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.
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.)
Although I detect it’s starting to drift as they switch to a “marketplace” approach similar to Amazon.
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.
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.
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
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".
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...
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.
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.
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
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.
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).
Payola.
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??
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.
"The same order of Tide Pods as last time?"
But Amazon can't.
“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.
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.
This is one of the biggest food chains in Sweden.
More like deceptively...
If a person did that, I would consider the behavior antisocial.
This is sneaky as hell.
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.
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...
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.
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)
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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...
Consumer laws are always a benefit!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Look at us poor Europeans with our metric-system money-math
Not if you are voting someone in a political office in the next election.
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.
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 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.
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.
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".
> 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%?
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.
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.
This was on top of renting me the flipchart for $107 for 6 hours.
> renting me the flipchart for $107 for 6 hours
- 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?
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.
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.
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 :)
Generously, he brought them in to share along with the story. I’m sure they made a lot of banana bread the following week.
For more info: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Banana_Stand
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.)
On the flip side, many local places have gone to pricing bananas by the each.
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.)
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.
https://cheezburger.com/12444421/twitter-thread-frustrated-h...
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.)
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.