I can imagine pushing the button to get more tide pods and being irate when the cost was twice as much as it was last time.

This 100%.

Their prices are generally too unstable to put anything on "ship & forget". There are some exceptions, like the items you subscribe to.