Good points!dr bob wrote: Fri Mar 08, 2024 6:57 pm ** caution - sarcastic non-technical socio-economic commentary included. Proceed at your own risk! **
Makes you wonder some on big-picture trade issues. On an immediate level, you have to wonder how these are manufactured, shipped to port in China, containerized there, floated to the U.S., unloaded by union longshoremen, transported in the container to a sorting and distribution center, shipped to Amazon distribution, inventoried and catalogued, pulled, packed, shipped, and delivered to my front door... for under $10. And every hand that touched it along the way made money doing it. Makes it tough to compete.
Some factors contributing to the almost ridiculously cheap prices are known, but they still seem insufficient to cover such cheap selling prices of many items.
Contributors: stolen engineering and design, cheap labor (forced labor?), cheap materials (sourced from from more cheap labor), automation (materials procurement, manufacturing, container loading/unloading), container ships piled sky high below and on deck (if a few fall off on the voyage, no big deal), more automation on the wholesale/retail side (Amazon), AI running the retail process from wholesale purchasing to warehouse allocations to customer ordering to pulling and packaging orders to delivery scheduling and, lastly, the delivery itself. The last one (delivery) is the one that stumps me the most on the very cheap items, especially on a $5 item. I guess they make it up on the more costly things purchased. And, of course there is the rising Amazon Prime fee now up to $139 + taxes.
But I sill like Amazon - great service and, if you're careful, good products and decent pricing. More importantly - everything known and unknown seems to be available there!
