Amazon Prime

[Bassman59]

Just a point with prime. You can almost always find whatever you want cheaper somewhere else.

I have noticed this. I'm in the habit of doing a general web search for a product to see if it's available elsewhere for less. Usually, it is.

[bd139]

I still order from amazon though because it comes next day...

[james_s]

I love the reviews on Amazon, they're very handy. Otherwise I shop by price, if I can save $1 by waiting a week I usually will. Otherwise I can usually find what I need locally if I'm in a hurry.

[PlainName]

I love the reviews on Amazon

You might like to install a browser extension from ReviewMeta which helps to identify fake reviews.

At one time Amazon allowed kind of paid-for reviews (where the payment was essentially the product for free) and insisted that the review noted that it was based on free kit. Easy to skip those reviews, or at least take into account the genesis, but apparently some reviewers took the piss and obfuscated the required statement in various ways so it wasn't obvious. Amazon's response was to ban solicited reviews completely.

Trouble is, now the transactions are done off-Amazon and there is no indication that a review has been bought (except that it is probably a 5-star). You have no idea which reviews are pukka and which are dodgy (sometimes all of them). That website uses analytics to try and figure it out.

[james_s]

I find it's pretty easy to identify the fake reviews. I'm sure a few clever ones manage to sneak by but for the most part I can tell. For one thing any review that doesn't list any negative factors is automatically suspect, and some just read like advertisements. I tend to pay the most attention to the 3-4 star reviews, the highest rate of fake ones are in 5 stars and a lot of the 1 star reviews are people who bought the wrong item, don't know how to use it, or are griping about problems they had with the transaction.

[PlainName]

Low hanging fruit. The site mentioned can turn up some surprising things because it does stuff like look at what other products groups of reviewers have reviewed together. The way these things work, that's a bigger indicator than the rating given, but it's not one a viewer can normally find.

[MrMobodies]

I go Amazon as well just to look at the reviews and also Trustpilot.

What I find I have to do is to look at the reviewer's profile because of the way they speak of a product and I get suspicious and quite a few of them never left a review before.

I look for things like negative feedback and honesty in what you would expect to find.

Good thing is most of the time you get some grumpy person on there leaving a one star review to know what the worst case might be and  what can go wrong with it.

[bd139]

Yeah I always read the one star reviews first. For example the toaster my wife made me buy.

Good reviews: 500x amazing toaster. Wow just looks great in the kitchen

Bad review (just one): this thing is stupid: two handles to put the toast down and only one eject button for both sides and you have to put the right two slices in first because the left handles don’t work unless the right are down.

That toaster was a pile of shite. Horrid to use.

A lot of the one star reviews are basically just idiots but they’re easy to filter out.

[cdev]

https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/seasonal-associate-is-a-labor-memoir-for-the-amazon-era

"The announcement drew considerable blowback. Local politicians argued that the deal—a form of so-called corporate welfare—would exacerbate New York City’s most pressing problems: underfunded schools, an overburdened public-transportation system, and soaring real-estate prices. The representative-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote on Twitter, of Amazon, “The idea that it will receive hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks at a time when our subway is crumbling and our communities need MORE investment, not less, is extremely concerning to residents here.” For his part, Mayor Bill de Blasio, when asked at a press conference on Tuesday how the deal will affect Queensbridge, a gargantuan housing project abutting the site of the new Amazon campus, sounded a boosterish note. “I can tell you, right here, baked into the deal are a lot of great specific efforts to help the residents of Queensbridge—training, job opportunities,” he said. “One of the biggest companies on earth next to the biggest public-housing development in the United States. The synergy is going to be extraordinary.” Listening to de Blasio’s words, I was struck by his slick and merry gliding from the particular needs of a struggling community to the abstract Newspeak of Silicon Valley, promising at once everything and nothing.

I kept thinking about this slippage as I read Heike Geissler’s “Seasonal Associate,” published in German in 2014, and newly translated to English by Katy Derbyshire. The book follows a nameless freelance writer and translator, who, seeking to improve her precarious financial situation, takes on a temporary, low-level position in an Amazon warehouse, in Leipzig, during the Christmas rush. Geissler herself worked at an Amazon warehouse on a short-term contract in 2010, but, despite the close likeness between the book’s protagonist and its author, “Seasonal Associate” is not a memoir in the conventional sense. We know very little about the protagonist’s life: what exactly she translates and writes, who her boyfriend is, what her kids are like, how old she is, what she looks like. What we do know a lot about, however, is her experience of her own labor. We learn, in textured, finely drawn detail, of the moist, overfull commuter tram that the protagonist rides to the squat Amazon building at the city’s outskirts; of trudging in the snow, feet frozen in work boots; of the large, drafty hall where forklifts circle impatiently, their operators, redolent of sharp-smelling aftershave lotion, pressing the floor workers to scan and pack up products quickly; of the too-big orange vest that slips off the protagonist’s shoulders as she handles packages; of the bland pasta that she scarfs down quickly during a too-short lunch break; of the jumpy co-worker who might be a drug addict, and the one who’s in love with a guy from another department whom she glimpsed through the shelves while working “in Stowing”; of the manager whose lame jokes are undergirded by menace, and the other manager who tends toward light sexual harassment. We learn, in other words, of the entire, hidden world of the contemporary laborer.

Geissler writes mostly in the second person—speaking to her past self, but also to the reader, as if to say, this could easily be you. She shows how workers are flattened into puppet-like role players in the dull drama of corporate capitalism, describing her Amazon self, working in the warehouse, as “simply one item on a list with breasts, ponytail, and glasses,” and as “nothing but a placeholder for machines that have already been invented but aren’t yet profitable enough to permanently replace you and your workmates.” In taking on the new position in a factory, Geissler writes, you are bound to “realize that your trouble and suffering are by no means specific to you, but astonishingly generic. Yes, you are generic; I intend to regard you as generic and introduce you to your most generic traits.”

Geissler’s aim is to communicate that beneath this abstraction, however, laborers are individuals. In that sense, “Seasonal Associate” belongs to the long literary tradition of social-problem novels, which includes Charles Dickens’s “Hard Times,” Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle,” and John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath”—all of which attempt to reveal, in their careful, humanizing treatment of character, fully realized protagonists caught within stultifying and impersonal industrial mechanisms. In a contemporary case like Geissler’s, this kind of project is no less urgent. If, in Sinclair’s day, a hint of the conditions of production was still palpably present—you might have breathed in the stench of the plant where rotten meat was being ground into sausage by underpaid workers—a corporation like Amazon, which magically conjures goods with the tapping of computer keys, has been almost expressly created to obscure the work that goes into getting these products to your doorstep. Geissler reveals the granularity of labor, both rough and prosaic, lying beneath this obfuscating layer. “It’s all about sheer endurance,” the protagonist muses as she packs and unpacks products, wraps and unwraps them, lifts them and puts them down, her feet sore, her arm muscles straining, her hands coarse and chapped."

[MrMobodies]

“You work slowly because Hans-Peter is having trouble with the computer. He can’t place the cursor where he wants it, using the mouse. His cursor chases nervously around its target. . . . You minimize the window, which Hans-Peter maximized to be too large to handle.” There is significance in the slowness, in the mistakes, even in the wrongness of the computer’s maddening interface, which is meant to be elided in the supposedly frictionless transmission of digital information. These are the moments in which the system is briefly subverted

That reminds me of a change to mouse acceleration in Windows XP that affected certain games. It is adjustable with the X and Y curves registry keys but there is a good tool "Mark C mouse fix" for that. With that change the Y axis becomes slower than the X axis making it difficult to aim.

Today when I was out someone spoke to me.
He was trying to post a picture using "an Instagram app" on their phone.
He said it was complicated.
I can believe that when they make things so difficult through over simplification.

[MrMobodies]

I got an letter from Amazon today and I guessed what might be in there.
Amazon Prime oh and they give a card as well.
See attachment.

Once you trail comes to and end, it will automatically converter to a paid membership

They might be hoping I'll get stuck in or forget.

It says at the bottom in the small writing:

Amazon Prime automatically renews at £7.99 per mounth or, if select, £79 per year.

I suppose isn't bad £79 a year saving £15.98 but why is it in the small the print?

If they want give me a bargain price for a year I'd expect the lowest price to be shown as well in the big print.

[hermit]

Why?  Because they have a lot of marketing research to tell them what EVERY space in the email should contain for maximum effect in accord with local law.  You think they want to tell you the price?  You think they want to tell you the REAL PRICE?    Oh those pesky consumer laws.

[MrMobodies]

So they want me to forget about the real price and forgive them afterwards for forgetting.

[cdev]

So I just read that NY officials offered to condemn whatever properties that Amazon might so desire- under eminent domain. Which is legal now here in the US, even when no public use is contemplated, under the theory that more money=good.

Total amount of tax concessions offered to them - $3 BILLION USD.

Thats truly evil.

The picture was part of the pitch. The building pictured (with the NY EDCs added text) is part of the new WTC complex!

[maginnovision]

So I just read that NY officials offered to condemn whatever properties that Amazon might so desire- under eminent domain. Which is legal now here in the US, even when no public use is contemplated, under the theory that more money=good.

Total amount of tax concessions offered to them - $3 BILLION USD.

Thats truly evil.

Yea, the government officials in NY should be ashamed.

[james_s]

Somebody with a bunch of money should condemn a bunch of elected official's homes to make a point.

This is something you'd think the right would be all over, individual property rights. Personally I think eminent domain should be abolished outside of very specific circumstances. It should absolutely have to be public infrastructure like roads or rails, never a private interest.

[ebastler]

The picture was part of the pitch. The building pictured (with the NY EDCs added text) is part of the new WTC complex!

"Priming us to never leave the house"? 

Was that a subversive graphics designer who put that slogan into the photo, or someone who didn't realize that this was not Amazon's own pitch? 

[DarkShadowsX5]

I've actually had Amazon prime for 4 years. I abused the crap out of the prime shipping to make it worth it. I ordered a bunch of stuff every week for my hobbies, watched movies on prime and almost never used the music as you can find all that on youtube anyway.
Sometimes you find something cheaper elsewhere but if you add the shipping its about the same cost and slower arrival.
For me it all worked out great product replacement policy etc. one day i needed themed clothing for a wedding and i had to 1 day ship it because no one told me the got dang theme until it was way too fkn late... lol

But lately amazon lost my trust when they blamed me for getting a "free product for reviews" when in reality i got standard product replacement.. they use to be so much better about things and not even care.
i think what they got confused by was me telling the seller that "i would leave my positive review as is" (note the "as is" as in i already left one) because frankly i didn't have much time to go back and change it. the product failed within a the standard 30 day policy. i was in my right to get a refund.
So now i cant write reviews and i dont have prime anymore.