Posted on 11/16/2018 5:34:46 PM PST by E. Pluribus Unum
Uber pays very poorly. Drivers don’t earn enough per customer to profit, even in volume.
They advertise $500 bonus for signing up with them, but then one has to meet a stringent set of goals to collect it several months later.
One of my kids bought me a new phone, then went to Amazon to order a case and screen protector. The case is super nice, but they messed up on the screen protector. Instead of sending the glass that was ordered, they sent film.
But everything came quickly.
Inside the box of screen protectors was a coupon for a free case for my brand of phone. My kid ordered the case a month ago and it never arrived. They said not everyone who orders that case, gets one :(
False or misleading advertising and gimmick offers eventually takes a company down. Amazon does a lot of business with private companies who may or may not have healthy and profitable business models, which will contribute to Amazon’s demise if they don’t screen more carefully, and compensate the customer adequately.
“I would disagree based on Trump winning the presidency. How do the people in flyover country split their money between Amazon and Walmart?”
Amazon is winning.
Amazon has been kicking Walmart’s butt for years.
Ecclesiastes it is, then.
CC
Bingo. I got out of the habit of going to Amazon first but as a last resort. I don’t like Bezos and Amazon isn’t always the cheapest.
I bought two Seagate hard drives for a Network Attached Storage system I was setting up. The Amazon page had numerous complaints from people receiving counterfeit or used merchandise. I figured “that cannot happen to me” and went ahead and ordered them. Sure enough, I got two very different looking drives packaged in plain cardboard boxes and mylar bag wrapped (not uncommon for bare drives). I sent photos of the drive labels to Seagate and they quickly confirmed one was not their drive. I returned both and then began buying the drives from reputable local retailers (Fry’s Electronics, Best Buy) and to get the drives in consumer packages.
Since then, I’ve found lots of pages where people are complaining about Amazon merchants fraudulently selling fake products.
Amazon seems to be doing very little to police their merchants. When I complained to Amazon, they said “write a review” of the product and merchant. That is not the action a company serious about maintaining quality and trust would take.
My opinion of Amazon went way down after that experience.
What’s funny is one of the GE execs (Comstock) just wrote a “leadership” book.
AMA opened their marketplace to more vendors in recent years. Unfortunately their quest for quantity has cost consumer quality. Lot of drop ship from China.....
When democrats finally get their way Amazon will have to pay lowest skill employees $100/hr with full medical, dental, a months paid vacation, and two months a year for bereavement or familiy pregnancy. Plus they will demand blacks and mexicans orders be paid by the government
Ali Baba
I agree with everything he has said. mediocrity is attracted to large successful companies because it is easier to hide and blame failings on others... At some point someone that has no skill or business sense will take over the company and ruin it because they lack the sense of vision to see what they should be doing in the business climate.
Yup, go to Amazon, learn about the product, read the reviews and then head over to Ebay to buy it, usually cheaper and without tax.
For me, Amazon has three areas that are making them less and less attractive to use.
One, is their search sucks. Many times if you do a search, you’ll get several hundred results, but if you attempt to sort by price or reviews, the result set drops to a handful. They throw in extra results that don’t match your search and make it difficult to narrow your search through words. Finding things is getting to be so frustrating that it isn’t worth it.
Two is their choice to allow sellers from China to be able to comingle their items without any means to filter them out.
Three is the incessant advertising getting in the way.
Amazon used to be an easy place to find what you wanted, buy it, and receive it quickly. It’s drifting further and further away from that as they apparently try to be something else.
Also, didn't Amazon just create, publish and send out huge toy catalogs ahead of Christmas to boost its toy sales? Thought I read that somewhere.
What's old is new again ..... go figure!
I go to Amazon to look at a product and read reviews.
Then I search it and usually can find it elsewhere less expensively.
Etsy, Ebay, and straight from manufacturers and distributors . Many now offer a lower price and free shipping.
I go out of my way to avoid Amazon.
Amazon is winning, for now, but I think Walmart is figuring out how to compete with them. Say I want to buy something that Walmart has online. If I order enough, they’ll send it to my address, but if it’s a small or inexpensive order, and I don’t want to pay a shipping charge, they’ll send it to the store for me to pick up there free. Some orders are ready in a couple of hours, and some take a couple of days. Time is money, and the less time I have to spend walking around a store hunting down an item, the more time I have to do something else.
For me, Amazon’s decision to ship USPS has broken our relationship. USPS doesn’t deliver to my house. For me here, they have window hours to pick up shipments during work hours. And I am not going to the PO to pick up a bulky items. If I wanted to do that, Walmart here I come.
I now use Chewy for pet supplies.
And I use Walmart more.
I think that depends on where you live. Where I live, UPS and FedEx don’t deliver on the weekends, but the post office does.
And while that is true, along with the accelerating rapidity of change, the human brain is somewhat evolved for a slower world and it's going to get messy as more and more fall behind and are replaced by AI and robots. STEM folks will be okay, but we're a minority. (See Vonnegut's "Player Piano")
Anxiety + useless idle people + hunger = zombie apocalypse.
With the exception of that dopey demoncrap congressman saying he'll nuke us, I don't think the government is going to publicly state what its real plan for dealing with surplus population - although you can tell that they intend a great culling if you read Agenda - 21's "sustainability" goals for 2030.
That’s the thing. Each carrier has their own limitations of what they can and can’t service. USPS does deliver to my house every day, except for Sundays, which they have added for package delivery only. Neither UPS nor FedEx delivers to my house on Saturday or Sunday.
I wouldn’t mind if Amazon would listen. If USPS did deliver to my house, at all, this wouldn’t be a problem. They don’t deliver, at all. They give me a free PO Box.
But, they do Sunday package delivery less than a mile from my house.
I don’t need weekend delivery, not a problem. But I pay for delivery, to my house. If I wanted to drive somewhere to pick up something, I will just shop with that business directly.
But, Amazon won’t listen. Claim they have no control over how their system picks delivery companies.
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