Comment by moolcool
2 years ago
Search Amazon for "Whetstone". You'll find tons of quality products from legitimate brands, mixed indiscriminately with the exact same dropshipped trash item repeated over and over for countless pages. Amazon has been entirely enshittified.
What are your standards for quality?
I’m an enthusiastic amateur home chef. I have ordered some of these “trash” whetstones.
My knives get sharp. They aren’t damaged. The whetstone works over time.
If you are like a knife artisan, yeah I guess Amazon won’t work for you. But I’m guessing the results work for 99.9% of people.
Is a generic AliExpress whetstone good enough for most home chefs? I don't know, probably. But if I'm going to spend $40, I would rather do it on a high quality Japanese unit than something I can get for $20 on AliExpress. On Amazon they're priced and presented as alike, and that's a problem.
Realistically, that $20 difference pays for the product being in a warehouse near you, rather than a warehouse 5000 miles away.
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I dunno how to square “tons of quality products from legitimate brands” with “entirely enshittified”…
Good quality stuff mixed with a lot of shit = shit
I could also make a more graphic analogy, but I don't think anybody needs to read that.
Having to care enough and educate yourself about how to tell the difference adds a lot of friction to the shopping experience. I have no qualms about buying from Amazon if I know exactly what I’m looking for and I’m shopping in a category where I’m at least pretty confident I’m not going to get counterfeit stuff (Apple accessories? Forget it).
But when I just need some basic household thing and don’t want to become an expert on the category, I often shop from other retailers where I can just be pretty sure they aren’t selling garbage.
Any porcelain measuring spoon someone like Crate and Barrel sells is probably a decent porcelain measuring spoon, but if I buy that on Amazon, I have to worry about which brands are legit so I don’t end up getting a spoon with porcelain-look paint that will flake off or something like that.
A marketplace where almost anybody can sell almost anything has a completely different level of trust than a store where professional buyer is making a conscious decision about what products they should carry - the presence of many low quality products dilutes the entire marketplace, even the quality products from legitimate brands
Google search results still have -some- useful links.
(I'm still having good results from amazon but I can understand 'entirely enshittified' as an opinion from people getting a similar thing there)