The Death of the Smart Shopper⁠↗

Amazon is getting worse, but you probably already knew that, because you probably shop at Amazon. The online retail behemoth’s search results are full of ads and sponsored results that can push actually relevant, well-reviewed options far down the page. The proportion of its inventory that comes from brands with names like Fkprorjv and BIDLOTCUE seems to be constantly expanding. Many simple queries yield results that appear to be the exact same product over and over again—sometimes with the exact same photos—but all with different names, sellers, prices, ratings, and customer reviews. If you squint, you can distinguish between some of the products, which feels like playing a decidedly less whimsical version of “spot the difference” picture games.

Amazon’s primary goal is selling the infrastructure of online shopping to other businesses—things like checkout, payment processing, and order fulfillment, which even large retailers can struggle to handle efficiently. Why be Amazon when you can instead make everyone else be Amazon and take a cut?

Ostensibly, the rise of online shopping promised a greater-than-ever opportunity for buyers to be discerning and well educated about their options. The appeal of Amazon and other megaretailers is primarily that of affordable abundance—somewhere in there is the right thing at the right price, and you can consider endless options until you’re satisfied. But what’s abundant lately is undifferentiated junk. In these conditions, understanding what it is you’re buying, where it came from, and what you can expect of it is a fool’s errand. E-commerce giants have pushed to the point of absurdity a problem that’s central to the consumer system: It’s basically impossible to be an informed consumer, and it always has been.

The supposedly informed consumer has always been a misnomer. Purchases are fundamentally asymmetrical interactions. Sellers will almost always know more than you do, and they are free to hide most of it. When buying a home, taking a car in for repairs, choosing a doctor, or deciding whether you actually need a separate eye cream or it’s all just moisturizer in a smaller tub, you will generally end up playing whack-a-mole with your own ignorance. And that’s to say nothing of situations in which an informed decision would require, for example, understanding a product’s supply chain in order to avoid buying things made through forced labor.

Online shopping as it is currently constituted—highly mediated by Amazon, Google, Meta, and now TikTok—causes such problems because it’s good at feeling highly informative. Before you buy anything, you can read reviews, look up terms you don’t understand, find out what everyone else is buying, and watch videos to get a better look at a product. You can consult the opinions of people who should have better judgment or more information than you do—fitness influencers can tell you which leggings to buy, makeup artists can tell you about their favorite concealers, reviewers at sites such as Wirecutter and The Strategist can tell you about everything else. You can comparison-shop across multiple brands and retailers without leaving your home, culminating in the purchase of the best product or service at the best price for your needs. If you can’t figure it out, maybe that’s a you problem.

More common, though, is something like consumer vertigo: The search results are full of ads. You can’t come up with the right string of words to get more useful results. The reviews, both on the retailer’s site and on third-party websites you’ve mostly never heard of, seem fake. You can’t get the site’s chatbot—or is it a real person limited to an approved script?—to answer a basic question. You suspect that the influencers are being secretly compensated even when their posts aren’t tagged as advertisements, and maybe that they’ve never used the things they recommend at all.

Because you’re shopping online, you can’t go look at most of the products in a store, and you can’t tell how—or whether—one thing is different from the very similar thing two thumbnails down. You can’t tell if a particular product will spy on you or sell your data. You’ll have already consented to whatever is in the lengthy, impenetrable legalese of its user agreement just by powering it up. You buy something cheap and hope it holds up—or at least tides you over—for a while. If it doesn’t, you probably can’t get someone on the phone to solve your problem, so you toss it or squirrel it away in the back of a storage closet.

All of this might feel unforgivably trivial. You don’t feel confident purchasing a laundry hamper? So what? But the fact that the highly visible scaffolding of digital commerce—largely built and maintained by the same handful of companies that control much of the internet itself—is deteriorating so rapidly does not portend well for those of us on the business end of these systems, who are protected by little other than our own doggedness. And many of the people involved in the consumer system aren’t even afforded that. If you can’t differentiate one product from a dozen listings for a seemingly identical thing, you can’t even begin to understand the conditions under which it was produced, or at what cost to workers and the environment.