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Comment by bluedevil2k | Hacker News Reader

100% this! The quality at Fanatics has fallen off a cliff the last few years to the point that I won’t ever order anything from there again. They have descriptions of some “performance t-shirt” material that turns out to the be low quality cotton that starts falling alert after a few washes. Advertisements of “Free Shipping” only for them to have $4 added to every order for “handling” (they’re synonymous in the US).

My tip to everyone is to order sports related clothing from Chinese sites like DHGate and AliExpress. The quality is better than Fanatics at 25% the price. “It’s counterfeit” — well sometimes a consumer has to fight back.

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> The quality at Fanatics has fallen off a cliff the last few years

And yet our courts are still under the sway of the Chicago school of thought that says monopolies are _good_ for consumers, because it drives prices down and normalizes a market.

Yet.. I've never seen that come to fruition, in any circumstance, ever.

Reminds me of the old Vistaprint model of “Free business cards, just pay shipping.”

It was so cheap to print the cards (and relatively cheap to ship slowly) that Vistaprint still made money on the “free” cards.

While I haven't found anything similar for professional sports, Homefield[1] is great for college gear. If your school isn't offered, they add new schools like every week. Less of a selection, I guess, but not only is the quality of Fanatics bad, their gear is also very cookie cutter. All of Homefield's apparel is unique to the school.

I feel like I have to go to the store for anything worthwhile in professional sports now, and even B&M will often just have a bunch of Fanatics junk.

[1] https://www.homefieldapparel.com/

Regardless of agreement, shipping and handling are not synonyms.

“Shipping and handling” is a ubiquitous term in U.S. online stores and I’d challenge you to find any site that separates them out like Fanatics does.

They are literally different things and always have been. Whether it’s common to bundle them isn’t really the point.

They're a doublet, like "cease and desist." Separating the two makes about as much sense as paying someone an extra fee to "handle" the goods from the warehouse to the supermarket shelf.

Hopefully if something is done about this, they'll make the policy Fanatics currently holds both null AND void

It’s 100% the point. It’s such a common and accepted thing here that most sites just have “S & H” during the check out process. To advertise free shipping in the US implies the S&H is free. To suddenly spring a “handling” fee at the last step is deceitful and no different than airlines or hotels advertising a price and then adding a “resort fee” on the last step. And if you think differently, then why do they hide the handling fee until the very last step?

Sure, I think at some historical point, and by dictionary definition, they are not.

In practical terms in north america, I've never seen them separate, and I buy online A LOT. So if they're not synonyms (and I agree with that pedantry:), they are functionally equivalent for most people's most practical purposes. They're just a phrase that goes together.

Ultimately, if a retailer advertises "FREE SHIPPING", and I find that I need to pay some additional fee beyond item's advertised price, to get the item to arrive to me, I will feel I've been deceived, whether they call that charge shipping, or handling, or gnorf.

Admittedly if they advertised "FREE GNORF" I'd at least be intrigued

They offer free fnords all the time but people never take them up on the offer for some reason.

They include them in the box; it's just no one ever sees them through all the packing material.

Regardless of semantics, a bait-and-switch is a bait-and-switch.

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