Good lord, if I was banned from buying anything on Amazon or its subsidiaries I’d be incredibly fucked. I never thought of this before, it left me with a thousand yard stare.
Well, that's the problem with having these dominant Internet companies (and telcos/cable cos/etc.). It's not that hard to imagine something happening that would cause you to be banned. Identity theft, software bug, triggering a flag for some strange reasons, or even just doing something that was dumb in retrospect. I'd actually worry less about Amazon than some other companies given that the lifetime value of a customer who feels dependent on Amazon is pretty high. But, in general, many of these companies have a disproportionate amount of market power.
Not me. I do enjoy WF365 but I could live without it. Hmm let me see, AWS is nice, but there are competitors. The online shopping experience is annoying, what with all the 3rd party crap merchants. Wal-Mart is usually better on price and availability within 5 minutes drive. I don't have Prime Video because I prefer Hulu.
Life can be a Red Queen Race, where each innovation keeps you barely above the rising water. Just because people survived* before [X] doesn't mean they can survive after having [X] withdrawn.
*For certain values of "survived;" e.g. if someone had a bad accident in an isolated area before cellphones, they usually died.
It was hell. To buy one item I would have to go to a physical store and search through a bunch of crappy options with little to no information about which was better. It could easily take an hour if I didn’t rush or traffic sucked.
Now, I could just wake up in the morning and get the same thing done in 5 minutes AND select a product I feel confident about based on reviews. Instead of wasting an hour of my life I could actually go live my life.
As a result, pretty much everything I buy comes through Amazon. Only things I don’t buy there are things that simply aren’t on Amazon, and getting those things is usually a pain in the ass because I have to search other websites or possibly an open store that may stock that item.
Using Amazon has made me time-rich. If I somehow couldn’t use it, I’d become something of a pauper: Unable to buy good items accurately, and spending a lot of time to find and purchase them. I do not want to return to those days.
To each their own, but I think the whole "schlepping to the store and sifting through products and maybe you overpay or get something you don't like" is a valuable part of the human experience.
That's not to say every trip is enjoyable, but I wonder what people might be missing by forgoing those trips (and automating everything they can, in general). You miss the trip there, and everything you might experience along the way, and the people at the store, and a poster for a cool concert that you might have gone to see, etc.
To me, that's not wasted time, that is living life.
Look, I find nothing heart warming about the experience of shopping for things in physical stores.
I liken the rise of Amazon as something analogous to the agricultural revolution. Before agriculture, everyone had to hunt and gather food, it was a laborious process similar to shopping. Once people discovered agriculture however, and similarly Amazon, it was no longer necessary to spend so much effort in getting life's basic necessities, freeing us to spend our time on more noble pursuits.
This is the world I would much rather live in. I do not care for the retail days of olde.
I think there's a big schism between cities and towns that have or used to have character and those that don't when it comes to retail. One reason NYC or SF are cool (though perhaps less so now), is that there are tons of interesting, well-curated, thoughtfully sourced shops with stuff to discover and explore.
I agree with you completely if we're talking about a Target in suburban Houston, but going to a handmade card store in NYC, or a rare books store in Charleston, or weird candy store in SF can all be fun exploratory experiences. I drop into the fancy grocery store nearby to look around and find ingredients I've never heard of, despite doing 90% of my grocery shopping online with delivery, because it's a fun way to get outside my comfort zone. The easy availability of places/stores that allow me opportunities to explore and be excited about new things is perhaps the thing I value most about living in NYC.
How much crap do you actually buy per day that buying stuff needs time management?
I mean, don't people normally just buy what they need once a month or so?
And, do you actually need a review for basic groceries that you buy once a week?
Also actual high-end products, like fashion, aren't available on Amazon anyways, while the real cheap stuff you'd get from Ali Express.
I will never understand Amazon. I use it maybe a couple times a year.. don't understand what people that buy hundreds of items a year are going through..
Wheel bearing grease, a Ninja food chopper, EZ jar opener, a vacuum, steel baoding balls, books, steamer rack, Bandai Tamashi Nations Darth Vader, air purifier, desoldering iron... these are just a few of my recent purchases this month.
Exactly. Amazon is perfect for those sorts of things. You would have had to have gone to at least 3 stores to find all of that stuff, if you could have found it at all. I am remodeling my house and it’s fantastic for finding things I didn’t even know existed.
Not the OP, but I managed before cell phones and lots of other things too. I could survive without Amazon as well. But, for many types of items, there's no comparable online one-stop shop which would be, at the least, very inconvenient.
I was banned from Uber. I think it was after trying to cancel a pickup that failed to show up, but I can't be sure - customer support wouldn't help or tell me what happened.
