Shinycroak Blog: On Online Shopping

This is where I put up occasionally shopping and finance advice--things I decided would be worth publishing that don't belong in my political blog. So! I'll start out with the post that persuaded me to start this blog: on evaluating online shopping services.

Does the store:
  • Let you just buy what you want? Once you've finished looking for your product, does the store let you just buy it, or does it keep offering you alternatives--that is, trying to sell you something else? This a bad sign because it tells you that the store doesn't care about your time. Exception: "you might also like..." can be a reasonable thing for books, CDs, DVDs, and so on.
  • Ask a price comparable to market, or does it seem low? If the price is substantially lower than most other places, chances are there's a catch. Perhaps many customers return the product, and the store charges a fee for this. Perhaps the product is counterfeit, stolen, or imported to the USA without the manufacturer's permission and has no useful warranty ("gray market").
  • File your credit card numbers? This is a risk to you, and also a sign that the store is trying to promote impulse buying.
  • Link its return policies up front? Can you locate their return policies on their web site at all?
  • State shipping prices up front, or do you have to go all the way to the end of the purchase process before you find out what the prices of the shipping options are? Concealing the shipping price until late in the sale is an indication that part of the store's profit is made by padding the shipping price.
  • Does the store tell you where they will ship from, so you can estimate ground shipping times?
  • Does the store try to offer you an expensive loyalty plan as part of the deal?

Some general warnings; these apply everywhere, but are especially significant in online shopping.
  • Never buy unbranded high-power (Li-Ion or NiMH) batteries--poor quality control can make these explosive. There was a recent luggage fire that involved a laptop battery.
  • The lifetime of a battery is reliably predictable by the manufacturer; in batteries, cheap is expensive, a theme I will be croaking about in the future.
  • Most extended warranties are far more expensive than they are worth. Unless you can't sustain the financial risk of a failure, or need the higher level of service that some manufacturers offer to extended warranty customers, don't go there. (Consumer Reports on extended warranties.)
[Edited to correct minor copy errors and add Consumer Reports link. 2010.07.31 to get rid of some unnecessary words.]

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Richard M. Stallman and the Failure of the Free Software Foundation

(Note: since the writing of the following, the Free Software Foundation has tweeted: “The FSF board unanimously condemns misogyny, racism, and other bigotry as well as defamation, intimidation, and unfair attacks on free thought and speech.” They are rejecting the criticism of Stallman as unfair and, in so doing, they aligned themselves with neo-Nazis and white supremacists. They have put themselves beyond redemption and any fair hearing for their ideas. No-one wants to listen to the logic-chopping of rape apologists – it is as bad as listening to Southern racists excusing slavery.)   This is outside of my usual ambit, and it is about cooperative software development rather than market economics, but it seems to belong here more than anywhere. People who follow free and open source software by now know that alleged harasser and rape apologist Richard M. Stallman has, by a secret process, been restored to the board of directors of the Free Software Foundation. Stallman has lon
Read more

The General Intelligence of Robots

“Artificial intelligence” researchers mean by the phrase “general intelligence” two things. One is simply a machine learning system that can, like humans, use its knowledge for many different tasks. This is not something that has currently been built; language models produce language, stable diffusion models produce images, and neither seem to have any concepts of the underlying realities these words and images reflect. The second is the “general intelligence,” g , derived from intelligence tests, which is believed by some to be a unifying reality behind intelligence test scores. In a paper on GPT-4 from Microsoft a Wall Street Journal Editorial by Linda Gottfredson, Mainstream Science on Intelligence is cited as providing a definition of general intelligence. It’s an appalling piece, repeating debunked claims about racial differences in intelligence and claiming as scientific consensus hypotheses that are at best debatable and at worst outright false.
Read more

A Grand Unified Theory of Bad New Economy Firms

The wildly successful internet economy firms mostly operate by evading laws. New technology which has allowed firms to move their business to less-regulated jurisdictions and a generation of deregulation and favorable court decisions have allowed these firms to be bad places to work and bad places to do business with. Here’s a catalog of some of their abuses: Evasion of local laws through national operations . Amazon notoriously picks jurisdictions with lax labor laws for its warehouses. Uber simply ignores local laws until penalized. When penalized, they initiate political campaigns to get the laws overridden at the state level. Extortionate business practices . Doordash infamously underpays its workers. Grubhub notoriously overcharges restaurants . Uber has the resurrected long-illegal practice of raising taxi rates when demand is highest. Monopolistic practices . Enforcement in this
Read more