I hope they battle it harder than they “battle” counterfeits in general. It seems like they generally like the money they make off of counterfeits and just pay lip service to preventing it so they don’t get yelled at too much for it
Yeah, they don't seem to battle it too hard when you can just search your local amazon for a relevant keyword, sort by price descending and find the offers. Amazon has every incentive not to battle this, the higher the price, the higher their percentage.
I like Amazon, but at some level I find it hard to believe that a company that can build a store that automatically tracks my purchases with ML and let’s me walk out without a checkout can’t figure out how to flag some of the blatantly fake stuff being sold on their site.
Sure given the scale there can always be a few bad apples but some of the stuff is clearly fake and stays up for ages.
That's because they really don't care, I doubt there's significant resources dedicated to that. Their store is full of counterfeit products and they don't even remove the most obvious ones.
In the Amazon Grocery Store in the Capitol Hill Neighborhood of Seattle it takes them over an hour to charge you and send you a receipt.
Doesn't seem like they perfected automated tracking yet. This screams manual human review of video footage -- seems like they are still collecting data for a future ML model.
I doubt it. They send a push notification to your Amazon Go app immediately upon exiting the store. They then later send an email receipt, as you said, about an hour later.
Because of the novelty of the store, and because it's on my way to work, I routinely go the store, and I've never noticed a discrepancy between the push notification and the emailed receipt.
I have no specific knowledge why the receipt email is delayed, but I suspect a more mundane reason, like they're batching payments, in case of multiple trips in-and-out.
Just to clarify again, this is at the Amazon Go Grocery store of which there is only one location in Seattle.
I don't use the Amazon Go app. I use the Go option within the regular Amazon app. I get no email and no status change within the app for over 1 hour.
Also, I'm really not that convinced that they have mastered picking up various fruit and vegetables and the bakery items I chose. Those things don't use RFID and from what I could tell their system must be vision-based online here.
Edit: My friend was with me and used the Amazon Go app and also didn't receive any message or receipt until an hour later. This has been a frequent occurrence at this store.
Oh thanks for the link. I was looking around to source food/cosmetics-grade carbopol 941, Caprylyl Glycol, AMP or high-purity TEA, and Isopropyl Myristate per a chemistry formulation forum. I was going to cost $500 or so to get started making even small quantities, and then everclear and distilled water for the balance.
Oh man... without very careful fractional distillation, random Home Depot paint thinner, fireplace fuel isn't a good idea at all. For use on hands, it must be food or cosmetics grade.
Maybe some aloe vera would be better than hand cream, which would leave less of an unpleasant, oily residue? Also, random hand cream would likely interact with the recipe because they usually include many components.
Please don't get too crazy if you're not a chemist.
If the stuff is clearly labelled ethanol, for cleaning/burning, made from biological sources, you can be pretty sure it's just simple continuous distilled sugar-based (likely via yeast) reasonably high-purity ethanol with mandated-by-law denaturation additives (over here in Germany that'd be ~1% methyl-ethyl-ketone and a hint of denatonium benzoate) to make it taste too bad for people to get drunk from it.
This is far from random paint thinner or random mineral-oil-based lighter fluid/accelerant.
For use on your hands the normal home and garden ethanol is sufficiently harmless, and will itself do more damage than any residues. After all, it's made for use in situations where most people don't wear gloves.
Sorry, wrong... you're making a big leap of assumption rather than understanding what grades mean. If it's not food / cosmetics grade, you have no idea what toxic impurities are left in it... that's why the fuel-kind is cheap and for burning, not placing on your hands. Unless you have a decent mass spectrometer, you can feel free to gamble with your and your own family's health and/or lives.
I might be have made wrong assumptions about consumer safety regulations where you are. I'm pretty sure you can't sell anything in Germany to consumers that's toxic on contact with hands if it's something people usually touch and you don't warn about it.
The reason the fuel-type is this cheap is that it's taxed much less than the drinking kind. For technical applications they have good reason to keep if clean, safe for traces of impurities. The stuff they use for non-medical hand sanitizer and such should come from the same factory. There isn't much you can do wrong when producing industrial quantities of generic technical ethanol.
Put some aloe vera in that cauldron, or your skin's oils will be stripped off like paint and then viruses, fungi and bacteria will move in to their new home.
When I found that the hand sanitizer was totally cleaned out this is what I did since isopropyl alcohol was still available and cheap. Maybe if things continue to get bad some of our E85 fuel production can be leave the gasoline off and offer pure ethanol for hand sanitizer, but we'll have to prevent people from drinking it.
Be careful with this. I checked the denatured alcohol available in the paint section of Home Depot and it said it may contain methanol. Everclear does seem like the next best thing after isopropyl, if it's available in your state.
Yes - most ethanol is denatured by adding a small quantity of methanol, which renders it undrinkable. They also sometimes add a bitter compound to discourage drinking or a colour to identify it as non-drinkable.
If you can get cheap high-proof food-grade ethanol that would be best, as methanol can be absorbed through the skin. You could also re-distill the ethanol (may not be legal in your jurisdiction), or find the MSDS to figure out the methanol range.
Just like how my employer sent an email saying "you are allowed to work from home" and then all the managers come and say "that doesn't apply to our team" :)
I had the impression that Amazon’s house brand was about getting more margin by cutting out some layers of middlemen, not actually starting their own factories.
"Incarcerated people tasked to make hand sanitizer to fight coronavirus are banned from using it themselves"
I mean, it's basically 120 proof ethyl alcohol. Of course they aren't allowed to have it. I'm very sympathetic to better prison conditions, but soap should be fine.
It's recovering. In my hometown (Shandong province), no more restrictions on manufacturing and transportation since yesterday, aside from body temp checkpoints.
It is basically contained in China outside Wuhan already. Wuhan will join in a few weeks.
> Amazon has not done anything to combat counterfeit items on their website before now, I don't expect much from them now.
I think they have, but their efforts are usually spastic and reactive, so they don't do much good.
I remember during the eclipse a few years ago, they told everyone who bought eclipse glasses from them not to use them and refunded their money. There were lots of articles showing most of the ones being sold on Amazon were inadequate or had fake certification markings. Unfortunately, Amazon only took action a few days before the eclipse, after millions were sold and it was almost impossible to find alternatives.
Well, they've removed millions of products. From the article:
"The company scans billions of price changes a week and has removed 530,000 offers and suspended 2,500 accounts because of coronavirus-related price gouging, he said. The company also removed millions of products that make unsupported claims about the coronavirus"
It'd be nice if everything were labeled honestly; but people get riled up around the wrong thing. High prices are necessary to get more production of these things quickly; and honestly the public buying counterfeit masks to leave real supplies for the hospitals is probably a win for us all.
Who trust Amazon and its marketplace on general goods nowaday?
About 95% of the people in the world who are not on HN.
Average Joe Lunchbucket assumes that the products he buys through Amazon are vetted by Amazon, like at his local store. He has no idea that the stuff he buys are from a thousand different randos.
Wal-Mart is notorious for their knowledge of the supply chain for their vendors, whether the vendor wanted to give up that information or not. On the other side of things, I've seen some pretty questionable items in dollar stores including food products that weren't labeled for the US market. The gas station near my house buys some of their products from Costco and breaks the packs into individual items, complete with "Not labeled for individual sale" warnings. Hopefully Costco is like Wal-Mart when it comes to supply chain knowledge.
Large brick and mortar stores get a bad knock because they provide cheap junk options. They also provide a lot of well researched reliable products for just a touch more. Say what you will about Walmart but they don't haphazardly choose what they throw in their stores--there's only so much physical space and they have to make chooses their local market will continue to return and buy more/other products.
Generally thats exactly what it means - the individual products don't have nutrition info or something else which would be required for them to be sold by themselves by law.
Depending on the size of the local store, it should be sourcing its goods through a reputable distributor or have its own supply chain that connects directly to manufacturers (eg. for Walmart and other large chain stores).
It's not impossible to get counterfeits, but it's a lot more reliable than marketplace sellers with no real brand to protect.
Amazon themselves as the seller can also no longer be trusted. They grey-market source some items and because they are so generous with returns, what you buy may not be what is in the box if it is inspected poorly (this has happened to me three times now).
Amazon Germany. Before the panic started, I was looking to buy sanitizers for the office. 4x500ml was €120 at Amazon from third party seller, with delivery time 2 to 3 weeks. The same seller, directly on their website, ... €50, delivered 3 days later. Amazing.
Good to see Amazon doing this but ultimately this should be a government driven initiative. E.g. Japan has put a fine and up to 1 year jail sentence for profiteering on masks and similar.
Since this was downvoted, I'm sure because it didn't add to the conversation, I'll add some more.
This has been happening for multiple years with Amazon seemingly doing little about it. I've faced it from both sides, selling and buying.
Selling: Counterfeiters were selling our item. We knew this because we were the manufacturer and only seller of the item. If we weren't selling it, it was counterfeit. In order to prove this, Amazon made us buy the counterfeit item from the other seller, and send in images to prove it. So when we did this, the counterfeit sellers caught on at some point and started simply shipping us random crap instead of the fake product. Then we had NO evidence they were selling a counterfeit item - we didn't have the photos to prove it.
Buying: Recently in the market for a bike air pump, I search Amazon and see no less than 50 listings, all having 4.5-5 star reviews, all the same bike pump, all off-brand sounding names, but all identical. It made it impossible to find what I need/want and also made it impossible to know whether or not these bike pumps were really worth anything at all. I didn't buy anything from Amazon, and that experience has made me question all my purchases from Amazon since. So, as mentioned above, I had meant to cancel my Prime membership - this post reminded me to do so.
Few days before the corona virus chaos started, we ordered a pack of PURELL hand sanitizers from Amazon. Then the chaos started and we wondered what will happen to our package. We tracked the package move around, then delays, then messages about possible delays, then it just never arrived.
I hit up Amazon.com and saw all these crazy markups on hand sanitizer. Eeek! But, I found 1 that was $10. Also from PURELL. Looked like the ones used at gyms. So I added it to my cart. Continued browsing and at checkout it got automatically removed. Subsequent searches revealed just the over priced hand sanitizers. Arrr!
I ordered a pack of the amazon bran hand sanitizer on Feb 26, and was wondering if this will happen. Luckily I didn't the order arrived 2 days later. During that week time amazon algo had already increased the price from $12 to $20 per pack and next week when I checked everything was sold out.
