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Amazon Isn’t Even That Convenient Anymore
Have we reached peak Amazon frustration?
I’m looking for a new computer monitor. And so, with a sparkling lack of original thought, I type Amazon into my browser and search for monitors.
I get a sinking feeling when I visit Amazon these days. First, I have a sense of guilt about handing over cash to them (or, more accurately, buying with one click. I don’t even feel the money leave me). Amazon has become retail fast food: easy, convenient, bad for you, bad for the people that work there, and bad for the planet. But where else am I going to buy a monitor? You can’t even buy the model I’m looking at from the manufacturer’s site. They offer a list of retailers, but that list consists of one option: Amazon.
More than that, I get this sinking feeling because finding things on Amazon, when you don’t know exactly what you want, is hard. I struggle to get a sense of which are good, which are overpriced, and which are drop-shipped from AliExpress to fund someone’s Tim Ferris-esque four-day workweek. Everything is either exploitatively expensive or suspiciously cheap. It doesn’t help that monitor model numbers look like automatically…
