It might be Monday morning, or smack in the middle of a productive work day. All of a sudden you remember this weekend you plan to have a barbecue, and you need a few items. It doesn't seem like much, maybe a few meats and snacks, barbecue tongs, a grill brush, some plastic knives and forks…..that should be all, right?
The thought of driving to Costco and loading up a cart seems rather unappealing. And what are you plugging away at your job for anyway, if you can't pay someone to shop for you? Time IS money after all.
So you open Instacart, start picking out meats and sides, and your typical items. Then a few sale items pop up, with big red $2/off tags, and pretty soon your cart is filled with extra sauces and aspirational cooking ingredients like tahini sauce or tamarind paste. You know, the fancy ingredients you've seen on Top Chef and would like to use someday. It's fine — you can find space in the far reaches of your cabinets or the refrigerator.
All of a sudden you remember that your toothbrush looked a bit funky this morning and well, and since you're online anyway, you might as well order one. Amazon Prime offers “free shipping” with membership so you pop on over to see all the options. (P.S. you pay for shipping in the cost of the product, unless businesses are just losing money for fun)
The internet sure has a way of unearthing new products, like charcoal and bamboo toothbrushes, all purporting to be antimicrobial and anti-cavity for your teeth. Not that your dentist has ever offered you one, but the internet probably knows better.
While you're at it, you find new toothbrushes for the kids too, because goodness they brush hard and the bristles splay within 2 weeks. These Nimbus kids bristles seem like a winner, and how often do you see nearly 90% 5 star reviews? Gotta be a home run, and if your kids don't like them, your shipment was probably a dud.
Just before checking out, another similar version of the toothbrush catches your eye. Oh but these are “Amazon's Choice” AND a dollar cheaper. Let's go down the rabbit hole of reading reviews again.
2 hours later you look up bleary-eyed. It's time to go get lunch.
The congratulations email that you've finally completed an online order makes it all worthwhile.
“Normal” Shopping
Let's compare this to the typical offline shopping experience. Get in the car, drive ideally less than 15 minutes, park, and walk into a store. Maybe you'll need to goto a second store, if you're looking for something very specific, but let's hope this supercenter has you covered.
Browse the aisles, check off the list, maybe pickup a few sale items. After living in crowded cities for awhile, suburban product selection within stores seems massive. Narrow down your choice by price, brand, or extra feature (for groceries – low sodium, low sugar, low fat, you name it). But at least there are physical products to compare, and usually a quick visual scan beats reading 10 reviews on pros and cons.
Call me old school, but if I need to shop and compare a bit, the offline experience still gives me the most comfort. Online shoppers would argue that getting deliveries at home and returning extraneous items is just as good.
Except that once you are physically holding an item, it becomes that much easier just to keep it. We naturally have what psychologists call “loss aversion”, which means the tendency to avoid losses rather than reap gains. Once we have an item, it becomes an item that's temporarily ours and now it takes extra work to get rid of it.
Not quite comparable to deciding whether to buy the item in the first place.
Take an inventory of all the items you meant to return but didn't get around to it, and that's the difference.
Looking For A Cure
Online shopping has only added to the explosion of affiliate marketing sites that attempt to comb through shopping options and offer suggestions. If you've come across a site where the titles sound exclusively like this : “16 Best Electric Unicycles” or “10 Best Bedwetting Alarm Devices”, proceed with caution. Particularly suspicious is when completely unrelated products like the above or found on one site with no apparent theme or coherence.
Sometimes they're at the top of Google search results because they know how to play the game. Even though they pretend to be an authority, I've seen enough mom blogger sites run by a single male in a 3rd world country to be skeptical. If you comb through website brokers you'll see what I'm talking about. I've even run into mom blog where the author claimed to be a NY Times Bestselling Author, but couldn't spell “Bestselling Author”. Not the accidental typo kind of misspelling but grossly inaccurate spelling.
These sites make money by collecting a commission on purchases made after clicking their product recommendations. With tracking cookies, you don't even need to purchase the specific item recommended for them to make money, just something off the store.
Affiliate sites aren't inherently evil, but if you're looking for true authenticity, just be cautious.
Stick with reputable sites for recommendations, like Wirecutter and CNet. They're affiliate marketing sites too, but they seem to apply more rigorous testing to products. Most affiliate sites, which collate or look exclusively at online reviews and/or other sites' recommendations. Have you ever seen a site that focuses on how BAD products are? It would never survive.
And that's why, the internet is a trap.
But I still love it. Nothing's perfect.