[msg]

The article does not compare apples to apples unfortunately.

The author compares buying a shoe rack on Google Shopping Express to buying on Amazon. He is impressed that a plywood laminated shoe rack sourced by Target is only $12 while a bamboo shoe rack on Amazon is $20, and makes much of imagining, zomg-like, 50% savings on his Amazon purchases over the year.

If you look at the same Amazon search results page where the author finds the bamboo rack, there is a serviceable resin rack for $13 (the author is obviously not going high-end with his plywood one). Four results down from his bamboo rack is a natural wood rack for under $16.

The real gorilla horse in the room is that the author goes on to lament $5 shipping for Google, which swamps any savings he was getting by going with inferior product. "Now, Google has to make sure its free delivery thing becomes well adopted the way Amazon Prime was, because the $4.99 delivery was a non-starter for me, and ruined the economics."

Twist ending?

[jmillikin]

Scroll down further. The author found the same laminated shoe rack on Amazon for $16.17, and notes that having a Shopping membership (equivalent to Amazon Prime membership) removes the shipping fee. That means that a price comparison of the same product was $16.17 vs $13.24.

Personally I think fretting over three dollars on a shoerack is a bit silly, since the shoes it's holding will each be at least an order of magnitude more expensive than the rack.

Also relevant: http://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/index.php/Sam_Vimes_Theory_...

[bpicolo]

Yeah. So Amazon didn't sell that particular shoe rack. I don't see a story here.