Bill Snyder writes at CIO that if you're a regular Amazon.com customer, you might think prices on the huge retail site never change but you'd be wrong. According to Boomerang Commerce, Amazon is a master of the art of retail pricing, and it carefully monitors the behavior of shoppers and competitors to determine the best times to raise or lower prices. The giant online retailer uses its vast computing resources to monitor and analyze the prices of many thousands of items sold by competitors. Popular items are quickly discounted, while items that are less attractive may actually cost more than they do on rival sites. For example, Amazon listed a 32-inch smart TV for just under $400 in May of last year. The price consistently increased and decreased for six months, and on Black Friday, the huge shopping day right after Thanksgiving, the price plunged to $250. "By testing the TV at various price points, Amazon would have been able to determine the optimum low price that it could use during the peak shopping period," Boomerang says in its report. However, Amazon seems to know, likely by studying billions of shopping transactions, exactly the time of year when many people will buy an item even if the price is high. For instance, the online retailer seemed to know that a lot of people would be buying HDMI cables in the fall and the run-up to Christmas. Boomerang found that a pack of Twisted Veins HDMI cables went from just under $5 in the summer to more than $8 before Christmas.
In a statement, Amazon calls the Boomerang paper “flawed” and says that Amazon is “obsessed” with providing low prices for its consumers. “We do the hard work for [consumers] by scouring prices – both offline and online – in order to make sure we meet or beat the lowest prices out there," says Amazon spokesman Scott Stanzel. So how should this shape your shopping decisions? In some cases, it may not matter; you may be willing to pay for the convenience of having an item shipped to your home or, conversely, to be able to pick it up that afternoon in a store. But if you're really looking to pinch pennies, you should do a lot of comparison shopping or use a site like track if, to make sure you're getting the best deal.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 21 2015, @03:16PM
This has been obvious for many years. Back when we still had big bog music stores, Amazon's discounts on music CDs were awesome - 30 to 35 percent pretty much across the board. Then the big boxes all seemed to go out of business within a couple years of each other. Now the discounts are token at best.
But you can still get deals on books. Once B&N closes shop, those discounts will be gone.
(Score: 2) by Zyx Abacab on Wednesday January 21 2015, @08:34PM
Wasn't there some other business that worked like this? It was a big deal back in the day.
Their mantra was "embrace, extend, extinguish" or something like that....
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 21 2015, @10:11PM
This is true even between box stores. CVS is an easy one to follow. When a new one opens up near an established local pharmacy, it is typically 24 hours and prices are cheap. Once that local pharmacy closes, which is inevitable with CVS's economy of scale, the 24-hour option is gone and prices stabilize. Supermarkets, book stores, clothing chains...they all do this.
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Wednesday January 21 2015, @03:17PM
I haven't confirmed it myself, but an acquaintance of mine tells me that Amazon also has individual prices. At least, he has seen different prices quoted when (logged in) / (not logged in) coming from different PCs.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Wednesday January 21 2015, @03:21PM
Welcome to the economy of information asymmetry. It's only going to get worse as the implicit collusion that advertising and CRM networks become more advanced.
Not only is Amazon going to know how much you're willing to overpay in specific situations, but all their affiliates will know that same information, and unless you develop a complex system to route around them, every single price you ever see will be perfectly designed to manipulate your psychology and get you to pay the exact maximum amount you'd consider.
Luckily we have a few more years before they get quite that good.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by WillAdams on Wednesday January 21 2015, @03:30PM
Yeah, I considered doing that sort of thing when I arranged to reprint _Traditional Archery from Six Continents_ (the price on Amazon and Abebooks got so absurdly high that it was cheaper to just buy the rights) --- it's a nuisance to do by hand, and you're right that prices will adjust dynamically once software catches up.
Fortunately Amazon seems to be hitting some financial difficulties, so hopefully this will keep the window open so several companies can step up to compete.
On the gripping hand, there's always "M.S.R.P.", and if the middle-men start to gouge to much, it will hopefully continue to be possible to purchase goods directly.
For my part, I'm looking forward to spring and the farmers markets opening up again.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday January 21 2015, @04:52PM
Don't forget they also have all your credit and purchasing data, not just from them, but thru information sharing.
"Hmm this bastard cleared $150K AGI on last years tax return, and our sales target for a HTDV is 1% AGI, so hope he likes being offered $1500 for this $250 walmart cash price TV"
Cash price is an interesting problem. If amazon takes this to an extreme, I'll pay poor people on craigslist to buy me stuff. "OK CL dude, you save me 50% because of your room temperature credit score, so I'll kick you back 10% of purchase price if you buy it for me at half off."
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday January 21 2015, @05:13PM
With people with bad credit, the Standard Operating Procedure is to fool them by offering a small down payment and such lousy credit terms that they pay a huge pile of interest before whatever you sold them gets repossessed.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 21 2015, @03:47PM
> I haven't confirmed it myself, but an acquaintance of mine tells me that Amazon also has individual prices.
Not generally. But when there are multiple sellers they will sort them differently so the default price is occasionally not the cheapest price of all the sellers on the site, frequently they will put Amazon's own (higher) price ahead of any of the marketplace sellers. Especially if you paid for Prime because (so they say) they assume you want the 'free' shipping from Amazon themselves even if the total price from a marketplace seller is cheaper.
(Score: 2) by goodie on Wednesday January 21 2015, @04:31PM
I don't know if Amazon is doing this now but I am pretty sure that they are testing it at the very least. In my field (information systems) where econometrics have been extremely popular for the past 5-7 years, there are a number of papers which deal with recommendation agents (RA), individual pricing and so on. And most of them rely on Amazon to do their empirical testing (when applicable). The goal of many of those papers is to see for example (1) how much do you want bots/paid RAs to "pollute" real reviews to maximize chances of purchase, (2) what is the optimum price point given a customer's past purchases, their segmentation etc.? Eventually this will be done. Right now, the difference is too insignificant for Amazon to bother. But once they are able to build robust models to support this (and this may only be a matter of collecting enough data to do it, which they do in massive amounts every day anyway), you can bet your ass that no two people will pay the same price for something. It's pretty much for the same reason that Amazon US and Amazon CDN don't offer the same prices (and no, it has nothing to do with fuel, customs etc. Ask Target Canada about it).
(Score: 2) by buswolley on Wednesday January 21 2015, @05:58PM
In a brick store we all expect other customers to be paying the same price as we, except maybe for the store owner's friends. Wed be quite upset if we found out the random customer ahead of us gets to buy a coffeemaker for $25 cheaper, just because.
subicular junctures
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday January 21 2015, @10:02PM
Gas stations do it all the time. Drive past one on the way to work, "Wow! I'm filling up today!" Then at lunch it's thirty cents a gallon more expensive.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 2) by buswolley on Wednesday January 21 2015, @10:07PM
Maybe. I've worked at a gas station for a couple of years before becoming a serious academic. They didn't change prices that often. Also if a change is noticed while in line, that irritates.
Also, there is an issue of false advertising.
subicular junctures
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Wierd0n3 on Thursday January 22 2015, @01:07AM
By law (in Wisconsin at least) you can change the price once every 24 hours. We make more money on the downward spiral than we do on the upward one. you can control how fast you fall, but no one wants to be the first one to raise, so you wait until you are breaking even before you raise the price.
think of gas like peanuts at the bar. practically give those away so they drink more beer. (get them in to buy a candy bar at 80% profit)
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 22 2015, @02:06AM
My family has owned gas stations - well convenience stores with gas. Gas is barely profitable, it isn't quite a loss-leader but close to it in order to get people into the convenience store. Anyway... we only changed prices when there was a new tanker delivery and the price from the supplier had changed.
(Score: 4, Informative) by wonkey_monkey on Wednesday January 21 2015, @03:27PM
Bill Snyder writes at CIO that if you're a regular Amazon.com customer, you might think prices on the huge retail site never change
This is the second recent article that has included the phrase "you might think..." and then gone on to describe something that, no, I wouldn't have thunk. I'm not really sure why anyone else would think that prices never change, either.
Practically every time I go to my basket, I get told that something in my saved items has changed price.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Wednesday January 21 2015, @04:21PM
The article struck me as mildly patronizing.
It also strikes me as a plug piece for a company that looks like it wants to do exactly what Amazon is doing.
It kind of makes me wish I would have done something else with my last minute and a half.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 21 2015, @05:50PM
So what you'e saying to the writer is "You might think I might think that, but no."
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Wednesday January 21 2015, @11:22PM
Not quite - I think the writer likes to fool himself into thinking we might think that, because then he can make smugly condescending statements so he can feel like he's better than us. He is a columnist, after all.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 22 2015, @12:17AM
Wow, you sure are taking a common literary device very personally.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday January 21 2015, @10:08PM
When he said "you" he didn't mean you, or me. He meant the aliterate noncompos who follow celebrities on twitter.
It isn't just Amazon, either. It's everybody. And the price can go up or down. Barnes & Noble listed Nobots before Amazon. Amazon came on with a price two dollars higher than B&N. The next day, B&N had raised the price.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Wednesday January 21 2015, @03:30PM
>Amazon is “obsessed” with providing low prices for its consumers
No, I'm pretty sure Amazon is "obsessed" with wringing as much cash as it can from its consumers.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by hubie on Wednesday January 21 2015, @04:48PM
As Walmart has shown, those don't have to be mutually exclusive if you got the sales volume.
(Score: 2) by emg on Wednesday January 21 2015, @05:26PM
"No, I'm pretty sure Amazon is "obsessed" with wringing as much cash as it can from its consumers."
That'll be why their percentage profit margins are in the low single digits...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 21 2015, @06:05PM
Those two facts are not in conflict.
They are wringing as much as cash as they can from their customers, they are just spending it on infrastructure. They want to be the next walmart - a behemoth so big that competition is futile. At that point they expect to have insane profit margins. Whether it works out that way remains to be seen.
(Score: 3, Informative) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Wednesday January 21 2015, @03:37PM
Amazon's advantage in prices has eroded over the past few years because the "MSRP" (the manufacturer's suggested retail price, or "cover price" or whatever you want to call it) has been inflated to take into account a 40% online discount.
I call this the "Dover effect" because the sleepy mathematics publisher Dover used to have really cheap math books, and online prices never had much of a discount. They waited much longer than most publishers to price in a deep discount, so I noticed it more when they started doing it. A few years ago, Dover math books began to have higher prices, but the net amount you paid was about the same after the online discount. All they did was increase the cover price and let retailers offer a steeper discount. The final price is about the same.
Yesterday's $25 hardback is today's $35 hardback, and this increase is largely just to price in the 30-40% online discount. I've seen $40 hardbacks, too, which is ridiculous except no one pays that amount.
I could give other examples. During the holiday season, I went to a store that sold clothing, and a lot the MSRPs were double what the item was actually worth, and the clothing marked down 40%.
Now that MSRP has the online discount built into it, Amazon no longer has their pricing advantage, because all retailers can basically offer the same discount. Before, Amazon had an arbitrage thing going on where they could sell the same item with the same MSRP cheaper than retailers because they used sophisticated just-in-time inventory systems and didn't need stores. Now, every retailer can offer items at basically the same price, because the online discount is part of the MSRP.
We're actually getting price increases. Yesterday's $10 t-shirt is today's $15 t-shirt, but it's hard to see this because the MSRP has almost doubled and the discounts are steeper than in previous years.
Prices are crazy. As an exercise, go price paper towels. Try to figure out the unit price per paper towel to figure out which is the best deal. It's insane. I think recently that every package I looked at had a different quantity of paper towels per roll. They're doing this because most people are so bad at arithmetic that they won't even try to compare.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 21 2015, @03:53PM
During the holiday season, I went to a store that sold clothing, and a lot the MSRPs were double what the item was actually worth, and the clothing marked down 40%.
It is an open secret that brick-and-mortar retailers regularly change their 'list prices' in order to have fake sales. JC Penny tried to get away from that practice and their profits cratered. So they had no choice but to start doing it again. [time.com]
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Wednesday January 21 2015, @04:57PM
Is that even legal? In this country (UK) I'm pretty sure it would be a breach of the consumer protection act.
(Score: 2) by dublet on Wednesday January 21 2015, @05:22PM
There's a regulation that the MSRP must be charged for a certain length of time (IIRC a month or so). So if a pint of milk normally is say 50p, they can jack up the price to 99p for a month and then advertise it at 50p but with a 50% discount. They do this all of the time in supermarkets with various goods.
Similarly with furniture stores that have seemingly eternal sales on get around consumer protection legislation by having a sale on only for specific lines of products, e.g. ``the "Foo Collection" is now 50% off! Hurry as sales end in a week!'', after this week, the "Foo Collection" goes back up to 100% MSRP but the "Bar Collection" goes down to 50% and they can say they have another sale on "which must end soon!".
"If anyone needs me, I'm in the angry dome. [dublet.org]"
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Wednesday January 21 2015, @04:18PM
Prices are crazy. As an exercise, go price paper towels. Try to figure out the unit price per paper towel to figure out which is the best deal. It's insane. I think recently that every package I looked at had a different quantity of paper towels per roll. They're doing this because most people are so bad at arithmetic that they won't even try to compare.
I believe there is only once choice for paper towels:
http://www.amazon.com/Kimberly-Clark-Scott-Towel-75147-Sheets/dp/B00S0LBOQA/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1421856977&sr=8-2&keywords=blue+paper+towels [amazon.com]
Although ironically Amazon provides many other sizing options, returning to the mental arithmetic that you were describing
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday January 21 2015, @08:30PM
Just don't buy. We've become so conditioned to buy our way out of every want and seeming need that we overlook simple alternatives.
I find certain kinds of commercials hilarious. Such as, the car commercial that emphasizes how much _fun_ driving is, while showing their sporty model being driven rapidly up some scenic, curvy mountain road, with not another car in sight. To me, a car is only a tool, it is not a status symbol, and driving is stressful, dangerous, and time consuming, not fun. One of the petty annoyances of car ownership is having to wait in long lines at some government office for the privilege of paying licensing fees, transferring titles, and that kind of red tape. Worse is the periodic visit to the gas pump. I'd like to ditch them altogether, switch to renting when I want one, public transportation, walking, and bicycling. I'm looking forward to the coming of the electric car, powered by batteries, or maybe fuel cells, and maybe aided by solar cells too. Then there's the typical lawn care commercial, showing such a warped caricature of a homeowner, tooling around on a riding lawn mower over a perfectly manicured lawn, going around perfectly manicured bushes, that you wonder how the veil can possibly hold up. Yeah, right, I have neither the desire, time, nor money to put that much into a lawn, and further, I think it's healthier to let the lawn be more natural.
As for Amazon's business, especially books, music, and movies, I look forward to the death of the dead tree and spinning storage formats. My parents have a wall sized bookshelf to hold most of their books, and an 8 ft wide stereo cabinet with shelves sized just right for LP vinyl records, I prefer flash drives and personal media players. I hope to see the private, corporate merchants fade into history as file sharing makes them obsolete. I want our public libraries to get with it, digitize everything, and offer it all for free download. Or, maybe the capacity of media will grow so huge that people can carry around the entire Library of Congress on one card the size of a fingernail.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday January 21 2015, @10:31PM
I find certain kinds of commercials hilarious. Such as, the car commercial that emphasizes how much _fun_ driving is, while showing their sporty model being driven rapidly up some scenic, curvy mountain road, with not another car in sight. To me, a car is only a tool
Gee, you picked one of the better commercials. Look at that Toyota commercial for the Rav 4 with the giant stuffed animal on the roof and not a word of why I would want that particular car. Or their commercial where the woman wins a locker with BB King's guitar in it and...
Well, my take on this is that advertisers target morons. I can think of no other answer.
Your comment made me think of the old Pontiac commercial, "we build excitement". Poor brakes, bad handling... yep, pretty exciting.
As for Amazon's business, especially books, music, and movies, I look forward to the death of the dead tree and spinning storage formats. My parents have a wall sized bookshelf to hold most of their books, and an 8 ft wide stereo cabinet with shelves sized just right for LP vinyl records, I prefer flash drives and personal media players.
Everybody's not you, and despite what I wrote in Mars, Ho! I doubt physical media will go away any time soon. My youngest is 28, and when she visited and I held out the hardbound copy of my first book, she was thrilled. "My dad wrote a book! And it's a REAL book!"
It isn't just us old geezers who prefer paper. As to movies and music, having a CD or a DVD (or a physical book) is ownership. I want my media on at least two drives each, and silver disks make great backups.
As to Amazon, well, there's a $2 ebook download of Mars, Ho (or you can read it at my web site for free). They don't just sell physical media.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Thursday January 22 2015, @04:05AM
Well, my views are no doubt colored by my changing tastes. I hardly read fiction any more. Sure, read Lord of the Rings, the Foundation series, and quite a few other big name and some lesser SF/Fantasy books when I was younger. But now? The great ones have held up fairly well. Not so much the lesser stuff. For example, rereading a bit of Sword of Shannara was a shock. I found the quality of the writing horrible, and wondered how I could ever have enjoyed that when I was a teen. Can't stomach it now. Elfstones was a little better, but I found I had to enjoy it on the level of cheesy comedy.
In general though, I've found most stories just too pat. Problems are too few and too easily solved. Or they're fake. The biggest problem the heroes face is usually other people, in eternal animalistic competition for sex, power, and wealth.
One big blind spot I see in much current writing is this "knowledge is precious" thinking which I feel to be wrong but to which authors are susceptible because they are authors and believers in copyright. To be fair, most ordinary people also fall for this wrong thinking, but authors have a seeming conflict of interest that impairs their ability to see this issue objectively. For example, near the start of the Star Trek episode "I, Mudd", it comes out that Mudd is accused of copyright infringement on a world where that is a crime punishable by death. Yeah, the story writers wish! Terminator 2 pushed this idea that knowledge could be destroyed. Whatever other problems the story had, that idea ruined it. "I cannot self terminate" Blearrrgh! That sort of garbage is like book burnings that reactionary social conservatives like to hold on occasion. Futile, unless the only objects are to feel good about making a protest and maybe warm some hands and cook some marshmallows.
Another more subtle example is the entire basis of the central plot of the Silmarillion. The precious jewels, the Silmarils, can't be duplicated! Why not?! Well, perhaps they are made of material that is so rare that there isn't enough to make more, or it takes so much energy that doing it again is impractical. And yet, the reason is hinted to be more of an issue of the maker being unable to repeat the manufacturing process because he can't think how to do it again. Didn't he keep any notes?! And, the Two Trees can be restored with light from the Silmarils, but the jewels have to be destroyed to use them for that purpose. Why? Tolkien ignores that problem with the plot. It's the same with the Two Trees themselves. They were created once but can't be simply recreated. And so these things are elevated to beyond price in value, irreplaceable, and their loss is a massive tragedy and Casus Belli. Now, we all know that data loss does happen with hard drives failing, discs being scratched, and so on. It is possible to keep knowledge from the world, as for instance in the 18 minutes that the Nixon administration erased from the tapes they made of their deliberations and discussions. But backing data up is easy, unless you're a character in a fantasy world, then I guess even hand written copies of valuable notes is beyond the ability of your entire civilization. Heck, the Assyrians copied much Babylonian writing way back in the day, between 900 B.C. and 600 B.C. It's not like copying is some kind of advanced technology. If you can write, you can copy. So, the big problem in the Silmarillion is fake. It's a real shame that the story has such a big plot hole in it.
One of the plot points in Hyperion, a Hugo award winning book, suffers this same problem. One of the characters is an author. Intelligent computers love his writing, but he doesn't make any money from them because they all just copy his book. Because of that he stays in debt, and the publisher can force him to keep cranking out sequels. A futuristic society still trying to make copyright work? No, that does not hold up.
Over and over, I see this problem. Perhaps works of fantasy can be excused, but not science fiction. Until authors get over this professional blind spot, I'm not much interested. Some get this, I think, but even now they are still the minority. I haven't read any Doctorow, maybe I should give him a try. Since your book is free, I may take a look, enough of a one to see whether you get it.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday January 21 2015, @10:13PM
I think recently that every package I looked at had a different quantity of paper towels per roll. They're doing this because most people are so bad at arithmetic that they won't even try to compare.
I'm not bad at arithmetic, but what I spend on paper towels compared to other things, the thirty cents I might save by doing the math just isn't worth my time or effort. I can save a hell of a lot more money by driving sensibly instead of racing from one red light to the next like all the other idiots do.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 21 2015, @10:40PM
> I can save a hell of a lot more money by driving sensibly instead of racing from one red light to the next like all the other idiots do.
I love jack-rabbit starts. They are fun and a really cheap thrill. I don't mind the couple of extra dollars a week it costs me. You might think I'm an idiot, I think you are just myopic.
(Score: 2) by el_oscuro on Wednesday January 21 2015, @10:37PM
Amazon had a aquarium light for less than the local fish store. No real surprise there, but both were substantially discounted [amazon.com] from the list price.
SoylentNews is Bacon! [nueskes.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 21 2015, @03:43PM
I always check CamelCamelCamel [camelcamelcamel.com] for the price history before buying anything at Amazon.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 21 2015, @04:14PM
And, it's Hump Day, Mike.
(Score: 1) by DaTrueDave on Wednesday January 21 2015, @04:51PM
Camelcamelcamel is a must-have plugin for anyone with Amazon Prime.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday January 21 2015, @05:00PM
Most of the plugins monetize by autorouting you thru the plugin makers amazon affiliate link, I prefer the amazon affiliate link at
https://www.eff.org/helpout [eff.org]
aka
http://www.amazon.com/?tag=electronicfro-20 [amazon.com]
Why does the EFF have such a weird affiliate link title? I really donno, but to the best of my knowledge it is correct. (and no its not a goatse, rickroll, or my own amazon link, although I feel the need, the need to rickroll...)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 21 2015, @05:41PM
I never use affiliate links. They leak information because the affiliate link owner gets a list of what each customer purchases. They don't get the customer's ID, but they do get everything that the customer purchases within 24 hours of hitting the affiliate link which is the kind of thing that could still be reverse engineered under the right circumstances.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 21 2015, @03:50PM
This is a very long article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon.com_controversies [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday January 21 2015, @04:46PM
So, like most of you, I know about camelcamelcamel and I went there and checked out the HDMI claim and it seems to be false? Hasn't been above $8 since 2011? Could be some weird game play like MONSTER CABLE 50 ft instead of amazon basics 2 meter. Maybe its a really old study predating camel.
Offtopic, with a website name like that, I hope their backend is all Perl.
Considering how much BS goes on in currency markets and world trade and seemingly everything consumer level comes from overseas, I'm surprised the actual graphs I see are as flat as they are.
Someone living in Switzerland this month probably has seen wilder price fluctuations. Or Greece. Or pretty much everywhere but USA?
The other off topic anecdote I have is TV screens are now a cheaper source of glass than home depot windows. Of course the money is all in the weather stripping and multiple panes and stuff, but per square foot up on the wall, TVs are cheaper than windows, which seems crazy. The operating cost of a window is probably higher because of the heat flow, too, not just capital costs. Crazy times. Of course windows can provide better ventilation than TVs LOL. Pretty soon instead of people living in plywood shanty towns, or obama-villes or whatever you want to call them, they'll live in huts made of HDTVs and ipads.
(Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Wednesday January 21 2015, @05:02PM
That's not too surprising: The first article appears to be a veiled plug for Bloomberg Commerce, which looks like they are trying to pull off an Amazon like service for non-Amazon retailers. When was the last time you heard a company say something good about their competitors?
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 2) by Leebert on Wednesday January 21 2015, @05:25PM
Like other commenters, I didn't think that was the case either. What draws me to Amazon is familiarity, the long tail effect, laziness, and "good enough".
Familiarity, because it's worked fine for me since 1997 with nary an issue.
The long tail effect, by which I can at least consider using Amazon for practically any purchase. Including MP3s.
Laziness, because I don't have to go to Dave's Web Store and LED Emporium, figure out what javascript to allow to make the stupid card and payment system work, be required to create another account (No, you can't check out as "guest"! And be sure your password meets our absurd password standards! And won't you just love getting our LED-of-the-Week promotional e-mails?!), be certain that they actually will process my order securely, etc. etc.
"Good enough", that I know even if I'm not paying the cheapest possible price, I'm not out of the ballpark of "reasonably inexpensive".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 21 2015, @05:49PM
I recently moved to a state with nearly 10% sales tax. Amazon charges sales tax here, they have a couple of warehouses in state. Many of the smaller vendors do not charge sales tax but generally price the same as amazon. So it is worth it for me to seek them out and make my purchases there. Ironically, I like to "showroom" at Amazon to see the reviews and such before making my purchase elsewhere.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday January 21 2015, @10:37PM
The only thing I buy from Amazon any more is books and movies. I bought a new battery from Amazon for my laptop, and was sent the wrong battery. Pain in the ass. Bought it directly from Acer and was shipped the right battery.
I learned my lesson. I wonder when Seagate's going to ship that "personal cloud" (external hard drive) I ordered Sunday?
Scew Amazon, except for books and movies I have better sources.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 2) by TK on Wednesday January 21 2015, @05:55PM
There's your problem, you're not buying cables from monoprice.
6ft HDMI cable
Amazon: $5.49
Monoprice: $2.53
6ft USB to micro USB
Amazon: $5.49
Monoprice: $1.44
6ft TOSlink cable (optical audio)
Amazon: $5.99
Monoprice: $1.60
6ft 3.5mm audio cable M-M
Amazon: $2.00
Monoprice: $0.88
There's no "free" 2-day shipping, but if you put in a big order once a year you'll easily save money*.
Shameless plug, I know, but monoprice kicks everyone else's ass when it comes to cable pricing. (I have no affiliation with monoprice, I just love them.)
*Unless you live outside of the US.
The fleas have smaller fleas, upon their backs to bite them, and those fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Wednesday January 21 2015, @09:30PM
thanks for that, I had not come across them ;-)
(Score: 2) by Foobar Bazbot on Wednesday January 21 2015, @10:23PM
Hey, if this is the Unaffiliated Monoprice Plug thread, let me mention these earbuds...
http://www.monoprice.com/Product?p_id=8320 [monoprice.com]
Just google "monoprice 8320" to find various reviews, but basically these $5 to $9 earbuds (depends which color, and whether they're discounted) match or stomp everything in the $30-50 range.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 21 2015, @09:20PM
When did "customers" become "consumers"? Seriously, they don't think of their customers as more than money farms? I miss the days of "the customer is always right".
(Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Wednesday January 21 2015, @11:25PM
I'm pretty young, comparatively speaking, but I don't think the customer was ever right; I think it just got exhausting keeping the lie up.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!