Trying to find a messenger bag at Amazon
4h 59m ago by lemmy.world/u/Bruncvik in mildlyinfuriating
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)
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
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.
Local appliance dealers likely also have a dude who in a pinch can just carry most appliances where they need to go.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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?
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.
I use arch btw
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)_/¯
It’s missing the random “Amazon’s Choice” badge on one of the 20 identical choices 🤣
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.
One of the many reasons I canceled my prime subscription is a lot of stuff was not coming in 2 days.
Easy, they don't.
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.
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.
Man it’s fallen off a cliff. Many years ago I bought a knockoff Chinese messenger bag from Amazon. It’s fantastic, great materials, good quality zipper, it’s held up to daily use for years and looks even better than when I got it (leather developed a nice patina).
So, I needed another bag, went looking for the same brand as mine. No longer there, but there are 75 identical looking but weirdly named brands instead. I found one that looked as similar as I could to my old bag, and this one is an utter piece of shit. I mean, I’ll use it, it’s a duffle bag so not as much use as the messenger bag, but the difference is stark. Stiff, cheap cloth, leather sure, but probably harvested entirely from cow buttholes, zippers look brass, but one zip and the color wore off…
Everything, even purchased goods have enshittified. Everything looks cool but just absolutely sucks.
I wonder what enables this business model to survive? 🤔
People being afraid of AliExpress
A market of lemons
leather sure, but probably harvested entirely from cow buttholes
lmao
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)
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.
Are you looking for something which can actually take a beating? I have bought like four of these cheaper bags on Amazon and they all fall apart in a year or two. And before then they all have shitty strap adjustments which slowly slip over time.
I'd strongly suggest getting something like a chrome or timbuk2 bag which will be like 5x more expensive up front but will actually last decades instead of years. I have been dailying the OG chrome citizen messenger bag for five years now and it's barely broken in.
Timbuk2 isn't as good as they used to be. If you can find a used one it's worth it, I've had mine for like twenty years, but I wouldn't gamble on one made in the last five years. (They closed all their physical stores and cut costs on manufacturing by moving offshore)
"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet."
GNU Terry Pratchett
I agree. I have several timbuk2 bags and the only one with significant damage is the pet carrier that my cat clawed the shit out of. The company repaired it for like $10 to cover the shipping
I second this. I am currently still using the waxed canvas bag from the distilled collection and all I've had to do is replace the strap from wear. Its seen rain, snow, and shitloads of abuse that would cause these cheaper bags to just disintegrate. Its old as shit by now but aside from being well worn - is still perfectly functional.
More expensive AliExpress...
It feels like Amazon is flooded with dropshipping beyond repair.
But you know that capitalism is so good because the free market ensures that there’s so much variety and choice in quality and innovation.
What we have isn’t even capitalism. The supposed free market doesn’t exist when the big players pocket the regulators to use as a weapon against smaller businesses and secure their own market positioning.
Incidentally, this is typically the end result of capitalism if you don’t reign in and break up these companies.
I know. It’s how what China and the Soviets had wasn’t communism. A relatively small group of people climb up top and ruin everything, as they always have.
It’s like we have a centrally planned economy but dumber.
I don’t know what the solution is.
The first thing I would do if I had a magic wand and could just change reality to see what happens, would be to get rid of Citizens United and whatever they called that decision that said money=speech. That's the kind of thing that could actually happen without requiring wholesale societal change. Add in some strong campaign finance laws and maybe you could get some politicians who aren't putting themselves up for auction to the highest bidder.
What we have is exactly capitalism. A "winner-takes-it-all" system breeds oligopoly, and oligopoly breeds corruption.
the big players pocket the regulators
That's the entire point of capitalism, it's how it's always been, and it's how it will always be. It's class analysis: the capital owners have the media, the political power, and the repressive force of the state apparatus behind them.
There are two factors necessary for a truly free market that prevent any capitalist system from actually being a free market. They are:
-
Consumers need to have perfect information about the products and the companies that make and/or sell them - in other words, companies must not be able to hide their sins.
-
There needs to be zero friction for new entrants into the marketplace, whether that is from costs to start up a business, or anti-competitive behavior from other companies with money to throw around.
It is impossible to achieve either of these in the real world.
They don't need to pocket the regulators.
They just need to buy up or out-price the competition into oblivion.
These practices are exactly the kinds of behaviors that regulators should prevent.
When a business gets huge it shouldn’t be allowed to buy up all of its competition. Regulatory authorities should block these acquisitions. For example, Sprint should never have been sold because it concentrated power even further and gives customers less choice.
It’s not simple price competition either. A company like Walmart can afford to sell products at a loss to drive other businesses out on purpose and then jack up the prices when they’re the only game in town. Dollar General has been accused of strategically placing stores to block businesses from making a profit.
Sprint is an interesting example because I believe regulators did block previous merger attempts on exactly those grounds.
It’s yet another case subject to the whims of whatever administration is in charge, and we’re stuck with the fallout
It used to work. When something no longer sold, manufacturers would diversify. Now they force you to still buy the same product with the help of politicians and bribes.
Do Amazon companies count in Scrabble?
If hoement wasn't a word then now it is.
We are totally making hoement happen
About to have a ho moment with my Business Messenger Bag. 💅
Probably not but "zoomer" and "yeet" do!
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.
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!
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€.
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.
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
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.
More and more I’m finding things I want either aren’t on amazon or are buried under so many inferior products that they are hard to find. Earlier I was looking for geek themed ugly Christmas sweaters, and the ones on the first few pages of amazon results were absolute garbage. Found several viable suppliers elsewhere in no time.
Once again capitalism has bred all sorts of innovation in the space!
So I just got a steam deck... A little birthday present to myself.
My local microcenter sells nothing for it... Neither does best buy. And if best buy did I wouldn't over pay anyway at that failing store.
So... Amazon it is. 40 bucks and two days later I have a silicone case, anti glare screen protector and a cheapo dock.
I didn't want to get all that shit off amazon... It was just the most convenient place and in my case the only place.
If anything amazon needs to crack down on these bs Chinese sellers.
Like what? 2x the price for worse hardware?
Feels like the only alternative for reasonable priced stuff is AliExpress (in regards to electronics)
They have a near monopoly on certain goods. I built my home gym using Amazon 2 years ago. I couldn't find most of the stuff anywhere else for anywhere near the same prices.
Things have changed. I don't use Amazon anymore. Out of curiosity I checked some prices on my gym equipment and a lot of it is 50+% more now. The squat rack I have is almost double the price.
Prices elsewhere haven't gone down. It is still probably cheaper to buy the double the price squat rack from Amazon. But I'm done, Amazon is full evil.
without literal exploitation of everything?
Huh? Do you think workers are not exploited at physical stores? Do you think most of the stuff isn't made identically and then rebranded differently for Amazon or for other stores?
Two things can be true at the same time.
No, I'm saying that I bought some stuff then changed my ways. I didn't look elsewhere previously. I am looking elsewhere now, and I will not give Amazon money. I was highlighting the problem that tons of people run into - shit is still cheaper at Amazon even if it is much more expensive than it was 2 years ago.
Sometimes Amazon has the stupid low priced widget that I need, at a lower price than anywhere else, with next day delivery...
Like... Fuck...
They have a most favored nation policy, meaning that people who sell on their platform can't have a lower price anywhere else than what they have on their platform.
Yeah I had the same thing happen with a smartwatch. I want a new band made of fabric instead of the silicone rubber or whatever it is. It is extremely frustrating to find one anywhere but Amazon. I don't use Amazon anymore, so I guess I'm getting my random Chinese products from ebay now. Not sure if that's any better.
Two major differences between Amazon and eBay eBay has longer shipping times but a significantly better rating system which holds the buyer accountable as much as it does the seller.
But since I like and enjoy instant gratification Amazon's faster shipping times are a little better for me especially as a consumer rather than seller.
Amazon's product search is intentionally bad
Why?
Two reasons:
It promotes excessively tagging products with keywords
and
It allows them to seamlessly sort their own promoted products in the top results and actually be considered
Sellers can also pay Amazon to get a higher listing in that shitfest of a result page. It's all intentional.
Because they're big enough to get away with it.
I imagine to keep users on the site longer
Maybe people will stop using Amazon?
Nahhhh
Amazon's going through the same enshitification cycle as Sears and JC Penny did a decade ago.
It's not a question of "Will people stop using Amazon?" but "Will people start using <X>" where X is better than Amazon. Solve for X.
Consumer action is a lie that doesn't work. Worker action through unions is the way
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.
It’s worse than when eBay peaked.
A brush for cleaning around your sink
This shit has literally always been the number one reason I avoid Amazon as much as possible, even back when they were pretty new. As soon as they started selling more than books, it's been like this.
Same. Companies named 5 random characters that come and go as fast as the sun rises. and thousands of white label products. Amazon is a flea market of shit, hard to find what you need even with exact part numbers.
Shop local if you can, avoid Amazon.
For me, local is improving, but slowly. Living in Ireland, the local market is, well, insular. Until recently, local shops faced very little competition, so their prices were exorbitant and customer service non-existent. This attitude is slowly changing, and my shopping habits are shifting to local, so hopefully in time I'll stop buying from Amazon, Ali Express, and the likes.
I mean, if you've got an REI in your neighborhood, that can be handy. But even they still get their merch from somewhere that isn't the storefront or even the city. There really isn't a "buy local" option for textiles in a material sense, unless you really know where to look.
Shop AliExpress if you can, avoid dropshippers and petit bourgeois
Don't use Temu, lol. Good ol' AliExpress has proven it's quality over a long period of time. Also, there are many trusted stores that were proven to be of high-quality. Just Google some reddit posts asking for the good ones.
My wife uses Temu for disposable party items, but that's it. I'm of an age where I unironically ask for socka for Christmas, so I'm already beyond Temu's target audience.
Oddly enough, I've had better luck with temu than with aliexpress.
In general they have a lot of the same products, but AE has a much larger selection. However, the AE interface is pure garbage. If you apply a price sort, everything just dissapears. Trying to narrow a search means looking through pages of items, most of which aren't related to what I seached for. Temu, at least, has a preety good search function, filters, and sorts. Plus temu doesnt have the annoying minimum for free shipping.
I'm not a shill for temu. They are a shitty company with low quality chinese crap. But if all I need is low quality chinese crap, it's actually the most effective marketplace I've found to get it.
Dunno.. As I said, what I like in AliExpress is that there are many trusted sellers that are proven to sell high-quality stuff. It's just a matter of finding them.
I don't get why multiple people in this post are recommending AliExpress over Amazon. Like yeah it's cheaper and more from the direct source...but not everyone wants to wait a month to receive the item they want to buy. I've seen some items on AliExpress advertise that they now have "faster shipping", but it's still very very slow in comparison....still taking multiple weeks in my experience.
There is a reason why Amazon got big over other online retailers. Even the online shops for many brick and mortar stores end up making you pay more for the item, make you pay a sizeable fee for the shipping, and make you wait 1-2 weeks all on top of that. Not to mention that if your order does get fucked up or you do get scammed on Amazon, they are very quick to give you your money back because they know it helps with customer satisfaction.
I had an issue with an online order from Samsung before. And despite also being a massive company with shittons of money, they gave me a hard time and I really had to fight to rectify their own mistake.
I get Amazon is evil and all but there's a reason why they are the most used shopping platform. If no one else comes even remotely close to what they do, they aren't going to gain much of a foothold.
but not everyone want to wait a month
There are different options with different delivery times. You can just search for "Choice" option (IIRC) and get products that will get delivered to you in 2 weeks. Also, AliExpress has a lot of stores that ship from Europe. So, for example my lab power supply and router for woodworking got delivered to me in 5 days from Poland.
With an online order from Samsung
You learned your lesson. Don't buy stuff directly from the brands. Buy them on markets that have good reputation in following their policies.
In the nutshell, I never had problems with AliExpress and will recommend it to everyone for everything - from electronic components to.. anything else.
I mean, AliExpress is great, but for many things I'm really just not interested in waiting 2 weeks for my item.
You said don't buy directly from brands, but that's the main thing others in this post are recommending lol.
Thing is if I bought that item from Amazon instead of Samsung, they would have immediately rectified the mistake instead of making me fight for it. And the item would have come sooner. So it's still a win for Amazon.
I still do get why people don't want to use Amazon for moral reasons, but again, they simply provide a massively superior experience than literally any other retailer I've used.
Depending on where in the world you are:
There is a resale store called Buffalo Exchange with a bunch of locations who always has the best messenger bags IMO. I've purchased several vintage messengers from them for carrying art supplies.
My favorite is a rigid leather satchel the size of a briefcase. Its new enough to have a laptop pocket, but old enough where the laptop would be expected to be gigantic. I use that slot for canvasses. Then it leaves the main pocket open for my mini-easel and brushes. External pockets act to replace my purse on days I carry it. All this covered with a giant leather flap which locks closed. V protec.
Edit: fixing autocorrect mistakes
Thanks! That's actually what I'd be looking for. I'll check whether they deliver hassle-free to Ireland. Relatively few speciality stores do.
Apologies for the YouTube link but Cory Doctorow explains this phenomenon really well: https://youtube.com/shorts/vrgtV_yxxn4
this is the exact reason I try to avoid buy off amazon. You pay 5% more elsewhere, but the seller probably gets 50% more
I have seen some sellers figure out workarounds. If you have a different SKU, it doesn’t get considered. So for example, Poppi soda sells a 12 can variety pack on Amazon. They sell a 15 can variety pack for the same price at Costco. Different SKU, lower price per unit.
Just choose the one from the brand you trust most!
I recommend GHSOUNETS, or FNNAULOO
Otherwise just mash your keyboard and the best brands show up.
The more consonants the brand name has the more you know you can trust them. Vowels are sus
Warning: Cat-like typing detected
"Hoement" immediately stuck out to me and sounds like a portmanteau of "hoe" and "moment"
Sounds cool enough to be used as slang
Best weird “brand” name on an Amazon product I bought was a “Lokass” cooler. And of course the name is proudly displayed on the lid of the cooler haha.
I have hoements every day.
Knife sharpening stones are the same. I am thinking of using a brick instead.
I use the sharpal dual grit.. have found it to be a pretty handy.. much more convenient than a soap stone as well
Looks a lot more expensive than a brick, or a slate roofing tile
It sure would be. Let me know how your kitchen knives go on a brick. Maybe I'll try some shed tools on that
You can get pretty smooth bricks which would be fine. Could also rub a couple of bricks together to smooth the surface. Then it's just like sharpening on the rim of a cup, both are ceramic.
Maybe dig some clay in my garden and fire that in the BBQ, make my own ceramic sharpening blocks for free.
Home Depot got some fine brick my friend, fine brick indeed.
Yeah, just get a couple of smooth ones, rub them together to take off any edges of necessary. Or sandpaper but that costs more.
I honestly haven't bought anything from Amazon for a long time. Sure, other online retailers are shit, too, but at least this year most of them like Walmart have been funding the DNC as a result of the tariffs. Amazon is funneling fat stacks into 45's pockets, doubling down on fascism.
You can also shoplift at walmart.
You can shoplift from Amazon, too, but only if you're employed by them.
If you’re in canada just go on the shop app. Forget this Amazon bullshit. Buy local.
Or hit up the thrift stores. Eventually you'll find something. I have to go because it's the best place to buy fat man clothes.
Shopify is American
The app itself just collects retail storefronts into one tool so you don't need an app for each store.
You should check out chrome industries. I’ve had two of these messenger bags and I have a few of the backpacks. Really great build quality and the bags last forever and look great.
https://chromeindustries.com/products/citizen-24l-messenger?gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=21779439101
My day bag is a Chrome. I got it at their brick and mortar location in lower Manhattan over ten years ago. It goes on every trip with me short or long and has seen multiple lengthy eras of daily use yet it doesn't have a single fray or tear. And if it did, they have a free lifetime repair policy. Fucking incredible, literally one of the most excellent purchases of my life.
This is why I have a few different bags. Their stuff is bomb proof and the lifetime warranty is solid.
It's like ebay in 2003.
Freedom To Choose
I really don't it's a scam, just a bunch of different vendor selling the same cheap bag from China. It's exactly what it appears to be.
I will also throw in for a chrome bag. I've had a messenger for a decade and its a tank. I got it made left handed. https://chromeindustries.com/products/citizen-24l-messenger
I have a messenger bag!
It's a tote bag with the MSN logo on it.
If I ever find a bag with with an ICQ logo, I'd pay in gold.
What's Amazon
It's the site where you can buy things off of temu and the resell it here.
A river
just went through this myself
needed a gooseneck phone mount for tomorrow morning. nothing local has something suitable, so damnit amazon it is
oh look, it's dozens of the same product, using the exact same photo often even, from random shit brands
I've been doing pretty good at avoiding amazon for the past year or two, but every two or three months there's something that I just can't get somewhere else on the timeline I need or at a reasonable price
Just get a used Filson off eBay. I'm not even sure why you would consider anything else
Just a guess but, I wouldn't consider anything that was an order of magnitude more expensive than what I was looking to spend.
I looked them up now, and they look very good, but for my purposes I'd like a bag that costs less than the contents.
It turns out that I was looking at the wrong type of bags. What I really needed (and got) was a thin, lightweight laptop bag, which holds my notebook (of paper variety), a few pens, and some odds and ends. For anything that's capable of carrying significant bulk and weight, I prefer a backpack.
Had to post this, gives me the giggles every time. Ryan George gets it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQpxAvjD_30
Fwiw I like ll beans. It’s quite expensive but really durable
I hate to say it, but I almost appreciate the honesty that comes from multiple different alphabet soup brands selling the exact same item often with the exact same photos. Additionally, unbranded items aren't always poor quality.
I've actually got some unbranded Christmas light strings I bought because I just wanted to put some lights on some columns at my wedding and wanted to spend less than $100 doing so, and those light strings have outlasted every commercial Christmas light string I've purchased. Heck I have a couple of those strings which have been on for 3+ years straight.
Most unbranded items are made by factories that do OEM and ODM work for actual brands that we've all heard of, so they know how to make quality products and they can get more ongoing orders if they make products that are worth restocking. Sometimes you get burned but far more often than not I end up with something that's relatively decent quality and fullfills the need I have for the item
I agree with the quality aspect. We got some solar lights for the garden that are brighter and last longer than those you buy in local stores for a much higher price. That said, I prefer to buy such no-brand items from Ali Express, which charges a third or half the price Amazon does for the same item.
Why in the world would you be using Amazon
This kinda seems like your fault. In fact, it fully is
Sometimes I check Amazon to get ideas of options, then look for independent companies that sell products with the features I want.
A lot of it is done by hustle bros.
This far from a solution but the thing I do is do a quick search for it on a search engine and look for websites makes a list of the best ones you can buy at the moment. Here's an example: I search for "best hiking shoes for national parks" and many outdoor-focused gear websites will recommend shoes from brands like Columbia and Merrell.
That’s a sure fire way to land on AI generated affiliate sites that just rank items by popularity or their royalty %
Those are all just affiliate spam links, often AI made, generated to get people to spend the most money so they get the best kickbacks.
Lol dummies this isn't enshitification. Amazon used to not list this stuff, but they realized that they were losing sales because people would go to temu and AliExpress and buy the cheap goods there.
It's not that hard to tell which products are cheap products from China being sold by distributors. Y'all are just bad at shopping.
To a certain extent, isn't it still enshitification? They lowered their standards (making the product/marketplace worse) to capture marketshare/increase profits.
Also, blaming consumers for being "bad at shopping" is certainly a take. What about the gold plated HDMI cables sold at a huge markup? More expensive doesn't mean better and we can't expect everyone to have the knowledge or ability or time to know about every single thing they purchase. Shitty companies are charging more for less and consumers are being squeezed. Photos are all manipulated and there's no real way to know the quality from a picture. People are trying their best to get good products for their money without being scammed.
Yeah this thread is beyond sad. People want to think they're savvy consumers; also think every AA battery with a different outer wrapping is made in a dedicated battery factory.
Amazon is a service. That service is becoming materially worse (I have a harder time finding what I'm looking for because of the flood of substandard products and Amazon's preferential search treatment practices, and even when I do find what I'm looking for, there's a sizable risk that it's a fake). This is very much enshittification; they captured the market share, and now they're squeezing it. Anything that makes them more money but is worse for the consumer, they do. Anything that is better for the consumer but costs them money, they don't do.
How is this enshitification? You can go into a physical store and find the same from one store to another. I think this is just your bias speaking.
At least with a brick and mortar store you actually know what you're getting*
*to a degree. You still won't know how well it will actually hold up in the real world - but you can at least get an idea of it's construction (Materials/stitching and so on) that you don't/can't get via an online shop (especially with all the bogus reviews nowadays)