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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

If I were to decide that I wasn't going to use Amazon starting tomorrow, I'd be spending a whole lot more time checking a bunch of online stores, paying for shipping, driving around, etc. So, yes, they are for a lot of things. While I certainly ordered from them pre-pandemic, the pandemic has brought home to me how many things I can just order rather than put on a shopping list and drive around to stores to find and purchase.

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I've found Walmart.com to be about as good as Amazon for my online shopping (in the US). I particularly find Walmart to be a lot better for some dry goods like cereal and Clif bars. They can mix delivery from their warehouses and from local stores.

This is not me shilling Walmart. I've been pleasantly surprised by it in the last year, and find it to be a real competitor to shopping at Amazon.

If you don't care too much about the price, the time difference is low: you spend some time looking at an online retailer (maybe typing in your address), but you save the time you would waste searching Amazon for the correct listing amongst all the knockoffs, sent-from-Hong-Kong etc.

If you care a lot about the price, you already need to consider other shops, since Amazon isn't necessarily the cheapest anyway.

I have ordered one thing from Amazon in the past five years, where the manufacturer only sold to consumers through Amazon.

It is sad to read that people want a monopoly for a minor convenience.

Same with steam (that takes a big money cut and their buggy launcher is awful)

People don't "want a monopoly." But they do want to order things in a way that is by no means a "minor convenience." Just going back to when Amazon was getting started, finding a book that wasn't in stock at your local store was a massive hassle and could take months. Today, not spending an hour running errands is not really a minor convenience. Again, I'm good with there being more competition--and, in fact, I order things from multiple places--but Amazon is often the easiest choice.

> finding a book that wasn't in stock at your local store was a massive hassle and could take months.

Or you could just ask your local store to order it for you and you would have it in a week. It's not like this was an unusual situation.

There was a time when that was definitely not the norm. You looked a book up in a big Books in Print volume and an order could take quite a long time to come in. Yes, the situation improved over time with certain big city bookstores and then Barnes and Noble prior to Amazon. But I can certainly remember a time when getting things generally that weren't in local stock took considerable effort and time.

I would be fine ordering from a local store and waiting but not if they are going to charge me full price as if they had to keep stock on the shelves.

Back in the day (round these parts anyway) books were always full price [1].

Nowadays, I'm not going to pay full price to wait for a week either, but there are alternatives to Amazon.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Book_Agreement

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