XPost: rec.arts.sf.written
On Wed, 8 Jun 2022 16:56:23 -0600, Chrysi Cat <
Chrysicat@gmail.com>
wrote:
On 6/8/2022 11:21 AM, Paul S Person wrote:
On Tue, 7 Jun 2022 13:43:48 -0500, Lynn McGuire
<lynnmcguire5@gmail.com> wrote:
Arlo And Janis: Online Shopping Is Dicey
https://www.gocomics.com/arloandjanis/2022/06/07
So true, even with Amazon, I do not always get what I expected.
I've learned to be /very/ careful with my orders, but I still
occasionally get a "surprise". Like getting an R2 PAL DVD from Merry
Olde England when what I was sold was an NTSC BD.
I once purchased a Kindle book which turned out to be a different book
when I examined it. Now I use "Look Inside" to at least /try/ to
verify that what I am purchasing is, in fact, what it claims to be.
And then there are the areas awash in East Asian Technotrash. Whose
positive reviews are suspect because these companies offer positive
reviewers free merchandise (ie, bribes).
TBF, when the bribe is merchandise, if it were ENTIRELY bad, you'd be
worse off writing up the paid good review than not writing anything at all.
Because while you don't have the monetary cost of obtaining it, you're
still on the hook for disposing of it or having a broken item take up
space in your house.
That's how I always looked at it. The one item I tried that came with
such an offer was sent back and reviewed negatively based on its
performance, but the offer was /definitely/ a negative point.
The reviews were ... hard to decipher, since there were typically 5 to
10 vendors all of whose reviews were grouped together (thank you,
Amazon!). Early-on, there were venders who used one page to sell five
or six different items, with reviews on them all mixed together with
no Amazon-provided way to tell /which/ item the review was about.
But the negative reviews that went into detail were most intimidating.
The only explanation for East Asian Technotrash I can find is that
nobody in the country it comes from dares to complain, lest they find themselves being re-educated.
But perhaps gaining experience with foreign customers that /actually
expect their purchase to work/ will improve things for the domestic
customers as well.
--
"I begin to envy Petronius."
"I have envied him long since."
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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