I by things from amazon that I can’t find easily locally. And books. Lot’s and lots of Kindle books.
But soap? Gum??? I don’t get that. Unless you’re housebound, it seems awful wasteful. Just the packaging alone.
Never underestimate the laziness of most people.
There are a few household products that I regularly buy from Amazon, because they’re hard to find elsewhere. If they ever have a button for one of them, I could see going for it (although how hard is it really to click on the Amazon button in my Favorites bar, go to my order status, and click reorder?) The problem is that the more obscure stuff isn’t going to have a button, and for the stuff that’s available everywhere, I’d rather comparison shop or maybe pick it up in store.
Which is exactly why they’re doing this, and why they’re doing it with common easy to find products. They want to make it so [del]convenient[/del] impulsive that you forgo wise shopping in favor of spur of the moment laziness.
Or maybe they like to buy things in bulk and don’t have a car.
I can see the appeal, partly because you can order it right when you realize that you’re running low, rather than waiting until you go to the store, then forget to buy what you needed in the first place. Lord knows I’ve forgotten to buy essentials on many trips to the store, it’s amazing what can be used as shampoo when you repeatedly forget to buy more. It’s irritating that you have to pay $5 for the button, it should be free and I wish they’d do something about their packaging so it wasn’t so wasteful.
We have Amazon Prime and will periodically order a box full of essentials like laundry soap, paper towels etc. Basically you fill up a box with stuff and it’s not outrageously over packed in plastic and Styrofoam, buying those items one at a time does seem pretty wasteful though.
You can do that without a button.
Their new thing, Amazon Dash, might work for this. It’s a voice-enabled bar code scanner, so you can tell it what you want to buy or scan the bar code from something in your cabinet. Still think it’s ridiculous, but it’s not a single-product button.
I suppose it would be useful for a small business that was ordering the same supplies on a regular basis. But I can’t see how I’d have much use for it personally.
I also wouldn’t pay five dollars for it. But I might reconsider if the five dollars was refunded with the first order.
According to the link, they are currently offering this exact deal.
What I’m seeing is a lot of products that are just incredibly inefficient to ship by mail or UPS. Laundry detergent? Bottled water? Pet food? These are all bulk goods that should be shipped to supermarkets in pallets on huge trucks and picked up as part of regular shopping trips. I can’t even imagine how it’s cost effective to ship them individually unless you’re jacking the prices up to unreasonable levels.
So maybe if I lived in some remote mountain fastness or in forest far from any kind of actual store, I might consider this. But as someone who actually lives in, or at least close to civilization, I don’t see the need, and it strikes me as horribly wasteful and indulgent.
There’s also the problem that generally you don’t notice you’re running out of stuff until you need it now. Use the last capful of Tide? Well, too bad, because you’ve still got two loads of wash to do, and company’s coming.
There are at least four things I order on Amazon that should be available at grocery stores everywhere, but aren’t.
If you were coming home at 7pm from work and still had to make dinner, lived in a city where a trip to the store to get detergent meant finding street parking and fighting crowds, you might understand the appeal of coming home to find a box of items like laundry detergent waiting for you on the front porch.
Yes, but you don’t need a dedicated button for that.
Until you can just program the button to a specific product you want, I don’t see the point.
Agreed. I was responding to people wondering why you would want these kinds of things delivered at all. My most valuable resource is my time, and the less of it I spend standing in line at a Safeway, the better.
Seriously, it’s not like you could just push a button and have more batteries show up.