September 23, 2008

  • Remember when Amazon was just books? And discounted books, at that?

    I even remember when one would get freebies in with one's order.  Cheap plastic coffee mug, that sort of thing, as a thank-you-for-ordering gift.  This was ten to twelve years ago, mind.  It's been awhile.

    And that was when they were selling books at a significant discount!  No freebies these days, boy.

    Now it's not only selling books, but toys, groceries, jewelry, music, and the latest....videos on demand.

    I keep reading about how Google is taking over the world.....Google nothing, it's Amazon that is going to become the sole provider of America's goods before too long.

Comments (4)

  • I'm hooked on Amazon!! Why pay full price, sales tax and have to go to a store, find item, and get it home when Amazon with one click will charge it to your account, ship it free lots of times and it will show up in 2-3 days. Of course, sometimes things go awry but then free shipping home fixes it. then there's the time i bought something, it wasn't what I wanted and I had to pay shipping fees (big ones) to return it. If you shop carefully, it works well.

  • Oh, I shop at Amazon, too, but it's amazing how it's changed over the past decade.

    Dollars to donuts there'll be Amazon Autos before long.

  • It's funny, but while I'm aware of Amazon's wide offerings, in another sense I'm barely aware of it. That is, it almost never occurs to me to shop there for anything other than media -- books, videos, software, or CD's. And, it almost never occurs to me to look somewhere else first for any of those things.

    I have bought electronics there, and checked out other things, but usually Amazon doesn't come to mind until I've price-shopped several other sites, and then think, "Oh, yeah, I should check Amazon, too."

    I don't have anything to back this up, but I think I'm fairly typical. For whatever reason, Amazon will make caboodles of money off it's non-media lines, but at the same time most people will still thinks "books" first and foremost for some time to come, unless Amazon engages in some deliberate marketing to change that image. Somehow I don't think they want to, because it's very much to their benefit for them to be strongly identified with the media market. Increasing awareness of them as a general retailer runs the risk of confusing their identity in people's minds, and ceasing to be the automatic go-to for media, which for a lot of people, they are.

  • The thing about Google is that they give everything out (ostensibly) free. So Amazon might wind up being the place where we buy everything, but Google will be where we DO everything. If Google and Amazon between them really took over our lives, it would be a funny symbiotic relationship -- creating Google docs to track the Amazon purchases that we are notified of by Gmail, (after researching the stuff through Google search) all of which is supported by advertising by Amazon on Google sites. :tongue:

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