Does anyone have any good alternatives to Walmart, Amazon, or Target? I’m looking for a general store that sells household products and preferably isn’t owned by a billionaire or a company that adds to our surveillance state… So does anyone have any online, or physical, alternatives?
Local is 100% on you unless you want to divulge information, which I would advise against.
Online, just find what you want on Amazon/Walmart, and search for that item in a general search. You can often find way better deals elsewhere, at least if you can manage free shipping.
Anything globally relevant is going to be another Amazon/Walmart wannabe, so asking in the general sense is a bit silly.
Polite reminder that Prime is not free shipping — it’s prepaid shipping.
I didn’t think about using amazon to search for an item to buy on another site, that could work well! Like the other user said, Costco might be my best bet as far as chains go, and for any other physical stores I’ll just have to try harder to find local ones.
Oh yea. Amazon is basically the average price these days. The trick is finding the places with free shipping for orders that aren’t already crazy expensive. Which … might be a lot harder these days with the price of diesel vs when I was shopping a lot.
Yeah, plus Amazon uses dark patterns to get you to sign up for prime, and then prime isn’t even fast shipping anymore…it bothers me enough I can stand to pay a little more somewhere else.
If you search on Amazon, and then buy elsewhere, Amazon still makes money because of that search…
I assume they get paid for serving me ads, and is that the case even when I don’t click on any ads?
While true, Amazon makes most of their money these days from AWS.
lol no. That is absolutely not how click through contracts work.
Ughughu: Sponsored listings (marked “Sponsored”). These are pay-per-click ads — the seller pays Amazon roughly $0.75–$1.50 per click, whether or not you buy anything. So every click on a sponsored product puts money in Amazon’s pocket directly from the seller’s ad budget. This is a big business: Amazon’s advertising segment generates tens of billions of dollars a year, precisely because sellers pay for clicks even when shoppers don’t convert.