alt Hacker NewsLike most people, I always try to give preference to local merchants instead of giants like Amazon. And most of the times I regret it
I don't buy groceries online, have never liked the idea. But for other goods, Amazon or other corporate giants are normally the best choice. And you probably know it too.
> How many specialty items has Amazon kept in stock just because you, individually, wanted to buy them?
Places like Amazon are usually the only place to get specialty items. Go to a local merchant and their answer is always "We don't have them in stock, but we can order them for you". Even specialty stores never have specialty items which they know customers need. After having spent the day going to 5 different specialty stores and none of them having the item, you'll wonder why you didn't buy it on Amazon in the first place.
> How many items have you successfully (even if accidentally) negotiated an ongoing price with Amazon on?
Never, of course. Their prices are already cheaper than what you can get after successfully negotiating with a local merchant. And I don't enjoy negotiating. I have nothing against local stores being more expensive for the convenience.
> How many minty new Weber grills has Amazon offered to give you before they fell over dead?
About fourteen.
For most sectors, local merchants simply offer no convenience, no knowledge, no stock, annoying sales tactics, lying salesmen, predatory terms, no product guarantees, a hateful attitude, and jacked up prices. The local merchant is usually a multi-millionaire who gives as little a damn about you and the community he operates in as Amazon does.
With Amazon I can return a product if I need to and get my money back. I can purchase it in peace with all relevant information about the product presented clearly.
Huh.
I have much better results with nearby merchants than that.
Like: A couple of weeks ago my furnace died. On a Sunday, at the end of a 4-day weekend. It was cold outside, and getting colder inside.
I could have called someone and they could have come by to fix it, but I would have paid dearly for that and that's never been my style anyway.
So I troubleshot it myself and worked down the flowchart of what a furnace needs to do, and what this one was not doing. I deduced that the ignitor was both not working, and that it was open-circuit, and that it had 120v available to use at times when it should have been doing its thing.
Thus, it was proven that the ignitor should have been working but was instead NFG.
I looked at Amazon (easy enough, right?) and found plenty of ignitors that could be made to work, or that were dead-ringers for the one I had in my hand. They were all cheap-enough (excluding some were that definitely too cheap), and they promised delivery in 4 or 5 days.
Now, I can sort out some temporary heat for a night or two (I even have a plan in-place just for that situation), but I don't want to deal with that for an entire work-week. Besides being inconvenient, that's also a money-losing proposition.
I looked harder. I found one in a store that was open, about 30 minutes away. I set forth immediately to go get it.
And then I installed it. It worked perfectly.
It did cost about twice what Amazon wanted for a seemingly-appropriate ignitor, but meh: I found a place that had the product I needed in (close-enough to) the right place, at the right time.
I was very happy to pay them.
---
Right now, I'm about to go outside to put new spool valve gaskets on my Honda. They're leaky; it's a known issue with this version of the J35 engine. And when they leak, they drip oil on the alternator. These alternators are known to die from being bathed in oil.
Amazon would have cheerfully sold me very inexpensive gaskets from any number of alphabet-soup vendors, but those are all known to leak again sooner instead of later and this isn't a thing I want to repeat soon. Besides, a new Denso alternator is expensive (and the other aftermarket offerings are known to be failure-prone in this application).
I found gasket part numbers from Mahle -- a German company with a very long history of making engine oiling system parts, and of not selling junk -- instead.
I ordered them online at O'Reilly Auto's website late last night as soon as I noticed the issue. They had them at their store two blocks from my house this morning before noon.
This was not inexpensive. I paid a -lot- for these two very specific little rubber gaskets.
But Amazon (with their selection of bad parts, and also fake parts) was a non-starter -- and their delivery times are still bogged down in the holiday business anyway. It was also both cheaper and faster to get them from down the road than it was to have them overnighted from Rock Auto.
---
And, you know, that works great for me. Right now when I need a thing ASAP, I can get it done with local(ish) shops that have local people working there. I can get it done faster than Fedex Overnight can.
Or at least: I can do this for as long as the local shops manage to stay alive.
After they're gone, I'll be left with extra-long delays every December (that's only 1 month out of every year, for the rest of my life) or spending even more money to keep my own personal inventory of spare parts for the important machines in my life.
I don't like that version of the future.