Interesting... but doesn't fit my buying habits. The only time I go to Amazon (which is quite frequently, actually) it is to purchase a specific thing right now.
This. I also buy way too much stuff from Amazon.
I believe I've had 6 packages delivered in the last two days, which is about average to low
Then again, I get a lot of parts to deliver to my clients. But we also tend to buy everything in our house from Amazon and rarely if ever get something from a store. Sorry, brick and mortar! But I do think that if you thought about it, there are a few things that could wait a little while for the right price. I'm not normally a savings hunter. I don't clip coupons and I'm a brand loyalist. But I'd estimate that Camelcamelcamel has saved me hundreds of dollars over the years, mostly on staples that we keep around the house.
Along the way, I've sometimes gone price shopping elsewhere prior to hitting the buy button and the results are illuminating.
It's funny, I don't deny that this is the case, but I never really feel it. Perhaps it's because the vast majority of products I buy at Amazon are low-margin electronics and I have a good sense of pricing for those things, but they always seem to be competitive to me. Once and a while I'll check on a pricier component and find it elsewhere for less, but then I'll weigh the cost of shipping, speed of shipping, and ease of returns and decide it's worth it to stick to Amazon.
For example, Monoprice kills Amazon on cable prices, but unless I'm placing a big order, it's just easier to get a 5-pack of ethernet cables in two days from Amazon (also, maybe it's just me but Monoprice shipping seems even slower than it used to be).
One other random anecdote: a couple years ago, we had a minor disaster when it turned out that the pan below our shower was slowly leaking, which basically required going all the way down to the studs and rebuilding the shower. We decided to use this as an excuse to upgrade our shower to have his-and-hers dual showerheads. We went to a local shop that specializes in this sort of thing and picked out a particular set of Hansgrohe hardware which came with an eye-popping price. I was able to buy exactly the same gear on Amazon for maybe 2/3 of the list price. Win!
Ooph, sorry to hear about that. I'm particularly attuned to feeling empathy for water leaks after having several devastating ones in our house. But congrats on the new equipment! I've had several Hansgrohe showerheads over the years and they're really nice. Definitely a great value/quality ratio there.
There's another mode of Amazon failure that's worth noting on this thread: when Amazon runs out of something and the only seller with stock is a third-party with a jacked-up price. This reared its head over the holidays when I had a particular pair of pants on my Christmas shopping list, in an odd size (33" waist). Amazon ran out and the offering price was 3x what the pants should have been from the only vendor who still had them. I suspect this sort of thing is a deliberate strategy to profit from people who literally don't look at the prices and just blindly buy anything.
Sounds like you should have had a price alert on those
But yeah I see that all the time. I never buy third party anyway so I just treat that as "sold out."
My particular favorite Amazon quirk is this simple formula:
Product x 1 = $10
Product x 5 = $80
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