Customers Sound Off on the Scam That Is Amazon Prime Day(s)
old.reddit.comPrime day is the same as Black Friday, aka “clear out the warehouse”. There haven’t been good deals in a long time but with CamelCamelCamel or the plug-in I use, that’s escaping me right now, I’m sure I’d be tempted.
I’m in the market for large hard drives (20TB) and so I figured I’d go look. Not only was the price I got last week better ($1,200 for 4x20TB with $60 off coupon, today the best price is $350/ea or $1,400) but Amazon’s search/filter tools (which have always been bad) are an absolutely joke. My options are a bunch of tiny GB ranges, 1TB, 1.5TB, 2TB, 3TB, and 4TB & Above.
“4TB & Above” is just silly in the age of 20TB+ drives. And it’s not like drives shot up in size overnight, I’ve been buying 16TB drives for the past few years, they’ve had plenty of time to adjust.
Prime day is actually a copycat of Alibaba’s Singles Day that happens on November 11th.
Also, Amazon doesn’t “clear” out their warehouses. They charge sellers to story inventory in their warehouses. The longer items sit unsold, the more amazon makes off of the seller in FBA fees.
> The longer items sit unsold, the more amazon makes off of the seller in FBA fees.
Really depends on the volume of the item and the selling price. I'm sure Amazon would prefer shipping the item and collecting the 15-20% closing fee in most cases. The alternative is building more warehouse, so the decision comes would they rather continue expanding existing fulfillment centers or build new ones in strategic locations.
Amazon doesn't build warehouses either. They lease them from Prologis and others as they grow capacity.
Same logic applies because leasing > $0
> Also, Amazon doesn’t “clear” out their warehouses. They charge sellers to story inventory in their warehouses. The longer items sit unsold, the more amazon makes off of the seller in FBA fees.
Yes but 2 things can be true at the same time. Amazon can make money of stuff sitting in the warehouse and they/their clients can want to sell stuff so that they can make room for more stuff or just clear old inventory off the books. I'm not sure how you get "included" in Prime Day but I assume sellers do something to opt-in.
> they are saying things like %67 off 1tb micro SD cards for $97, which is their normal price.
is this kind of trick legal in the u.s?
* here is a good link in english
https://www.cliffordchance.com/content/dam/cliffordchance/br...
Yesterday I read about a M1 macbook air for a really good price,* prime only. Went to amazon, bought it, will deliver Sunday..oops it was the work account which does not subscribe to prime!
It arrived today and I got the magic prime price.
I don't know what the hell they are doing -- do they?
* camelcamelcamel will give you price history
keepa.com is also pretty good
There’s millions of Amazon sellers so you’ll always stumble upon “scams” such as that.
Just use camel camel camel and know what you’re buying.
Personally, I save tons of money on Prime day.
It's a huge reach to say it's not scammy because you use an external tool most people don't even know about or would be able to use effectively in order to help filter through the scams.
> most people don't even know about
Agreed
> would be able to use effectively in order to help filter through the scams
I think most people can figure it out. I’ve sent it to a lot of people and if people can figure Amazon outcome they seem to be able to figure out CamelCamelCamel.
I love cruising for bargains but I've never seen a Prime Day deal I liked. I'm just hoping that fancy set of speakers I spotted at the reuse center downtown is still there because that is a bargain.
There are certainly deals to be found. A list of things that I have found Prime deals on in years past:
1. Security cameras 2. Hard drives 3. Tools 4. Gift cards 5. Scanners
On average I have gotten 10-20% off for these items. Of those, the security cameras were discounted the most.
The same deals also generally happen on Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend.
This year I’m just picking up typical household items. Some seem to be discounted a dollar or two.
Despite the notorious “they fell off the back of a truck” speaker scam, there are legitimately amazing deals to be had by hunting around. Getting a pair of 3-way box speakers for $20-40 on used local marketplaces is common. With another $40 used amplifier you have a sound system on par with modern sound bars costing hundreds of dollars more, plus getting the rest of the features on the amplifier.
If you decide to go this route just make sure you can give them a test listen or know what to look for as far as degraded speaker cones.
Speakers deprecate a lot faster financially than functionally (and are subject to a lot of interesting dynamics such as 'wife acceptance factor' and other fashion like the current trend for small soundbars)
Your $40 used amplifier probably won't support Dolby Atmos and other movie formats so it's not really functionally equivalent to modern models.
Myself I collect home theatre receivers. So far I have two Denons I bought new, the video stage burned out on my 7.1 receiver during the supply chain crisis so I got an inferior 5.1 that is de contented and doesn’t even support HEOS (Denon/Maranz’s whole-home steaming solution.).
The speakers in question are real used Pioneers that are a lot more than 3 way, not a scam at all.
I have seen numerous receivers go by at the reuse center, I shoulda bought a Yamaha I saw that was a little ugly but quality. My son has a NTSC-based retro gaming rig with a CRT, I wanted to find him a matching (pre HDMI) home theatre but he was in a hurry so I found him a nice NAD 2 channel receiver from the 1980s.
Now I really do crave a modern home theatre with an insane number of channels, say 11.1 and I don’t expect to find that at reuse, but I have so many other things that support my art projects to get like a PCVR headset, a monitor as close to Rec 2020 as I can afford, a light field camera, etc.
Can’t say I am too excited about Atmos, the “bounce off the ceiling” trick won’t work in my main A/V room, object-based surround doesn’t make a lot of sense for music because it is not about the “flying horns” but about feeding ambience into the other channels, that really does “put you into the world’s greatest concert halls” and I have many 5.1 DTS music CDs of everything from Kraftwerk to Super Furry Animals to Yes and traditional Chinese music to prove it. Similarly most movies still have great DTS sound tracks.
Yeah, the industry is pushing new standards just a bit beyond what makes sense in a normal living room. On the positive side, you can buy good high-end stuff from a few years ago for less ;)
I hear a bit too often about burned out HDMI boards on Denon receivers. Hope my X3000 will last a few more years.
Yeah, I should go research it and see if I can just replace the HDMI board on my 7.1 because it is a sweet machine.
My take is that the more expensive your hardware is the faster HDMI ports burn out. I've had some cheap TVs gifted to me (one reason I haven't upgraded) that had 2 HDMI ports and never had trouble w/ the ports (1) had excellent value engineering and built in speakers better than many soundbars and eventually had the backlight, (2) is a Samsung that just sucks.
I think a high end Sony TV has 8 HDMI ports though you can have 7 ports burn out and still watch TV. My guess is that ports can have various levels of isolation to noxious electrical influences, USB ports are notoriously strong but I think many HDMI ports are under-engineered.
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The other trouble w/ Atmos is it makes no sense at all with smart speakers, headphones, etc. I have screwed around with HRTF tech and for me it works poorly. My Hololens 1 can localize sounds in the space around me very clearly but the fact that it creates matching visual cues must help. I've tried headphone surround in gaming and find it is an absolute joke: I can learn that "the sound must be above me because it sounds like I have a head cold" but it is not realistic at in most cases.
I just can't believe an Atmos mix rendered to headphones is going to approach the quality of a good stereo mix.