After coming back from a break, I realised I might have leaned too hard into “protecting Chinese companies”. I will say this right now for everyone reading: I have no love for the nationality of said companies. I don’t care if Aliexpress or a clone of theirs was Chinese, Korean, Brazilian, Swiss, Russian, Iranian, Australian or Japanese (incidentally I spend time on buyee.jp because the cheap deals on CDs sometimes). What I care about is providing competition to the bigger mammoths here. If I find a USB adapter for a quarter of the price with free shipping and refunds from a Chinese shop with a decent reputation (Aliexpress, Banggood, TaoBao and now TEMU), I’ll take it. I hope this forces big American retailers to maybe give better, fairer prices to their customers.
I’m not quite convinced that Amazon is no longer the giant with worms as we knew it. Can you explain?
I don’t have a lot of inner details about amazon but I do know that they have peaked already as far as retail goes. I don’t know when, I just know its happened already.
Amazon is no longer any of the following:
- The cheapest deal
- Filled with reliable reviews
- Filled with trustworthy companies
And on top of that, their product search page is to the point where not even the advertisers are having a good time. The end users (buyers) stopped having a useful interface a while before that.
Its easier now for me to avoid amazon simply because they aren’t the best deal by nearly any metric any more.
True, most global brands are garbage, but I do see a lot of stuff locally thats sprung up to fill interesting niches. I still think the community of people who say “fuck big business, and fuck endless greed” is a growing bunch so I’m hopeful.
It helps for me to watch what the generations after me are doing, and they are doing a fine job fighting for progress in my opinion.
