If you're just looking for something that's all whitelabeled stuff all coming from the same alibaba source, you can just find who's selling the same thing at the cheapest price currently. The prime only label is needed to filter out the stuff with extreme shipping pricing and times selling for $1. Would be much nicer if they could just properly sort everything with shipping included like ebay but whatever.

The results have long been flooded with brands with names like XEZAXFE all selling the exact same thing so it's the fastest and easiest way to find what I'm looking for if it's not brand name (which I wouldn't trust amazon to send me a non-bootleg version of otherwise if I want brand name).

This needs to be pinned as the top comment. Thank you!

I'm happy to wait 3 more days, and have inaccurate delivery estimates, in order to get what I actually want.

It also spurred me to move most of stuff off of AWS, which is saving me money now too! The cloud ecosystem has grown in the past 10 years, and I hadn't shopped around, and was missing out on better experience that cost far less.

This is why I'm so bullish on Shopify. It increasingly is getting network effects (Shop.app) and people are starting to become even more brand loyal than before. Even Chinese companies are creating strong brand categories at a fraction of US counterparts and selling direct on Shopify to (e.g. Anker, Fnirsi, Fanttik, etc.)

Amused so many people here seem to be pushing etsy. I saw the same supposedly hand-made mugs on sale by hundreds of people on etsy a few years ago.

There is no single website that offers similar solution where my payment is saved and I can just buy and forget.

Only thing I’ve successfully replaced is grocery shopping.

"Only" here is incorrect. I posit every public company's primary concern is stock price. But certain behaviors and values align with driving that stock price up and for Amazon it's Customer Obsession. And they are not obsessed with it because they love you, it's because they love your repeat business. But that obsession means your happiness and their stock price are aligned, for now.

I pushed Purchase on Amazon one day and was opening the package 36 minutes later. I can barely drive down to a gas station, get a coke and come back in that time. But I wanted a particular, random item one morning and was setting it up within the hour without leaving my seat. Ebay and Walmart and Local shop can't do that.

I support leaving out of principle, that's laudable. But it won't be because they aren't good at delivering CX.

Best Buy, Microcenter, B&H, Walmart all do better. They just don't have the range or sometimes do not respect my tax forms.

I am an hour drive from a larger town with a big box store like Walmart. The Best Buy closed. The closest thing nearby is something called Tractor Supply. They put out a big sign each year saying "We Have Chicks!!!" which means they have baby chickens, ducks and turkeys. They are super cute.

Second, I found a product I liked but was the wrong size. As far as I could tell, they can’t even show you recommended similar products. They show you what other people clicked on or bought in the same order. But not just actually similar products in the same style.

ByteDance has reimplemented their now infamous video suggestion algorithm for shopping and it is _very_ effective.

Once the infrastructure and logistics of the Chinese eCommerce platforms improve in the US, it will be so much better that I imagine that Bezos only recourse will be to have congress ban them (a la the Chinese EV ban).

He will likely be successful in doing this and allow the US to slide further into modern technological irrelevancy at his own benefit.

There’s really no knowing what contaminating or failed spec made that batch super cheap.

It’s a race to the bottom, corners will be cut.

worked in advertisement, and there's legal precedent to allow bidding on competitor brands (for every advertising network joy).

Years ago Amazon intentionally nerfed their own on-site search into complete uselessness. A step at a time they removed the ability to exclude a term by prefixing a '-', then they removed grouping terms into a phrase either with quote marks or plus+signs. For years these all worked well. It's no longer plausible that the reason is to serve semantic search results, they could still include synonyms lower in results while respecting exclusion and phrases but that would make what's really going on too obvious.

The real reason they nerfed their search so bad I often have to use Google with "site:amazon.com" is simply so they can serve up whatever results are most profitable which vaguely semantically match any term. This is a big profit center due to all the 'marketing programs' they push on third-party sellers. Paying for these is virtually required to get on the first page of any popular search. Amazon has a huge inventory of such listings and selling you one of those listing is more profitable for Amazon, but assuming the price is the same, less profitable for the reseller due to giving Amazon even more of their slim margin. Since playing this game has become required, it raises the ASP of all products - another Amazon tax.

Through the Bezos era and up until around ten years ago, Amazon was "good", meaning their broad strategies and policies were generally a net gain for most buyers. Things Like allowing negative reviews and no-questions returns made me a fan and allowed Amazon to destroy all its competition. Since then they've gradually A/B tested their way into, IMHO, pure evil.

For consumers, the only real net gains Amazon still provides is massive inventory and faster delivery for Prime items (although you may have noticed they are now also strategically degrading Prime delivery consistency). Everything else about Amazon is objectively worse. Products are more expensive, search is intentionally broken, the site is rife with paid placements and dark patterns. And no one can compete because as soon as a new upstart offers search that works or lower prices by not forcing all sellers into high-margin programs, Amazon will un-nerf that specific enshittification just enough until the new threat is exterminated.

They do the reviews themselves, watch for returns and quality issues, and can actually provide consumers with the best products.

Hello! Another thing it means is that you are legally responsible for paying ... ta-dum ... TARIFFS!

This is a solved problem. Recommendation algorithms aren't just "highest average rating", they take into account number of ratings, recent trends, etc.

Even if some ads improve this experience, Amazon is orders of magnitude past that threshold into hostility and toxicity. You have to scroll through pages of sponsored results to find anything worthwhile.

Hopefully Seth's publisher knows this?

It's unreal to me that you can search for a specific doctor's name in a specific town and end up seeing a sponsored result that uses the doctor's name in the ad's title but it's not the real office, instead it's someone else entirely.

If I search for specific terms then I get a menu of slop to choose from. Search isn't built to serve the searcher at all. Search is meant to surface things that are promoted, hyped, advertised, or paid for in some way.

So you search Amazon for stuff and a lot of crap added on to it. Any retail site's filters are useless for filtering out what you don't want to see or casting a net for desirable features. I swear--search for "bananas" at a grocery store and you'll get results for ice cream and baby food and Minions merchandise and organic pears?

This behavior has already crept into LLM responses. I often request that they compile a list of the top-5 or top-10 according to some criteria. And it never fails that they cannot resist giving me outliers and things that don't fit by any means. Now I don't know what influences an LLM to give stupid non-matching results, but I know they do. Is RLHF already baking-in advertising and sponsorship? I wouldn't rule it out.

Case in point: the other day I was thinking of Amy Schumer but couldn't remember her name. So I struck up a convo with Copilot, and described Schumer by profession, personality, and physical attributes. Copilot first suggested a slender Black woman. Then Diablo Cody. And eventually compiled me a list of 5-7 people who were nothing like Amy Schumer. Never once even thought to mention her. Once I surfaced her name by other means, I went back and scolded Copilot, just so I could feel smug and better about myself. But it's genuinely surreal.

It has everything to do with amazon.

Amazon has chosen to embed ads into the navigation used to shop on their site. It is a conflict with the customer's needs in just about every way possible.

I think the only time I saw something so blatant was years ago at the Cheesecake factory, where they had ads in their menu (not really food-related)

Urgh... kills me.

I have some ebay alerts for items for one of my hobbies (nothing at all to do with cars). Sometimes if ebay has nothing that matches my alert, I still get an email with spare car parts that I can buy.

And today I was looking for specific brand of wine for a friend on a bottle shop's website. I got 108 results, none of which were for the brand I was searching for, many of which weren't even wine either.

It doesn't have to be that way. Can you keep your search results pure and put ads next to them. If the ads are good, customers will be interested.

Yes, you will have fewer clicks (i.e. less ad revenue) than if you try to deceive your customers by not clearly marking ads. But you don't have to enshittify your page. Enshittification also lowers the value of your business, particularly in the long term.

Expecting that the rich will do the right thing out of their good hearts is not just naive but actively damaging for society.

2. Fraud is a stretch, these things are labelled even if it’s deliberately designed to be difficult to understand. The discovery on this would be fascinating though because I can guarantee you there’s records somewhere of a ticket to make things more deceptive…

3. I don’t think the fraud thing will get you the results you want (I guess this is a slightly ironic statement given what we’re talking about). According to Claude it’s more likely deception under “FTC Act §5” but you can’t directly do this anymore and apparently “Amazon reinstated binding individual arbitration with a class-action waiver in its Conditions of Use, effective 14 August 2026.” So even taking them to court got much much more difficult.

I think unfortunately until a different administration (maybe one less motivated by billionaire donors) comes in, we are stuck with this type of practice.

So much agreement! I have a bunch of obscure parts like 99 wooden dowels from when I needed one and had to buy 100.

Screwfix is sometimes OK for this, but I still end up in situations like the above where I have 99 wooden dowels that will remain in my garage for all time.

(For what it's worth, I also completely agree with Amazon vs stores like John Lewis etc, I haven't bought anything from Amazon for years now, and definitely don't miss it at all)

    > As for Amazon, it is not cheap!

First, no. You have missed the point of the piece entirely.

Second, even if you were right, is that an argument for it working that way? If this were a blog post about how gangrene sucks, would you be making the same case?

I’m just going to keep doing this like once a month here forever: “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”

Not, however, reliable. Ordered espresso filters, got counterfeits; ordered new monitor, got used, with a scratch in the screen, followed by a runaround game while demanding a replacement.

https://sellercentral.amazon.com/help/hub/reference/external...

How exactly is Amazon preventing the customer from meeting the merchant? What is the precise mechanism?

The solution to this is just what you described, a 3rd-party recommendation service. I don't think there's any reason Amazon should be able to make better recommendations than I can with a minute or two of research. Advertising giants only have a marketing profile on people, I think it's fairly limited in terms of how helpful it can be.

The problem with the "top 10" sites you mention is ironically that they are almost all actually advertisement sites, not genuine product recommendation sites. This means they get paid to place products and are essentially corrupt. I would guess the ecosystem is so universally horrible is because SEO costs money and requires them to aggressively monetize to exist. I've read that the Wirecutter is one of the only genuine sites and I find that it usually works fairly well at the price bracket they choose and for certain kinds of home goods.

Yes. I’d rather compete on quality and customer satisfaction than who can burn the most money on ads.

By making it almost necessary to buy their ads, Amazon is harming my margin.

I don’t hate all advertising, but I do hate this form, where it’s perverting search.

It's been noticed, just not put into words very often. And it's not as if anyone felt like they could do anything about it.

Make YouTube videos. Food porn is a thing, and some subset of that crowd will want to watch you fry stuff with your "pro" fryer.

You wouldn't, your product would languish in obscurity and unless the searcher knew the exact actual product name forever be on page 200 of the search results (As a Sci-Fi book author I found this out the hard way). Influencers and having followers can also help your product break through, but that's about it. Self promotion of your product is usually actively discouraged or banned by many forums.

I know the item is there because Google returns it, either as a search response or in their "shopping" widget. I can click through Google to Amazon and see the item, sometimes even from the certified seller. But if I enter the exact search term in Amazon's search bar it doesn't show up in their own results.

I disagree, many many people noticed and we were irked by it, but it's extremely impractical to fight against it.

If "not paying someone x dollars" = force, then at this moment, I'm forcing 6 billion people to do something.

This guy's publisher is paying Amazon $1/click to show the book to people who are already going to buy the book. It's basically the same thing.

The number of times I have searched something, got back something I did not ask for, and found that helpful, rounds down to zero. It's actively destructive to the platforms that allow this kind of hijacking of search terms.

People only look at recommendations now, they don't look with their eyes anymore.

So now restaurants have to focus on growth hacking rather than food quality.

Agreed about it not being static, but I don't see why ads should be that answer. The easiest way to "bump" a product is just sell it for less for an introduction period, so that people sorting Low->High will see it before the current highest rated one, at least until they get high ratings, and then can increase the price. If they're going to be losing money on marketing, it would be nicer if it goes to consumers.

a lot is worse now, but not shopping. on amazon some very specific items may be hard to find, and the search will throw a lot of crap at you, but you're still free to refine, compare and explore. finding exactly what you need and making an informed purchase has never been easier, and you get next day delivery (most of the time) plus exceptional return/refund policy and process. not sure about picking a, b or c? order all three, keep one, return the rest. i ofc don't (usually) do that, but i could. don't know how shopping could get any better/easier?

i don't like amazon as a company, it is evil and there is a lot to criticise, but the service and the value to the customer they provided has completely transformed shopping, for the better.

ofc long gone are the times where you could walk into a shop and talk to someone who actually had a clue about what they were selling and most likely was even an expert on the matter. that isn't coming back but that happened long before amazon.

Some of the products aren't that bad (most are at least better than these sorts of results would spit out when it first started, years ago), but the prices are also at the same not-too-cheap, not pricey moderate price-point as the (of course I know many of those brands are not American but I know how they fit) known brands. Whoever is coding language parsing at Amazon.com must be really challenged by the brands; I get that; but there has to be a way to make it less stressful to shop. Maybe Bezos is just secretly trying to get us all to buy clothes where we don't buy food and books. Ha.

But yes, the language and sorting models being used by Amazon suck.

He seems to assume that there is 1 air fryer that everyone on Earth should be getting, and all others are strictly inferior. There are probably no products that exists where that logic is true. There is so much variation in cost vs quality, or entire feature-sets like you pointed out.

This bleeds over into incredibly "messy" areas too, like societal signaling. Someone might specifically want a more expensive version of something simply because it's more expensive. The author doesn't seem to account for any of this complexity, even the "simple" complexity of cost/quality/features.

The value that these types of ads can add is that Amazon can build up models that can "learn" and get better at matching every unique persons criteria and provide a way for vendors to get "matched" with that buyer. Obviously you can still critique this model, but to assume it's strictly bad feels like it lacks nuance/critical thinking.

So much nostalgia for these shops. A man with a posh, sparkling clean apron knowing exactly what you need or mean. In and out in under a minute or two having parted with just 30p

Screwfix are actually pretty close in terms of service. Their staff are pretty patient with people and quite helpful. They mostly only sell packs of things though (and wow fixings got expensive... anyway. And it's ironic that the "trades" brand of the group that owns B&Q has better customer service than B&Q...)

The day someone can sue me because they searched for something on my web site and what they expected didn't come up, my web site is effectively legally prevented from having a search box.

The action needed here is anti-trust style / monopoly action. If there were viable competitors it wouldn't matter what Amazon's search box does. The fact the US government is in denial about the whole principle of the need for robust anti-trust / competition enforcement that is the core issue here.

To Google's credit, they did drop the "Don't be evil" slogan many years ago...

I just wanted to share that I find Seth's daily blog consistently excellent.

After going mildly buckwild on amazon after 3 years of not ordering a single thing (after a move to the country) I let the free month of prime I was using expire. This, and the counterfeit product I got (and had to spend 45 minutes on the internet and phone to get refunded) was decisive. I'll try again in 5 years.

2 is just being bad at business. Which is why I’m skeptical it happens.

3, I hate to break it to you, basically happens in every major store you walk into in America. Google “slotting fees.” If you think customers want an alternative, apply to YC!

[1] The FTC (on your behalf) sued 1-800 contacts for trying this. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2016/08/...

Incidentally, last week Amazon changed their TOS [0] and now all disputes with them are to be resolved via Arbitration; class action waiver when you use their services, etc.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/amazon-reinstates-b...

I do. I like money. Amazon doesn't seem to care when I report them.

And once the money clears my account, I change the review back. I have one on my desktop right now, awaiting a $50 gift card. I mean, I still care about people reading the reviews. They aren't completely immoral liars, like the company writing me.

We're in rural Vermont, but not particularly remote. Amazon is the same for us, with a minimum 1 week quoted delivery time. And it's not because it actually takes that long to get to us, since Walmart is reliably 2 day. Prime used to be 2 day delivery, like Walmart still is. Amazon has just decided to deprioritize rural northeastern delivery, and just don't ship it out for several days. Even random Ebay sellers using USPS are typically faster. This doesn't make Amazon useless, but it's definitely not my preferred place to buy from anymore.

> They put out a big sign each year saying "We Have Chicks!!!" which means they have baby chickens, ducks and turkeys.

They also sell bees in season, although I think you might have to preorder.

this is really bad comparison

a subway platform ad doesn't dictate the way consumers use the subway.

a restaurant does not monitor the effectiveness of the ads in their menus, analyse their industry and rip off their product with an in-house brand (amazon basics)

amazon is not a marketplace, it is a surveillance platform built to allow amazon to take ownership of more and more markets

to say this is just a problem with ads is defeatist instead getting real tangible change

In the recent past, there was a browser extension called "Honey", which purported to find and apply the best coupon code for you when you online shopped. Turned out they were actually (amongst other things), in cahoots with the shops by ensuring that you get only a modest discount, rather than the best available coupons (and this was paid for by the shop).

Recently a nice wooden piece from a shop in Germany and an address sign for my yard from some place in the Midwest.

For some things you do see endless shops selling cheap Chinese imports.

After spending close to 6 months and countless phone calls trying to get a refund processed the bad experience is outweighing the good for me.

The entire experience on the unhappy path is so obnoxiously dreadful i don’t purchase anything on Amazon over an amount I’d be fine just losing. Even though 99% of my orders have been absolutely fine.

Why doesn't the supermarket just raise the price on its own? If it thinks X brand sugar can be sold for $4.50 and the supermarket should pocket $1.50 of that, why not just do that instead of doing all the weird accounting tricks?

But they're not maximizing repeat customers, they're maximizing repeat customers multiplied by product fees. (roughly)

They would prefer 100M customers paying $4 a product over 250M customers paying $1 a product.

They keep driving up product fees more and more, reducing how happy the buying experience is.

Is it worse for me as a consumer? I'm not convinced.

Way worse than Amazon because at least Amazon is just showing you products and telling you how much they cost.

To be clear I'm not letting Amazon entirely off the hook here, but Seth's situation is somewhat unique in that "someone looking for a particular book" seems to me like a really different use case than "I want an air fryer".

And "Amazon’s theft makes products more expensive" falls a little flat when a main reason for shopping on Amazon is that their prices tend to be really good.

No reason to get congress involved when you can have the president suspend duty-free de minimus with executive authority.

It would only perform well if you identified some actual source of latent demand. For example, maybe many people searching for Taylor Swift concert tickets would actually be happy with movie tickets to see a simulcast. At which point, you are providing real information to some searchers.

We can debate and disagree about whether this is something you want in your search results, but it’s not spam. Spam exists because it doesn’t have to compete in an auction.

My goal has now shifted to identify the thinnest intermediary between my dollars and the person doing the labor for the product/service I'm paying for.

Etsy is certainly _bad_, but getting to Amazon levels is a whole other animal.

There are many product categories where I know that shopping on Amazon will be a miserable experience riddled with crap goods and useless search, so I go elsewhere. Never even occurred to me to use an LLM to make up for Amazon’s own deliberate decision to serve me crap.

There’s a perception that those who seek knowledge and truth are somehow less happy. Ignorance, and the willingness to take the path of least resistance, can be seen as an advantage for those who would rather not look too closely. Fundamentally, perhaps the difference comes down to red pill versus blue pill, and the illusions we’re willing to accept.

> The highest-yielding ad my publisher has tested so far is the search “Seth Godin The Knot“

But that doesn’t mean the ad is a good investment. It isn’t just about the yield from the ad, but about the DIFFERENCE in yield between having the ad and not having the ad.

It is really simplistic thinking to just look at conversion rates.

Google needs to ban this practice because it makes their results garbage.

It is a bandaid for a dysfunctional market with high transaction costs of trust(reputation) and triangulation(discovery).

Amazon only excells at low transfer cost - no negotiation and cheap delivery

Oh, and you have to pay the building owner for the coupons which also discount your food.

His trick, well back then for a nickel you could go to a paper vending machine and buy a paper. But it would just open up and you could literally grab all of them if you wanted. So for a month every day he sacrificed a nickel and essentially stole about 20 papers. He then delivered them to non customers along his route for about a month. Then he left a note "if you have enjoyed your free trial of the paper and would like to continue as a customer....". He won the bike hands down and never did tell the paper company how he got so many new starts.

Keeping a restaurant open is more about managing costs than having good food; many die because of not great inventory and supply chain handling, for example.

If you can, use Apple maps for now, although Apple has proudly proclaimed that they will be serving ads in maps soon. I also refuse to use the maps.app.goo.gl short links that google maps always wants to send. They will trap you in the compromised google search ecosystem. Insist on using raw addresses. I will paste in the raw address every time someone in a group chat sends a goo.gl link.

You can make it slightly more useful by changing the sort order to average rating or best selling, but for many "normie" things the bestselling will just be the crap amazon shows people by default.

Came by a bookstore yesterday, went in, asked the nice lady, she recommend 3, one was a pretty good match, bought it on the spot.

It’s so easy to get lost online when you’re looking for something these days…

Big surprise when I moved to Germany was that there's a Woolworth's brand here that survived independently to the one in the UK which closed decades ago.

The anti-trust cases I am familiar with spanned decades. Perhaps it's not a representative sample, yet it also makes sense. Anti-trust basically says they're doing something that is normally legal, but they're abusing their power over the market in a way that makes those actions illegal. You're moving from prosecuting actions to intent. That is a whole lot more difficult to prove.

I'm also uncertain how I feel about prosecuting a company just because it is a monopoly. I absolutely hate monopolies, and large monopolies almost certainly got to where they were by illegitimate means. On the other hand, it is difficult to untangle legitimate consumer choice from a monopoly manipulating the market to remove that choice.

We ended up not purchasing anything due to some unknowns, but when my PM told me we'd just order what we need I told him if the price is remotely the same we should go back to the store a few blocks away because had I not spent 15 minutes chatting I would have wasted hours reading blogs/ads trying to figure out what I needed.

Dude, nearly everytime I'm at a shop that's what happens. Not all are top top experts, but generally they have a very good idea about their subject and perform their jobs as if they liked them.

But that's Norway, not everyone is so lucky to live here.

But as you point out, there’s reason to think Amazon’s search engine is imperfect, especially for new products. Ads are the messy, side-effect-laden solution for that problem.

You're also just one step away from suggesting it should be put higher up in the search results - which is the entire complaint!

I gotta say, I think you’re in the minority. I suspect most folks appreciate the cross shopping suggestion

> Advertising as inference not influence.

People buying ads want to influence customers, but the platforms can instead focus on finding the folks who are already going to buy the product and show them the ad in order to gain the sweet sweet attribution saying "I am responsible for the sale".

You can test this by taking your ad-spend and flatly multiply it: if you spend 5 times as much money to advertise to 5 times as many people, but your sales don't also go up by 5x, then the money you were spending at the 1x rate probably wasn't influencing the buyers either, instead the ad companies were merely targeting all the customers you were already going to get sales from.

That's why the mantra in running restaurants has been "location, location, location".

Location was a proxy for marketing and attention, based on foot traffic. So yes it does need to be updated to be the 2026 version for what gets peoples' attention on trying your new thing.

I think almost all good restaurateurs know that. The rest, who hyper focus on food quality, are tragically doomed.

source: my parents were in the restaurant business

Unfortunately for them, I’d rather buy cheep Chinese crap from a local retailer where there is still a human buyer in the loop choosing something that’s not the lowest bottom of the barrel junk.

When I worked there a long time ago I spoke to the search team about moving more towards a New Egg style filtering model. When I’m looking for something there’s often very specific features I want. Now they’ve decided to go in the complete opposite direction and it doesn’t matter what type, they’ll show me the items they think I want. I’ve bought more than a few wrong things due to this. Returns must not factor into whatever fees they’re making off everything else.

This also lines up a lot better with other complaints with amazon: their inability to get rid of counterfeit sellers, the degree to which their reviews (and listings) are gamed, etc. Arguably the reason people buy garbage on Amazon has more to do with their lack of interest in policing misbehavior than ads (though perhaps the ads are the financial incentive to keep being lazy).

You can see this with the knockoff[1] plugin that flags "no-name" brands on amazon. Sometimes this takes out the listings you want and you need to consider it, but I think it's a pretty effective counter to the kinds of scammy ads this poster is frustrated with.

[1] https://knockoff.co/

https://www.nj.gov/governor/news/2026/20260723a.shtml

Same thing, and simpler to do than making new law. I always prefer keeping tax simple!

AI can mirror this style of writing, but it can't mirror the clarity of thought behind it.

https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/warby-parker-fends-...

The incumbent has a massive advantage, making it harder for a new (but better) product to get on the first page.

> There is no rent seeking or monopolistic or technofeudal or enshittifying aspect of Amazon at all.

How so? Amazon search is almost probably worse than 10 years ago.

anecdata and all, but i've had the exact opposite experience - I've never spent more than a couple of minutes getting a refund, and it's always been less time and effort than returning something to a B&M store.

The only thing is that Amazon is more diversified than other retailers, in particular, they have AWS, essentially selling the platform that runs their website to third parties. It makes sense for them to offer sell their ad service to third parties too.

To be clear, it's gross, but they are doing it just enough that their convenience and average sufficient product quality keeps me using them. I'd guess they do a lot of research to keep that balance where it is.

What I often see, especially in the social media era, is people who are selectively curious and like to notice negative things. So they'll share lots of articles with titles like "The Amazon Tax", which I agree was interesting and informative, but they're not at all interested in e.g. "How Amazon Is Bringing Fast Delivery to Rural America" (https://www.wsj.com/business/logistics/how-amazon-is-bringin...). That's more of a problem, and I think it's what drives the idea that truth-seekers are less happy.

To be clear, when I do use LLM for search, I don't limit it to one site.

This reminds me of Instagram's search page, which is full of animated videos jumping at you to dissuade you from completing the search you wanted and just click on what they want you to see.

Meaning if Amazon takes 30% of the sale and Walmart online can only take 15% with those savings being passed on to the customer, the company is not allowed for that lower price to be on Walmart.

On the Amazon homepage that has never happened. It usually just shows some banner ad for prime day, new amazon tv show/movie, then maybe 4 little thumbnails of the last product I searched for or whatever. I have to initiate the shopping experience, I have to pique my own purchasing interest.

The first is price. The stuff is cheap, as in so cheap I know it will be terrible and I still sort of don’t care. It’s $2, if I only use it twice I got my moneys worth.

That makes it super easy to hit Buy without thinking much.

The second is that they appear to target verticals that don’t have a natural ceiling to sales. I only need one microwave, so they won’t sell me that. They do sell a lot of apparel, decorations, toys for adults (crappy 3D displays, not dildos), stuff where you don’t think “eh, I already have one though”.

The third is the marriage of entertainment and shopping. I can be doomscrolling, see an ad and buy it without ever leaving the platform. If I remember right, it doesn’t even interrupt your doomscrolling really. Swipe to next video, see it’s an ad, hit buy, confirm Apple Pay pop up, scroll to next video. You can decide you want something, buy it, and be on your next video in 15 seconds. It’s so fast it almost blurs the line where I’m not sure if I’d call it shopping or entertainment.

The last is that they’re really good at luring consumers to start selling on there. The ads for stuff tend to be sort of home made and low quality, which makes it seem attainable for your average person. That tends to mean a huge selection. I had a buddy that randomly decided to sell stickers on there just based on watching other people do it (no idea how that went, I didn’t ask)

As an example of how this stacks up, in the app, I filter air fryers to be red. Easy, right? One option, two sponsored, three more options, an autoplay video ad for a non-red one, then another sponsored link, “customers frequently viewed carousel with more sponsored links, one of which is not red, (so this is a full phone screen and a half with zero real results), one more result, two sponsored links, three more results, and then a non-red deep fryer, which is not even an air fryer to begin with. How does a silver deep fryer end up in these results at all?

The shittiness continues. A sponsored link to a toaster oven (not an air fryer either), another sponsored link, a real result, a used air fryer, silicone liners (not air fryers), a carousel of “trending now” including four of five items that are not air fryers either (and a low-rated red air fryer I haven’t seen yet… which makes me think they are outright lying about it being a ‘trending’ item), another carousel with “brands related to your search”, ALSO sponsored, two more results, another near full screen autopay video ad, three sponsored links for air fryer accessories, two real results for more accessories, then two more real red air fryer results, though one is only available used.

I’m exhausted just typing that out. It’s soul-crushing. A good two-thirds of total screen real estate in any given session is just pure ads. And I typed “red air fryer”, so don’t show me a red air fryer silicone liner! That’s not what I asked for. If you must, label it in a carousel that says “matching accessories, that’s both user friendly and appropriate!

What's the question?

Not exactly, they'll show you the items they want you to buy/are paid to promote. They don't actually think you want the crap their search surfaces, at most they think they can con you into buying that stuff anyway as long as they make it difficult or impossible for you to find what you're actually looking for.

Literally everyone I know feels this way, even if they don't care about it as passionately. No one "appreciates" being openly manipulated to their financial detriment.

The shop also sold more expensive things like small appliances and hand tools etc

Or maybe I am wrong and "This time its really different".

OK, but the customer is the only person who gets to decide what that means. "Reversing the idea" is just making the same (imo faulty) assumption that the author is, which is that there is some known "good value" product that everyone should be buying. What you perceive to be "good value" might be "overpaying for useless features" to someone else.

If anything, allowing for ads like Amazon does is probably more likely to match a customer to the product that's "good value" for them. If someone consistently buys products after sorting price low>high, then you know something about their purchasing habits - giving them a recommendation to buy a $450 air fryer because it's "good value" (decided by who?) isn't helpful when they really just want something barebones for $100.

To do this in brick-and-mortar, you'd have to use remotely programmable price tags and detect who is looking at what, which seems doable, but then you still run into all kinds of tough questions with no good answers. If I happen to see the price tag change from $3.49 (perhaps set for the person in front of me) to $4.49 and I put that item in my cart, which price am I getting charged at the register? And did a legal sale even occur if I wasn't aware what I would be paying? I don't think it's going to work.

If I'm buying a curtain rod, the MUDLRHK brand is effectively indistinguishable from a "name brand" or house brand. They're basically all coming from the same factories in China anyways - a outside of maybe Costco, there's not a human buyer exercising that much oversight at Walmart, Macys, or Kohls.

Engaging with the nuance means engaging with the fact that rent-seeking can only exist where value (real or perceived) actually exists. Amazon is only able to sell these ads because sellers get value out of them through increasing sales using the infrastructure that Amazon built. The fact that they capitalize on that by creating a market for those ad-buyers to compete in (rent-seeking, as you'd call it) is not remotely surprising, they should be able to profit using the systems they built up. This is akin to paying more to rent a "better" booth to sell at at a trading card convention; or for ads costing more during the Superbowl halftime than at 2am on local news. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with any of that.

As far as a conflict of interest, Amazon is still incentivized to get a potential customer to make a purchase, and (more importantly) to make sure that the customer would want to keep returning to Amazon for future purchases. If Amazon develops a reputation of giving suggestions for junk products that people end up buying, people will stop using Amazon. It's "naturally" regulated in that way. Gibing some governing body the power to regulate what companies are/aren't allowed to suggest to their customers feels like it's only relevant if this was a true monopoly.

Re: monopolies- Amazon is not hiding alternative products to those in the ads; customers are people with the autonomy to find the product that best suites their needs, and they still have full capability of doing that. There are also plenty of other ways to purchase products, I'd guess that 95%+ of products available on Amazon can be sold/purchased elsewhere, it's just that Amazon is the most convenient way (for both buyers and sellers).

People go where the mindshare is. It doesn't matter if its ad-ridden drivel and slop, it just needs to be popular.

The number of people who use OpenAI's products because "ai == chatgtp [sic]" in their minds is immense. Just like how to a ton of people, "online shopping == amazon".

I'm not arguing Amazon or OpenAI will always have this role, but while they have that the benefits of this position is immense.

B&M is different, Ads are there, but you aren't forced to look at them like Amazon does.

In many ways this is symptomatic of larger trends in society and managerial culture of looking for ways to measure things rather than confronting the messy subjective non-measurable reality.

The only time we'll get a true counterfactual is when a competitor arises who can meet Amazon's very high bar for logistic excellence but can offer a more appealing interaction, and then Amazon retail will die off without anyone understanding how or why it happened.

The last big redesign netflix made was pretty much universally hated, but they were mostly upfront about the fact that it was intended to take choice away from users and highlight the shows they wanted to promote. For a company that got where they are because people wanted "on demand" over cable TV it seems strange to hear them now saying "Choosing for yourself is so hard! Just let us tell you what to watch!" but that's the attitude every company seems to be taking.

1. We tend to believe "more power/knowledge/choices" is universally a good thing; that we are rational creatures in some sort of game theoretic landscape where we are free to optimize for our own outcomes, and extra options or information can only be to our optimization benefit.

2. We tend to believe that as moral agents, we have obligations to Good. More specifically, knowingly choosing against Good should in proportion produce Guilt.

The bind that results from (1)+(2) is distinctly Christian to me, obsessed as Christianity is with the notion of shame as a moral whip. It is an exercise in religionmaking how to structure one's psychological incentives so that solipsism is avoided while not sacrificing (1).

That doesn’t sound like being customer focused or obsessed at all.

Not to mention that finding previous orders via email is much, much faster than going through their website.

    > The third is the marriage of entertainment and shopping. I can be doomscrolling, see an ad and buy it without ever leaving the platform. If I remember right, it doesn’t even interrupt your doomscrolling really.

Are you aware of the world you live in?

Losses and gains on the order of 0.5% market share may not sound like much, but at this scale it’s a vast amount of money. So being slightly more hostile needs to be offset by meaningful increases in revenue.

If you excuse the effects that people’s actions have because they didn’t realize they were causing them, you guarantee that those effects will never stop.

They've known for a long time now that their profits will go through the roof if they can get away with it, but the fact that consumers find the practice offensive has held them back along with the cost of initial investments in things like digital price tags and facial recognition systems (https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1057/s41272-019-002...) but all of it is coming. The big chains have already started. By the end of this year Walmart should have digital price tags in every store. Facial recognition is spreading too (often using loss prevention as an excuse). The grocery chain Kroger announced they'll be using facial recognition to offer different prices to different people. Their digital price tags scan faces, and your track appearance and behaviors, like how long you spend looking at various products.

It'll be simple for stores to do things like charge people more when their cameras see them wearing expensive clothes, or when the data collected from their app shows that they live in rich neighborhoods or when they can use the data they collect on you in combination with information from data brokers to learn what your income level is. I fully expect things to get even weirder like stores setting higher prices for people with the wrong opinions or political views. Algorithms will be caught "accidentally" discriminating on things like skin color and gender.

There's a little bit of pushing back against that kind of things in some places, but with the massive amounts of money on the table I expect that politicians will be bribed to allow it.

> If I happen to see the price tag change from $3.49 (perhaps set for the person in front of me) to $4.49 and I put that item in my cart, which price am I getting charged at the register?

The store shelves have cameras in them. You won't see your price until the system detects you. They can even display your photo/avatar next to the price so you know that it's for you. Facial ID at the register tells them who you are when it's time to pay up. That's just for now though. Eventually it'll likely all happen in a cell phone app and you won't be able to as easily look over someone else's shoulder to see what price they're paying.

And when you DO specify one, but get results for something else entirely?

One thing that is structurally certain though: Amazon and other major corporations have almost unlimited time and direct incentives to find reasons to justify this point of view, while the people whose interests are being potentially being harmed (all Amazon customers) don't have much concentrated resources or focused, actionable incentives at the individual actor level to put together the counter case. I think it's incredibly important keep this asymmetry in mind before dismissing a take like Godin's in favor of Amazon friendly talking points.

I was looking for a device that plugs into my car's 12V cigarette lighter outlet, connects with my phone's Bluetooth, outputs the audio to 3.5mm aux (my car has aux input but no Bluetooth), has no battery, automatically turns on with my car, has next and previous track buttons, and outputs USB-C with at least 30W.

Amazon's search filters were useless for this, but their LLM was able to read through reviews and suggest products that come very close. Unfortunately, no exact product exists that fulfills all the requirements.

Like, are you suggesting that when someone tries to buy a brand-name product and receives a counterfeit knockoff instead, that some proportion of those customers prefer to pay brand-name prices for knock offs? That doesn't seem very likely to me.

Ignorance is bliss. Unfortunately, even your physical Walmart store is also selling a lot of shelf space to manufacturers/advertisers (similar to how Amazon sell the first slot, or at this point first 'page'), especially those checkout lines (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-grocers-wring-extra-cash-ou...). That's why your on-boots retail staff can't change those planograms (which defines how to layout shelf space in a grocery store) willy-nilly, they're designed by the highest bidder. That's why those soda or chips seems placed in too convenient slots that are also 'coincidental' to those currently advertised in other ways, because it's, plain and simply, paid to be there.

But I'm close. My purchases through them are down probably somewhere around 80%. My girlfriend never really used Amazon and doesn't see the appeal at all - telling someone "it used to be good" makes you wonder what you're doing.

Even AWS has burned me and clients enough times that we pretty much don't use them anymore - an idea that was unthinkable a decade ago.

The other thing is that the more they burn this goodwill the more they'll be tempted to increase ad revenue, and the more the goodwill will disappear.

Certainly this world comprises many other things than the Holocaust and IBM's support of it. Perhaps your awareness is lacking if you think that is the main thing to be aware of in this world.

I'm not here just to defend Amazon, it has it's issues, but it has also provided a lot of value to it's customers, all things considered (building out the largest most efficient supply/distribution chain ever, increasing convenience, reducing cost, and giving access to wide range of product choices). I just think it's important to take full stock of what the benefits are as well as to understand if harms are actually harms or just assumed harms. Basically, just to understand what the tradeoffs are, and that there's likely something positive to be found. I try to apply this thinking to more than just Amazon- like I said, I'm not here just to defend it.

Thanks again for the levelheaded response, I'll leave this feeling like I understand the point you were making better.

The function is to get incremental sales (and hopefully establish a pattern of repeat business) by discounting selectively to people who might not buy at all otherwise.

If you're thinking "But they should give that discount to everybody!" that's not a thing. There's not enough margin in the first place, especially at a supermarket or Walmart, that everyone could just have lower prices on everything.

My grocery store already sends me individualized paper coupons every month.

All of this is promotions. It's all just trying to get some incremental sales, and hoping that if you get an offer for free hot dog buns you'll also buy the hotdogs.

It's always going to come down to manipulation that prioritizes their profit over your interests. You can't afford to pay more than corporations are willing to spend to degrade the usefulness of your searches. The best you can hope for is to spend a bunch of effort to find some tiny niche alternative to google that almost no one uses and ride it out for as long as you can until enshittification sets in and you're forced to start all over again.

It may be better than the uselessness of the Amazon search box, but that's a very low bar.

So nothing I said disagrees with this. I agree that "pseudo-scam" products and counterfeits exist on Amazon, but if something is risky/dangerous for someone to buy, Amazon is at least partially liable for this - I got a product recall from Amazon for a water kettle (that Amazon doesn't make) that had some defect that could lead to scalding.

While it's a problem, Amazon is incentivized to make sure that the customer would want to keep returning to Amazon for future purchases. If they develop a reputation of giving suggestions for junk/scam/counterfeit products that people end up buying, people will stop using Amazon - at both the individual, and word of mouth levels. Your concern is "naturally" regulated in that way. Amazon wants to keep it's customers happy so it can keep selling them things, and selling them crap is a bad way to keep them happy.

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> when someone tries to buy a brand-name product and receives a counterfeit knockoff instead, that some proportion of those customers prefer to pay brand-name prices for knock offs

What did I say that would imply this? No, I am not suggesting that at all. I am suggesting that some people want to pay less ($100 vs $450) for a cheaper product (barebones version) and that's what represents good value to them - not something at the same price that's fake, I really don't know where you think I implied that lol.

I would use it to question the premise

> we should divest from companies and organisations complicit in genocide

which in reality I decided was obviously wrong the first time I heard it, many years ago. In fact, I don't think this concept of "complicity" is morally valid at all.

I don't think that's what GP was saying at all.

Strange how this totally worked until a few years ago. I never cut coupons or any other time wasting shenanigans, but was able to stop up on deals on the commonly used shelf-stable items I buy without even needing to signup to a loyalty program.

I understand price segmentation is a thing. But it's gotten pretty exhausting and only increasingly so.

Fast food you can simply opt out of. My health improved due to them shifting all the "deals" to the app, and doubling menu prices. Groceries are a different thing.

https://nypost.com/2026/04/21/business/jetblue-x-post-sparks...

I also think this hypothetical "scan to see your price" scenario is a lot worse. As things stand now, there's still a baseline price. If the shelf says $8.99 then you know that you may be able to get a better price through their loyalty program or with a coupon, but it will never be more than $8.99. In a fully dynamic pricing world where you have to scan scan to get a number at all, which is what a lot of businesses would really love to have, you'd lose that baseline. That item might ring up at $20 if the system decides I'm desperate or inattentive or just don't care. This is already possible online, of course. If it spreads to grocery stores, though, I'm going to start channelling Ned Ludd and it won't be pretty.

Some particularly skeevy car dealers were skewered many years ago for saying "Advertised price is less tax, title, and additional $2,000".

But they CAN get away with saying "The $8.99 burger is $11.99 unless you: - possess one of a range of sanctioned devices - have access to data services - are able to create and manage an account - are willing to opt in to whatever tracking/marketing gimmickry - can claim the "deal" in advance

Each of those steps is a funnel that opts out at least some potential customers from the deal. The 12-year-old who doesn't own a phone can't get the deal. The 85-year-old who can't operate Android can't. The person making impulse purchases and not pre-researching their meal selection misses the offer.

I feel like there's a argument for a precedent akin to "no purchase necessary to enter" for sweepstakes-- no additional purchase, software install, or commitment should be required to claim any advertised offer.

Today I told someone to google “school name student handbook 2026.” Only to realize I wasn’t using Google so my #1 wouldn’t be in the same place, doubled checked it showed up on Google and eventually found their link to the handbook way down the page.

“Ops, sorry Google sucks now” isn’t going to kill a company quickly but market share is a lagging indicator. Of course some enshitificstion is simply companies responding to what the largest market segment wants so they may actually be doing the correct thing even if it doesn’t seem like it to me.

This isn't even a little hypothetical- bluetooth had to anonomyze the MAC address to stop this, and it still fails sometimes.

> I really don't know where you think I implied that

When you said "What you perceive to be "good value" might be "overpaying for useless features" to someone else." you implied that there was no knowable standard for good value. I articulated that idea to an absurd degree in suggesting that you were saying some people would be happy to be scammed - which might be true if good value is impossible to understand objectively.

There’s a great number of products that I used to like that have been replaced and that’s fine as a consumer but stock holders are generally better off when the stock is still valuable in 10 years vs a slightly higher dividend today.

To me "Are you aware of the world you live in?" suggests "If you don't even know this, you don't know anything. This is the first thing anyone should know". I'm willing to learng if they meant something else, but I guess that's asking a lot.

If I buy a lot of Scott toilet tissue, I'm happy to get a discount on Scott toilet tissue.

Though mostly, the discounts I use are already posted on the shelf, I just need to "clip" an e-coupon in the app to get it.

They do send me emails and even postal mails with coupons too, but those all go in the trash.

The main point I'm trying to make there is that customers are unpredictable (and irrational) and they have autonomy, and they need to bear at least some responsibility in making sure what they are buying meets their needs/wants, regardless of what Amazon was paid to suggest to them. This is true everywhere, like at a grocery store - it would be a silly article if it complained about more expensive or store-brand products being placed at eye-level when a "better deal" might be 3 shelves down. That's essentially what Amazon is doing and what the complaint is.

> you implied that there was no knowable standard for good value

This is something I stand by (see above), but you would have to take it to an absurd extreme to conclude that it means I think people are happy being scammed.

Being scammed on Amazon a separate problem, with other avenues of recourse (filing complaints directly to Amazon/requesting refunds, legal system for counterfeits or misleading advertising, etc.), and Amazon is financially incentivized to avoid it to keep customers happy/returning.

Not the largest market segment, just the segment with the most control/cash to throw around. That segment will only grow smaller and smaller as they gain more power and money. That's the whole plan. The vast majority gets screwed while a shrinking minority gets whatever they want. Making everything worse for everyone who isn't you is probably not doing the correct thing, but it can be the most profitable one. At least for a while anyway.

This was, to my thinking, such a straightforward interpretation that it didn't bear making explicit; and your interpretation genuinely didn't even occur to me.

The local supermarket chain near me has more or less done away with normal low prices on the shelves. If you want anything resembling a deal, you get to deal with their shit-tier quality app plus other friction inducting time wasting crap like "clipping" digital coupons. Plus opting in to all the associated tracking the app does in order to use it.

They effective raised prices 10-20% for the entire store and then the only way to get a deal is use the app. This is only currently slight hyperbole - every month it rolls out more and more in this direction.

This way they can tell regulators "we only give discounts in a discriminatory manner! We don't raise prices!" when the time comes.

With any luck a judge will see right through that unmitigated bullshit, but I'm not going to hold my breath.

Don't expect discounts on what you buy often. They know they have you hooked on those already and they'll drive up the price on those items (for you) the minute they can. They'll give discounts on brands you don't buy to entice you to switch (if those other brands pay them enough to do it). These surveillance pricing systems are not for your benefit. They aren't there to save you money. They only exist to take more of your money away from you.

I never get coupons for what I actually buy, I only get coupons for things I don't buy. Those things are sometimes related, but if I wanted the other brand, I'd already be buying the other brand.

Constantly jumping from unstable stock to unstable stock is a great way to suddenly be down a great deal of money. Offsetting a 50% drop takes doubling your money afterwards and in that period you haven’t made anything so the next 50% drop puts you into a deeper hole.

As to too big to fail, the top of the market has a surprising amount of churn with many companies falling very far very quickly.

Instead the model that actually works is to buy companies, load up on debt, pay yourself from that, and then let the zombie crash and burn. Part of that process is goosing quarterly returns with deferred maintenance etc but the model depends on a sucker lending money rather than the market.

I refused to get their card and stopped shopping there.

I did nothing of the sort.

I simply said that I disagree with your stated motivations for your vote.

The way that you discuss your plan makes it sound as if you consider it morally incumbent upon others to follow suit. I do object to that.

That's a semantic distinction without a difference.

> The way that you discuss your plan makes it sound as if you consider it morally incumbent upon others to follow suit. I do object to that.

That's more or less true: I do believe that people should BDS corporations that knowingly and willingly harm humanity (eg: aid and abet genocide); that it's not within our interests to let such things slide. And while I am biased, this doesn't feel like a particularly controversial take: it feels like I'm just spelling out basic civics. But.. this is also just like my opinion, man. You do you.