Everybody thinks Amazon.com, the on-line bookstore, is such hot stuff. In the past year alone, the value of Amazon stock soared from about 2 cents a share to $550.00, or something like that. Amazing.
The trouble is that Amazon has never actually made a profit. They lost about $45 million last year. Yet everybody thinks they are worth more than K-mart. Amazon was given a business load of $275 million dollars last year. Why? Does anybody seriously think an on-line bookstore operating out of a garage that hasn’t made any money yet is worth more than a well-known discount chain with hundreds of stores and offices and other assets? No. But everybody thinks everybody else does. So, you buy some Amazon stock and hype it up until everybody else starts buying it up. Then you sell it and get the heck out of there before it all crashes.
As a store, Amazon sucks.
I ordered a book, “Into the Wild”, by Jon Krakauer, in paper-back. How much is a paperback at a conventional book store? About $12-15 nowadays, I guess.
The Amazon.com price for this book was $10.36, U.S.. That seems like a pretty good deal. Let’s order some more:
Various Positions: A Life of Leonard Cohen, $18.20
Bill James Guide to Baseball Managers, $21.00
Wow! Three books for $49.56!
Actually, that’s pretty pricey. I think the government should subsidize books. Reading make you smart. The smarter we are, the more money we make. The more money we make, the more taxes we pay. The more taxes we pay, the more money the government has to build obsolete bombers and missile defense systems. Go for it.
Anyway, you hand over your VISA number and wait two weeks, and, voila: your book arrives by parcel post. Then you get your bill.
Whoa, Nellie!
The bill is for $59.00! How’d that happen? Oh yes— the ubiquitous “shipping and handling” charge.
Now, could someone explain something to me? You walk into K-mart. You see a book. The price of the book is $10.00. You go to the check-out. You hand over $10.00. You walk out with the book. Well, okay, first you pay $1.50 in taxes. Then you walk out with the book.
Didn’t they handle it? Didn’t they ship the book to the store? Didn’t they pay for electricity and water and heat? Didn’t they hire someone to clean the store? Of course they did. Those are all operating expenses. But they are included in the price of the book. They make sure that they sell enough books with a big enough profit margin so they can pay all their expenses.
Now, Amazon.com ships me my three books and then, surprise, hits me with a $9.85 “shipping and handling” charge. I can understand the shipping charge. That seems fair. But when I ship a package this size, I pay about $2.47, thanks to our volume deal with a well-known courier company. Amazon ships gazillions of books, so they must have an even better deal. So where does the rest of the $9.85 come from? Don’t tell me it cost $7.38 for someone to put the books into a box and slap a sticker on it? Of course it doesn’t.
It’s simply a way they have of picking your pocket on the way out of the store. Amazon has no more reason for charging for handling than K-mart does. The honest thing to do would be to include the “handling” charge in the list price, so you don’t get tricked into buying a book that actually cost more than they’re telling you. Then you can compare prices fairly, and disconnect yourself from their web page and head down to your local Chapters and buy the book in person and take it home with you right away.
Amazon.sucks.
Update 1999-06-25
Call me stupid: I went and ordered some more books from Amazon, “Digging up Sundance” by Anne Meadows, and “Etta Place: Her Life and Times with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”, by Gail Drago. Cost of the books: $15.96 + $10.36 = $26.32. Now get a load of the shipping and handling on THIS order: $18.90. That’s right– $9.45 per book. What the heck is going on here? This is double the amount I paid on my last order, even though both books were delivered in the same package. I shudder to think what the charges are going to be for a couple of CD’s I ordered but which haven’t been delivered yet. Boycott Amazon!!