Looks like I’m spoiled for choice. Temu has exactly the same for 11.29. Not that I’d be purchasing from either place; it’s just another example of Amazon’s enshittification.
I always love the nonsensical order of letters that these companies use.
It’s because of the US patent and trademark office. Not many people are competing with those who slam their heads on the keyboard for their brand names.
Amazon required a US trademarked brand name after the first bout of “el cheapo boot leg” products hit the news cycle (the pajamas on fire and hair curlers that would kill you), so we had these alphabet soup brand names ever since.
I read that it’s to avoid internal competition.
A Chinese company manufactures a product (or parts of it) for a Western brand with high quality control standards.
Half the production output meets the standard and is sold under the Western brand name for a higher price.
The other half is sold much cheaper, with a brand name that sounds unappealing to Western customers but can still be sold to Asian markets or people who don’t care and only look at the price.So the English name sounds bad on purpose to steer Western buyers towards the more expensive brand with a higher profit margin.
Amazon does not require a brand but having a brand allows the seller better access into amazing seller’s tools.
Amazing incentivizes this shit and does not give a fuck about it. They could be easily detecting this using LLMs but they don’t because they only care so it profits.
My favourite of these company names is still BOIFUN who obviously sell DVD players, baby monitors and door bells.
The one that really stuck with me was COCKFAIS
FOCMKEAS (19mm reamer) SCHNITPWR (12V power supply)
CTIRCHIU is definitely the most premium brand judging by that price, truly a name you can trust
I’m pretty sure CTIRCHIU is a Lovecraftian monster.
Hoement sounds like a word, at least. A… Hoe moment?
I don’t care what the Hoe meant, she’s still a hoe.
She’s having a hoement, letter.
„went to the bar last night with my girls and met this guy. a few hours later i was having a hoement with him in the bathroom.“
I was thinking it was a movement for sex worker rights, or something
What you mean? HAFSBEVCZ is a totally established, reputable brand.
Looks more like a randomly generated password.
Looks vaguely eastern european
There’s a reason for them! I can’t find the original video I saw about it, but this one explains it pretty well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UrqlMfwUC4
I also like how sarcastic this person sounds (at least to me) during their sponsor segment.
edit: Removed the timestamp from the YouTube link.
You’re probably thinking of the HAI video.
That seems very likely. I guess my YouTube search skills aren’t what I thought they were. Thank you.
My favourite one so far is “Hoement”
“CTIRCHIU” sounds like an eldritch god
I deleted my Amazon account last month. No more Goodreads and IMDb is just another plus.
Extracted my ebooks from my Kindle with Calibre, so I am fine.
Feeling good and less targeted and bombarded.
Having really hard time converting Kindle books lately, especially since last time I tried this, the deDRM plugin couldn’t handle the newest Kindle for PC versions. Is there an easy way that doesn’t involve getting a physical Kindle device? Does the Android thing work?
I suppose the easiest way is installing an old kindle for PC version, if that’s the problem (not through the kindle website)
Cannot say. I had a very old Kindle and all my books on device.
Does that work for Google Play books? Is it an app?
Google Play Books allows publishers to set the DRM policy. Some titles are not protected and can be just downloaded as EPUB. For the DRMed books, it can send them to Adobe’s ebook reader/sync app, which (last I checked) can be decrypted by the Calibre deDRM plugin.
Calibre is a program for Windows/Linux. To be able to export books (and deDRM them) there are different plugins, but I never heard about one for Google Play Books.
Thank you.
More expensive AliExpress…
It feels like Amazon is flooded with dropshipping beyond repair.This shit frustrates me to no end. These days I just look on Aliexpress first, just so I’m aware what the usual drop shipping item actually goes for.
It’s very annoying that platforms like Amazon tolerate this. Because it’s actively driving me away from them. I want to see good quality items, not the same Aliexpress shit priced ten times higher. But I can’t FIND the good stuff because the platform is literally full of garbage.
That’s what’s driving you away from Amazon?!!
Take a step back for a second. They’re complaining about Amazon, and your response is “that’s the wrong complaint”.
“You’re not complaining right! Why are to complaining that way, you should be complaining this way!”
Typical Linux user
Are these linux users in the room right now?
I use arch btw
Linux user here. I want to read dramatic complaints. Any kind, if it’s dramatic. Or write a boring one and I’ll move on. Starting a flame war for complaint style is boring. Better topics for flame wars exist.
Lol who is even talking about linux here?
People have no morals. Most people only care about the cheapest price, and after that getting the best item for the cheapest price
It’s also a question of availability. Looking at my last ten purchases, simply none of those were available locally here. We don’t HAVE a camera store here to buy things like lens caps. The stationary store where I went didn’t HAVE large elastic bands, only small ones. Nor did they have the specific Pentel gel pen that I use for work. The shoes I bought (US size 17) are not available, since stores don’t stock past size 13.
I did buy a laptop stand, so technically I could’ve bought say, a plastic box or some books locally to do the same thing. But the stand is nicer.
For me, it’s not about the price. I’d rather spend 10 for something great than 1 for something that sort of works. I am by no means cheap. But I do have specific needs and tastes that my local stores don’t cater to.
And hey, if they won’t sell me what I need, I’m not going to feel bad about buying it somewhere that will 🤷♂️
Local vs amazon are not the only 2 options. And let me be very clear. I am not simply saying “Buy local”. Conflating that with ethical shopping is wrong.
Well ‘buy local’ tends to be the solution most people offer when this particular discussions arises. But I agree that only solves some issues. Especially since local shops also get that stuff from the same sources.
I’m more of a ‘there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism’ kinda guy.
But frankly, I’ve got too much going on to worry about the ethics of where I’m sourcing pens and notepads. I’d rather focus on the big things.
Exactly my philosophy.
I try to buy in this order (time and money is of no concern):
Local shops -> domestic Online shops -> AliExpress (electronics) or Amazon (branded electronics like storage) -> Amazon (anything else).If it aint available for a decent price and I don’t need it, I won’t buy it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
People need to realize that Amazon has them locked in.
I needed a tall mini fridge for a garage. Cheapest I could find was fucking $700.
I went into a nearby home appliance store and got the same one for fucking ~$200. Granted I had to pay for an $80 delivery, but it still beats the shit out of every option for a 7 cu ft fridge on Amazon.
Every dipshit with a freshly minted MBA thinks they’re going to go and disrupt the appliance industry by putting it online and snatching it out from under all those antiquated local dealerships run by out of touch old men who can barely operate a computer. They think they’re going to go from zero to nationwide tomorrow, and they’re so smart because nobody’s thought of it before.
It turns out that dealing with the final mile with appliances is killer, and extremely difficult logistically. That makes the entire operation much more expensive than anyone thinks at first glance. Not just in terms of raw dollars and cents paid to disinterested common carriers to move your product from A to B (who also won’t install the stuff or even bring it inside your customer’s house) but also in damaged and returned products and angry screaming customers who will be initiating credit card chargebacks all the time whenever anything goes wrong.
All of those little local dealerships have had decades to figure out how to move a refrigerator from their warehouse to your kitchen and how to remediate the situation if it all goes pear shaped on delivery day, and all of them only service their local territory for a reason. The further you stretch without some physical presence in where you’re stretching to, the more impossible it becomes to control the logistics.
So yeah, that’s probably in no small part why your fridge would have been so expensive. Amazon is among the latest figuring this out the hard way, and you can’t just slap a refrigerator or a stove in a bubble mailer and dump it on somebody’s front porch.
Tangentially, this reminds me of some advice I read on whole home water filters. Get this one or get that one. but get it from a local business who’s been in your area for years and years. You will have a problem with it. You are going to need someone to call. And they say, just plan for that from the start.
Local appliance dealers likely also have a dude who in a pinch can just carry most appliances where they need to go.
Not to be that guy but there’s no way in hell that $700 is true. There are pages of fridges for less than $400 that are 7 cu ft.
I mean, fuck Amazon and all that jazz, don’t get me wrong - I just feel like it’s worth noting the hyperbole. It’s not that bad, at least from an end consumer perspective.
Amazon is admittedly powered by greed and the tears of the proletariat but they do a good job keeping the customer happy.
my 2 cents… not everybody sees the same prices at Amazon… that is part of their dynamic gouging
Just to add an anecdote… My friend is beyond millionaire as her father started a retail giant. Anyways, she has money coming out her ass and the prices Amazon shows her are almost consistently 30%-50% more than what they show me. Because they know she’s rich AF and they know I’m fairly poor.
e: grammar
Yep. Amazon knew my gf and I were moving in together.
I don’t know what kind of setup my GF’s phone had going, but she loved hands-free features like “hi Google” or whatever it was.
I specifically remember having a chit chat verbal conversation with her on her patio while her phone was laying there… and the next day products started getting recommended to me on my phone based on that convo.
My phone at the time was turned off and in my backpack in the house. Somehow the back end logic sewed everything together.
I was studying classical guitar. I was practicing piece and literally YouTube video results on my PC for learning the piece before searching for it.
Only network traffic to indicate was downloading a .PDF on my chrome browser on my phone. This was in like 2012.
Everyone is free to set their own priorities, but for me, I’ll just not purchase a thing at all, rather than buy it off Amazon. Most people buy too much crap they don’t actually need anyway.
Some stuff is more, most is less, at least in my town.
It’s missing the random “Amazon’s Choice” badge on one of the 20 identical choices 🤣
My co-worker & I have the exact same lunchbag, except the label has a different gibberish name on it. Yup, both from Amazon.
I will not defend Amazon. But the lack of local retail/price gouging which is shipping in Canada keeps pushing me to Amazon.
I need a role of 3D printable filament or an SD Card. The nearest store is 1-2 hours away and costs twice as much for the convenience, buying from the manufacturer may not possible and if it is shipping cost just as much as the product.
I would love it if there was competition, but there isn’t and Amazon knows it. So for the most part I just buy from brands I know are safe.
This is what people aren’t talking about enough. It may make people feel all good inside to not have Amazon and everything - until they are commuting for long periods, having to spend more than they budgeted for and shipping to not be available. Also, who loves it when you have to store-hop multiple places and still not find what you need?
It’s like I can’t rely on Walmart or even Best Buy to have what I’m looking for. They have their limits. I can’t rely on small businesses either because they probably won’t have whatever it is I need.
So, sorry, I’m going to keep shopping Amazon as sparingly as possible. Do I hear anyone who is Anti-Amazon prop up any stores for reasonable commute and pricing and available shipping for people and communities? No? Then shut up about your lectures that people don’t need Amazon and how they’re sheeple for continuing to buy from it. It is all about self-pride and virtue signaling.
I have a few local electronic shops.
It’s just that they dont have what I need or are way more expensive.It is almost impossible to buy RAM or a CPU in person outside of specialty shops.
SSDs or HDDs are only available in low capacity (<2TB) and/or low spec (M.2 Gen3).Nothing of use for an enthusiast.
The only worth they have to me are as a appliance seller (e.g. TVs, household appliance, general use audio equipment)I see you too have a waste of retail space known as Best Buy/Best Buy Mobile in your community.
MediaMarkt and Saturn (our largest electronics retailers) first merged then were bought up by JD.com (chinese retailer)
Any other shop is a small chain/one-man-army type of shop which usually don’t have what I need :/Recently discovered a decent camera shop by coincidence while traveling :) That was cool.
They are both physical and online. And they werent pushy about their products. Which is great!
Honestly, my strategy for buying goods online is to look up the relevant wikipedia article, read the list of manufacturers, look at their own wikipedia pages or read customer reviews, then finally go to the company site and ordering directly.
For used items or niche items not widely produced, ebay or craigslist.
Amazon always had funky shit with how they recommended things - now people just know how to game it more, so winning move is not to play there.
Check out an app called Karrot. It’s basically craigslist but you periodically have to confirm your location, so you know all items are local. It also has a shockingly accurate photo identification and pricing feature.
I’m not going into such depth (unless it’s technology I don’t understand), but I usually shop on Amazon after I figured out what exactly I wanted, and what price below other stores I was willing to pay. I found that only two categories I still overwhelmingly purchase from Amazon are books and branded art supplies.
I don’t know where you are located so this may not apply to you, but in the US for branded art supplies I always go with DickBlick or Jerry’s Artorama, because in addition to the usual “stick it in a bubble bag and see how damaged we can make it before it arrives” Amazon shipping policy, branded art supplies are now being counterfeited on Amazon, like so many other things.
I already could not safely buy liquids (Gamsol, OMS, etc) or soft supplies (paper or canvas pads, single watercolors) because of careless shipping, but now I won’t even try because of counterfeits. If you want the branded version of something that already has budget knockoffs, say an item like Holbein or Caran d’Ache colored pencils where the real thing is vastly more expensive than others in its category, you’re taking your chances on Amazon. Amazon has been selling counterfeit fountain pens for years, even low end pens like Lamy Safaris which always blew my mind, but now it’s a lot of things in the art supply world.
So now I only get cheap knockoffs there, anything under $50. Anything over that, or anything liquid or bendable/breakable, I go with a real art supply store. It’s absolutely worth it, they pack it all very carefully, excellent return service when I’ve needed it, and I can still pick up deals better than Amazon without ever having to worry about the possibility it’s a counterfeit and I just wasted hundreds on a scam.
If you’re not in the US you may be having a markedly better experience, so disregard. But in the US, Amazon for branded art supplies is a big NO for me.
I’m in Ireland, shopping mainly in the UK Amazon. I buy there mainly mid-range supplies, and I have a few physical stores in continental Europe where I get the more expensive stuff. But flying with anything liquid or large paper pads is almost as risky as having them shipped from Amazon, with the added bonus of my wife complaining that I take up too much weight in the suitcase with my “useless toys”.
Yeah, you’re definitely getting a better experience in Ireland with both Amazon and Temu/AliExpress, so I don’t blame you. Kinda have to cross your fingers and hope for the best, or have it shipped with all the added shipping costs: no truly good options. But people who don’t do a lot of art will never understand why you have to have so many different supplies, or why one paint is not the same as another, or why paper isn’t just paper, and “But you already have fifteen blues!” Yeah, and now I’m about to have sixteen, lol. Just the way it is.
I usually start with a google image search, find ones that look good and then try to track down where I can get them from.
Ah, I degoogled my life, so I use Wikipedia instead. Although considering that google images may be flooded with AI slop now that strategy might not work for much longer. Creative tho!
Well yes to be honest it’s DDG image search usually
Try https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ – it really cuts down on the slop, even for images.
I do use noai ddg, but I never tried the images function. Guess it’s worth a shot.
Almost everything on Amazon is cheap trash, and they promote the hell out of all that trash instead of products of any quality. I am also so sick of the click funnels where you search for a specific item and they just give you pages full of knockoff trash as search results even if you go to a specific brand store. It’s nonsense.
Why would they want to sell you a nice thing once when they can sell you a shit thing ten times?
I stayed away for a few years, ended up buying a fair bit more frequently when doing up the house just due to cost and delivery but the site does look exactly like any other slop store now. It looks like chinavasion or alibaba.
Amazon is just a drop shipping marketplace where everything comes direct from the exact same warehouse in China.
Exactly. Once you know about “white box” goods and the robust Chinese manufacturing chains that support it, you can’t unsee it.
What blows my mind is that Amazon is just accelerating this, and at times, embracing it with their own brand. They’ve gone from being a whole-ass shopping mall to end-of-days-K-Mart in just a few years.
How do they drop ship from China in 2 days?
Not everything on Amazon ships in two days. In the picture, the dates vary quite a bit.
Because Amazon pushes sellers to use Amazon warehouses and shipping their product in advance
…so they’re not drop shipping the product to the customers.
Easy, they don’t.
One of the many reasons I canceled my prime subscription is a lot of stuff was not coming in 2 days.
Hey now. China’s been churning out much higher quality merch of late. And the American Tech Giants have been increasingly wrapped up in US trade war politics. So a lot of this shit now comes from the Philippines, India, and Bangladesh.
It’s worse than when eBay peaked.
Just in case anyone actually intends to buy one, buy european: https://blahol.com/
Lmfao 170€ for a bag. Are you people rich? If Europe can’t produce a good quality 50€ bag ethically, it doesn’t deserve my money either. It’s a fucking BAG
If it holds up longer, start by dividing it by each year you use it daily for.
Once break even, determine if it’s still too expensive .
Buy cheap, buy twice.
Buy decent, buy once (for longer time).No, no and no. Artificial tough fabrics and sewing methods are extremely affordable industrially in 2025. I will not pay 170€ for something that should cost, extremely generously, 50€.
You do realize that those things are affordable due to labor exploitation, right?
Give me numerical data for that. I can buy fucking 10 cent microcontrollers and program them at home because 200 years of industrial development have made it that there’s so little labor involved in their production, it’s a matter of economy of scale. Manufacture loads of cheap, resistant fabrics such as viscosa, manufacture loads of cheap, long-lasting messenger bags. But no, it has to be 100 different small-production models because we need 100 different varieties of messenger bags instead of reliable, affordable, mass-produced Eco-friendly options
May be.
Didnt know wages became affordable as well.This aint the US where you don’t pay for the social safety net :)
Also I’m not into sweatshop products if it can be avoided.This aint the US where you don’t pay for the social safety net
Fuck that. In my European country, 25% of young people endure unemployment and nobody can fucking afford housing, where are our safety nets in Spain? Our purchase power is worse than it was 25 years ago, and keeps worsening. Wages in Spain are extremely affordable, we get paid like utter shit, minimum wage is 1300€ a month.
Go and spend 170€ in a bag 150€ of which go to the capitalist owner of the company.
I mean, technically given the layout, that’s a working cycle messenger bag.
Care to explain? I don’t understand your comment, sorry
yeah I dropped a comma. that particular layout is less of an everyday bag and more of a working bike messenger bag. for that purpose it’s pretty fairly priced- my messenger bag for work was in the $500 range. there’s a pretty big distinction between a regular messenger bag and a bike messenger bag- one sits low and on the hip while bike mess bags are designed for documents and small parcels and they sit high and tight on the back to stay slim for lane splitting and traffic. of course, it’s not just a working messenger bag, it’s also good for cycle commuters and the likes, but they’re less comfortable in that configuration.
Randomly recommending a 600% increased price bag is crazy.
Difference is the quality.
The listed item may break after 10 months or is not comfortable.
Meanwhipe this holds up for >5 years and feels very good.You pay for actual wages, quality assurance and not being subject to cancerous dyes they use over there without preparing them.
I will never buy anything plastic on Amazon or AliExpress that will enter my body.
Thats the price of a good quality product produced in decent conditions by a small company in Europe. Maybe could be cheaper if it was facory produced, but not much of that going on anymore is there? Anything lower is either sweatshop, low quality material/work or not produced in Europe. I use this stuff and can highly recommend it. You can check my posting history if you think I go around promoting a random buisness.
The internet was so good in 08. You searched for stuff, found exactly what you needed, and were done.
Poor kids today will never know anything other than ad ridden bot corponet.
The internet was so good in 08. You searched for stuff, found exactly what you needed, and were done.
Shit was bad in 2008, too. The degree to which drop shippers had consolidated down to one mega-wholesaler rather than a dozen crappy fly-by-nights hadn’t happened yet. You got a dozen different flavors of crap rather than just one. But it was still crap.
Poor kids today will never know anything other than ad ridden bot corponet.
Under an Amazon keyword search, sure. You can still find good quality products outside of Amazon. You can even find it inside Amazon if you know what you’re looking for.
The difference between 2008 and 2025 is primarily that Amazon’s algorithmic tools have degraded to the state of Yahoo or Sears.
You think normal people today go outside the 5 walled garden corpo sites?
They dont.
They are terrified of an html website. I dont have tech friends irl, so trust me. The real internet, the original non corpo net, is only for ultra nerds now.
If you seriously think the internet is better now than 08 ish, well I dont agree.
If you seriously think the internet is better now than 08 ish, well I dont agree.
I think it’s heavily predicated on what you’re using the Internet for. In the business world, we’ve improved system redundancy, backup/recovery, and transfer speeds by leaps and bounds.
Back in 2008, I was in my car driving to Dallas to escape Hurricane Ike, with a trunk full of server hardware needed to keep our business running. Datacenter proliferation has fully eliminated the need to do anything like that again.
We have significantly more high speed broadband. We have superior wireless connectivity. HTML5 is much better than it’s predecessors. We’ve modernized APIs and broadly adopted JSON for transmission. The hardware is so much better, from phones to routers to raspberry pis for self-hosting.
I get you don’t like the current content of big Web 2.0 publishers. But you’re really missing the forest for a few big ugly trees
In 2008 you could do a web search and have relevant real results right on the first page. Maybe an ad or two.
Now it is effectively:
- AI summary
- ad
- ad
- ad
- link that is effectively an ad
- link to AI generated website
- link to AI generated website
- link to an actual decent result
- link to a questionable result
- link to AI generated website
You can change search provider and have the experience back ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I use DuckDuckGo and it is better in general, but still has a big pitfall with AI generated websites. I’ve used some others like SearXNG but those feel experimental at best. I’m willing to hear about viable alternatives.
Kagi is where it’s at. Changed my search experience for the better like crazy.
In 2008 you could do a web search and have relevant real results
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bombing
Google had (mostly) solved this problem by 2007. I couldn’t name another search engine that could claim the same.
But the process of Spamdexing has been an ongoing war of the websites since the nineties. Google never fully solved it, they just did a better job than most up until the big executive shift in 2018.
The spam site takeover of your search results in the modern day is as much a consequence of modernization in Spamdexing as it is any search engine’s own failures. None of those AI content mill sites existed to index 20 years ago
I forget the exact proposed bill, it might have been SOPA (or something else threatening net neutrality), and it might have been around 2010. That made me think “they want to make the internet into cable TV”. And we’re pretty close to that being reality in a way.
- driven by AI-slop
(For real: all those products and descriptions/titles are so bad, it has to be AI-slop)
Honestly, I stopped buying on Amazon 3 years ago. Apart from an enshittified experience I don’t want to pay for Jeff Bezos next Helicopter. I go to the store or buy on alternative web sites which are 10€ more expensive, but fuck Jeff.
ebay. You get pretty much the same offerings but at least on ebay the people selling actually care about looking good since negative reviews really tank your scores and those actually matter.
Just a week ago I got victim of Amazon dropshipping on eBay. The product was delivered by and from Amazon, but the ebay seller used a weird tracking service so it isn’t too obvious. He put the 5€ difference directly into his pocket. I complained to eBay, but they decided “based on automation and the use of artificial intelligence”, that no rules were broken. So be careful with using eBay as an alternative. Negative reviews can be more or less easily removed on eBay, better give a neutral review in these cases.
Negative reviews are not easily removed on eBay. My husband has been a seller for years now. People will complain about the wildest shit that was clearly addressed in the listing, then you spend 2 hours on the phone with eBay, and likely they will keep the review.
On Amazon, on the other hand, vendors will personally reach out to you if you give anything less than 5 stars and basically “work” with you u til you change your rating (giving you free shit). A lot of people end up changing their review.
vendors will personally reach out to you if you give anything less than 5 stars and basically “work” with you u til you change your rating (giving you free shit)
Not the one I had a problem with. They sold me a bunch of reman hard drives that were listed as new. When I returned them and gave them a shitty review about how they lied they tried to bribe me with 1 used drive to take it down. I was like, “no, give me what I actually ordered or fuck off” They fucked off. Amazon also didn’t do shit to them for there fraudulent listings as far as I can tell.
Good call.
I will say, I do go out of my way to buy from local spots. I’ve thought about trying to negotiate with some Local Game Store types about prices. I want to buy from LGS but if the price is twice that of Amazon I do find it challenging, if it was like 50% up from Amazon I’d do it, but double is a bit too big of a difference to me in some cases.
Especially if it’s just one extra trader in between who drives the price. Jeff Bezos is evil, but let’s not act like local electronic stores are charity. In the end it’s all produced in China…
Their b2c stuff isn’t what’s making bezos rich. It’s AWS, which is difficult to avoid as it runs over half of the internet. But I get the sentiment.
