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Amazon brand guitar strings? Whats next, AMZ DAW?


Clovis Ramsay

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6 hours ago, Shane_B. said:

Yepper. You can get a lot of weird stuff from walmart.

There's a German (I think) supermarket over here that sells a lot of stuff you wouldn't expect to find alongside tins of beans and such. In the center aisle you'll find stuff like unknown brand lawnmowers, patio furniture and tools...

I've always thought their motto should be......  " LIDL -  cheap food round the outside, cheap crap in the middle"

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16 hours ago, paulo said:

I met a guy years ago sitting on a bench looking over the sea. He was quite old and at first glance very smartly dressed (shirt/tie/jacket etc...) but with a closer look the clothes were very well worn and slightly grubby.

Let me guess ... he was sitting there eyeing little girls with bad intent? Kinda feeling like a dead duck? His greasy fingers were smearing his shabby clothes?

😁

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OK, I want to say up front that I have an Amazon account and routinely buy stuff through them. And as was said before, nearly everything I buy through them is because I can't buy it locally. Plus I am not a big fan of Jeff Bezos personally.

However... here is the thing I don't get about the Amazon hate. All Jeff Bezos did was take the Sears-Roebuck catalog and put it on a computer. I mean really, that's all he did. Before the computer it was called "Mail Order" - now its called "On Line Shopping". Its still the same. You find what you want based on a picture and a description, send in your order, and wait for the package to be delivered to your house. Through Sears you could order cars (http://searsmotorbuggy.com/Sears_history.php), a house (https://unbelievable-facts.com/2019/09/sears-homes.html), a barn (https://www.farmprogress.com/farm-life/mail-order-barns-popular-early-20th-century) and the live stock (https://blogs.ancestry.com/cm/the-11-most-memorable-items-from-the-sears-catalog/). You could order anything through the Sears store.

Their only real competition was Montgomery Wards, but they were never a match for Sears. The thing is due to their catalog sales Sears and Wards had the infrastructure in place to take advantage of this new thing called the Internet, but they mad a conscious decision not to spend the money. By the time the tried to get into the game, it was too late. If they would have had the insight to invest in on-line shopping in the early days, I would venture to say that not only would they still be in business, but we would have never heard of Jeff Bezos and Amazon would only be the name of a river.

In the end, Jeff really hasn't done anything that hadn't been done before. He just did it better than they did it before.

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On 5/25/2021 at 6:29 PM, Clovis Ramsay said:

Amazon getting in on this market is a terrible thing, as for one, it forces the reputable string makers and startups to gradually start cutting corners to maintain profit margins once Amazon increasingly eats away at the market share.

At $6 a set, they're not going to be eating much market share any time soon. I can get Ernie Ball, Dunlop, or D'Addario sets for less than that from Amazon's own site. GHS are .07 more, and Fender are $4.

If I really want store brand strings, Musician's Friend's Musicians Gear electric sets are $2.60, and free shipping without having to pay $14 a month for it. Musician's Friend have been selling those strings for decades and I don't think they've put any reputable string makers out of business. To the contrary, in that time period, Dunlop started making strings at their factory in Benicia, just North of me. Good product, too.

I don't think that store brands have a negative effect on name brand products, especially commodity things like strings. I like my GHS and D'Addario, and I'll pay a buck a pack more for them if I have to, which I don't. If anything, I suspect that they cause the name brands to step up their game and make sure that their product is competitive.

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26 minutes ago, Mandolin Picker said:

In the end, Jeff really hasn't done anything that hadn't been done before. He just did it better than they did it before.

There's an awful lot more to Amazon than shopping.

Make sure that you don't talk about it in front of Alexa though. ;)

 

 

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1 hour ago, Mandolin Picker said:

OK, I want to say up front that I have an Amazon account and routinely buy stuff through them. And as was said before, nearly everything I buy through them is because I can't buy it locally. Plus I am not a big fan of Jeff Bezos personally.

However... here is the thing I don't get about the Amazon hate. All Jeff Bezos did was take the Sears-Roebuck catalog and put it on a computer. I mean really, that's all he did. Before the computer it was called "Mail Order" - now its called "On Line Shopping". Its still the same. You find what you want based on a picture and a description, send in your order, and wait for the package to be delivered to your house. Through Sears you could order cars (http://searsmotorbuggy.com/Sears_history.php), a house (https://unbelievable-facts.com/2019/09/sears-homes.html), a barn (https://www.farmprogress.com/farm-life/mail-order-barns-popular-early-20th-century) and the live stock (https://blogs.ancestry.com/cm/the-11-most-memorable-items-from-the-sears-catalog/). You could order anything through the Sears store.

Their only real competition was Montgomery Wards, but they were never a match for Sears. The thing is due to their catalog sales Sears and Wards had the infrastructure in place to take advantage of this new thing called the Internet, but they mad a conscious decision not to spend the money. By the time the tried to get into the game, it was too late. If they would have had the insight to invest in on-line shopping in the early days, I would venture to say that not only would they still be in business, but we would have never heard of Jeff Bezos and Amazon would only be the name of a river.

In the end, Jeff really hasn't done anything that hadn't been done before. He just did it better than they did it before.

Sears didn't trick you into buying a hockey puck for your living room that listens to all your conversations.

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I will say Sears trimmed down the catalog business when they went into the super malls because you know everyone is going to want to shop there and at first the public did. My father worked for a photo studio that did a great deal of the photo shoots for the Sears, JCP catalogs plus others. Sears signed a big contract with them and the photo studio went and expanded. Sears the very next year basically ripped up the contract when they decided to trim the catalog business. The Photo studio and others that my dad knew closed down.  So absolutely if Sears would of made the huge investment they would be sitting pretty now instead of basically a shell of a company.  I don't mind Amazon it is the small mom and pop folks that are scrapping by.  Another example, I was in local music store that sells band instruments and lady comes in with a cheap trumpet from Amazon that needs repair. Lady was mad at shop owner because the repair will most likely cost more then the trumpet she brought on Amazon. When she left the owner was like if she brought the trumpet from me for $150 more the repair would not of been necessary most likley and if it does need repair it would most likely of been a minor cost one. The metal used is so low grade in the cheap instruments that he said they are so time consuming to do repairs. 

 

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8 minutes ago, emeraldsoul said:

In the same future where Amazon stands alone as the only retail source for guitar strings, nobody will be playing actual guitar anymore.

Wait folks are actually playing actual guitars still ;)

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52 minutes ago, emeraldsoul said:

Sears didn't trick you into buying a hockey puck for your living room that listens to all your conversations.

Nobody tricked anybody. If you put a hockey puck in your house, you know what it is doing. You made a choice to buy it and hook it up - for "convenience". Same with hooking your TV to the internet - as for me I prefer "dumb" TVs.  

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So when are the Amazon Keyboard Controllers that use Alexa coming out.  I could really use one of those. 
Alexa start timer for dinner as I'm to lazy to get up off my A** and start one myself.  Besides I'm jamming at the keyboard  right now.

Also Alexa make a riff in the key of Am (of course)  8 bars long for me.  I'm to tired to play right now.

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4 hours ago, paulo said:

There's an awful lot more to Amazon than shopping.

No kidding!  Most people don't know that their biggest customer is the Defense Department.

(Especially since this fact is mostly hidden.)

Edited by craigb
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