Have you noticed what has happened to online shopping lately?

[rebeccmeister]

Order something from teh FleaBay, it arrives from teh Amazonia.

Order something from the Mall-Wart, it arrives from teh Amazonia.

Look for something on the Froogle, it is suggested from teh Amazonia.

I believe I also recently ordered something from Red Bullseye, and it also showed up from teh Amazonia.

We have also been observing recently that the Despot likes to advertise a lot of products online that you will never actually physically find inside of a warehouse where you might be able to pick it up and hold it in your hot, little hands.

I also suspect there's a growing number of internet shopping fulfillment services who have business addresses that correspond to a very random person's house. If you poke around on the website of one of these establishments, you'll quickly find that they sell very strange combinations of products that fit together very loosely in a theme (e.g. gardening), but that the entirety doesn't hang together. There might be hand trowels but no plant pots or seeds, for instance.

Point being, it's feeling like it's getting harder and harder to locate actual stores selling products, if and when one shops online. A consequence is the continued deterioration of product quality; the information value of product reviews is very limited.

But I also don't know where else to go when I want to buy a glass triangular prism to show students the rainbow hidden in white light.

Do you remember the Oriental Trading Company catalogs?

Comments

[rainswolf]

At work we still sometimes get things from the Oriental Trading co website...

What frustrates me is when it says it ships from the US and then 5 weeks later you get something that was clearly from China or some country you've never even heard of before.

[bluepapercup]

Yeah, this is a massive problem for the large retailers, who seem to have all gone to this model. It's cut way down on what I can buy online without doing a bunch of research.

Incidentally, for the prism, Fisher has one...https://www.fishersci.com/shop/products/gsc-right-angle-glass-prism/S13668#?keyword=

[threemeninaboat]

Hard same :(

[twoeleven]

Have you tried online speciality retailers? At least the ones I order from ship their own stuff, and it's good quality, not Chinese junk.

[rebeccmeister]

This depends so much on the category of Stuff, though, right? I think that's the challenge. I ordered a desk chair not too long ago, and a cake pan, etc etc.

A friend DID point out that one can narrow one's search parameters on the FleaBay specifically, such that you look only for sales in the USA of used items.

[jameswatriss]

It’s also possible to adjust some of your approach on fleabay. There are plenty of vendors selling vintage sci/ engineering/ old technology and so forth. Some of them will add a zero to the price tag for ‘vintage.’ But some of them have good, used stuff, for a reasonable price.

And the used stuff is just… better. Some of it is astoundingly cool stuff that was probably something a department or individual was proud of, has a wooden box or fancy enclosure or stand… And then there are the rabbit hole searches when you find some of the other stuff that seller has on hand.

Set filter for location, and just enter ‘used prism physics’ There’s some unrelated stuff, but when I checked just now there was one of these up for auction:

https://lsa.umich.edu/earth/about-us/department-history/michiganearth-artifacts/perkinelmer-sodium-chloride-prism.html

It was way more than a regular demonstration grade piece of glass, but it has a gee-whiz factor, too.

[(Anonymous)]

More:

https://utsic.utoronto.ca/spectroscopy-beyond-the-visible-spectrum-the-sodium-chloride-prism/

[twoeleven]

Do you remember the Oriental Trading Company catalogs?
Fondly. All sorts of random inexpensive toys to get from them, for a variety of silly purposes.