[stn8188]

I feel like this goes for personal life too. My particular problem du jour: some parts internal to my lawn mower engine crankcase self destructed and the engine needs a total rebuild or replacement. I replaced the camshaft 2 years ago with a cheapo Amazon part and I'll forever be kicking myself wondering if saving $20 on that destroyed a $1k (new price) engine.

[therealpygon]

Don’t beat yourself up…you’re probably right. Joking aside, with Amazon, you just never know whether you are going to get a hardened forged steel item, or pot-metal. You can’t even count on that “stainless steel bowl” actually being stainless at all these days. That whole marketplace is a grand example of the exact problem with outsourcing. These days you can’t even rely on price or brand being an indicator of what you will receive (with the counterfeits and intentional overpricing of sub-par items).

[datavirtue]

Amazon has turned into WalMart. Literally all of your choices for a product are a variation of the same cheap crap with different brand names. I would love to have a midling priced item of better quality. Not available.

The retailers job used to be offering the best value to their customers by filtering out the crap that was too cheap or overpriced.