Enshittification Finally Caught Me

I'd heard others complain about the the current parlous state of Amazon search results before, but had yet to really experience them for myself.

I mean, if I'm going to go get some Pom pepper spray from the Pom store or a box of Surefire CR123 batteries from the Surefire store or a Terry Pratchett book from Kindle, there's not a lot of searching involved. I know what I'm looking for and going right to the thing, like way back in the day when I won a bet with a friend by going into a Gap store and finding the shelf my jeans were on with my eyes closed.

And when I'm buying groceries direct from Amazon Fresh, they're unlikely to try to steer me to a third party vendor selling DIET MOUNTIAN DAW.

But generalized search is a hot mess, apparently. Per Cory Doctorow:

"Searching Amazon doesn't produce a list of the products that most closely match your search, it brings up a list of products whose sellers have paid the most to be at the top of that search. Those fees are built into the cost you pay for the product, and Amazon's "Most Favored Nation" requirement sellers means that they can't sell more cheaply elsewhere, so Amazon has driven prices at every retailer.

Search Amazon for "cat beds" and the entire first screen is ads, including ads for products Amazon cloned from its own sellers, putting them out of business (third parties have to pay 45% in junk fees to Amazon, but Amazon doesn't charge itself these fees). All told, the first five screens of results for "cat bed" are 50% ads."

The other day I realized I needed a fresh batch of winter socks and so, not wanting to drive over to Meijer, plugged "wool socks" into Amazon's search dingus.

Now, I'm no connoisseur of insulated hosiery, but I'm pretty sure that I'd never heard of XoxOY or Insoool or these other companies offering me $3.99 six-packs of wool socks with thousands of positive ratings written in some dialect of ESL whose origin was hard to pin down.

Fortunately I recollected that Browning licensed their name to a line of outdoor clothing and I'd had their wool socks before, so I plugged "Browning wool socks" in and found some that looked like the ones I'd had and were sold by and shipped from Amazon proper.

Then this morning I noticed it was supposed to piss-pour rain all day and frankly my sole remaining umbrella is on its last legs. So, hey-ho, off to BezosMart!

Friends, if I'm uninformed on socks, I'm positively ignorant on umbrellas. My umbrella-buying experience has generally been limited to grabbing a Totes off the rack at the drug store or Target and tossing it in with the soda and chips in my basket.

I'm sure there is an umbrella equivalent to a Glock: durable, workmanlike, reasonably-priced. Likewise there's probably a Rolls Royce of umbrellas, made by English brolly craftsmen to exacting standards of workmanship and constructed of the best materials well enough that your grandkids will be able to use it to stay dry at their parents' funerals.

I have no idea what those umbrella brands are, though, but I'm pretty sure that they're not being sold in three-packs for $7.99 by WOW-DRY. I'd be afraid to open one of those umbrellas for fear of finding a note written in Malay saying "Help, I'm being held prisoner in a Sihanoukville umbrella factory!"

In the end I bought one that seemed not too terribly scammy or gimmicky and was priced reasonably commensurately with its purported features.

We'll see how it goes.

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