The New York Times did some decent reporting into the pseudo-brands which comes closer to answering the question in the title: having a registered trademark unlocks a lot of on-platform seller tools (predictive analytics, early review program, etc.), and the easiest path to a trademark is to have an utterly unique, nonsense name. Some Chinese municipalities were also offering cash incentives for citizens who obtained foreign intellectual property registrations, further exacerbating the problem.
But why are so many of these pseudo-brands exactly 1. six characters long, 2. all caps, and have 3. point-form descriptions that 4. use some particular emoji as bullet-point symbols, and 5. give each point a separate, usually-capitalized "title" part, 6. enclosed in either square brackets or the even-more-niche punctuation【 】?
To me, that reads either like these all being marques of one company; or there being some Chinese "start a turn-key Amazon business" SaaS that most of these pseudo-brands make use of, which generates a brand name for you, and for product descriptions, takes structured key-value input and formats it into text in this style.
Either way, it seems like finding that entity, and preventing it from interacting with Amazon, would stop a majority of this in its tracks.
See also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mofiQ7EGBH8 — all the branded "knock-off" smartphones on Wish/AliExpress with hardware meant to look like some well-known phone, but with generic software (usually with a start-up screen that says "WELCOME"), are in fact made by a single white-label manufacturer, Microhand/KST (https://www.microhand.net/english/).
Your guess that this is driven by a SaaS is built around assumptions of how process and repetition is structured in the West and its labor markets but this doesn't hold in China.
In reality, there's no SaaS to automate this because labor is still too cheap in China to build tooling for this. Rather there's a cottage industry of "design" contractors built around selling to Aliexpress/Taobao/FBA brands. These contractors have an evolving, but largely standardized set of practices and aesthetic principles that they use to offer a basket of products — logo, product descriptions, brand collateral — resulting in this uniform weirdness across every NeoProduct.
There's no centralized entity or product for Amazon to smack down. If it updates its merchant requirements to prevent this specific aesthetic from proliferating across the platform, the "design" hive in China will update its practices, go through a period of discovery where things will look a little different from each other, before settling back into a new standardized form.
edit: while I believe my comment above to be generally true, the parent actually explores my argument with other people and makes a convincing rebuttal. I'm leaving my comment up but I encourage folks to go down and read about the specific formatting choices that don't appear elsewhere on the Western or Chinese internet.
#6: These are full-width brackets. Most Chinese input method editors will output full-width characters by default instead of the half-width ones that you're accustomed to.
For example: ，。；：【】
If you ever see an Amazon listing have full-width characters, they're almost certainly either Chinese sellers or sellers that are really good a copying and pasting from Chinese sellers.
Because it's not just the big things that are the same; it's the little points of style that a "marketplace of ideas" wouldn't think to share or copy.
You'd expect, if you allowed someone to study your notes before a test, that they'd possibly end up using similar turns-of-phrase to yours on the test. You wouldn't expect that they'd end up learning to perfectly duplicate your handwriting. It'd both be too hard, and not worth it, to do so; and they already have their own handwriting style. So why would they?
Ah, but if you both learned to write from the same person, then you would expect the handwriting to look similar (even if you didn't let them see your notes).
And I think that might be going on here. Take a look at a Chinese-language web site, like http://news.baidu.com
You'll see that it has the "niche" punctuation you mentioned, lots of point form descriptions with emoji bullets, and nearly all the latin script on the page is composed of short strings of all-caps text (many of which are acronyms like "IPO" or "AEX" that would be nonsensical if you didn't already know what they meant).
Some of these stylistic elements are naturally going to bleed over into Amazon listings too.
That's certainly an alternative possibility; more likely, IMHO, than sellers copying one-another perfectly. However...
> You'll see that it has the "niche" punctuation you mentioned
It does, but there are only two examples of it on the page right now. (It is a thing common to Chinese text generally, but it's not the first thing you'd reach for.)【】gets used on this page as a sort of "tag" or "section" for a story. In Amazon product descriptions, meanwhile, it's being used to form a sort of two-tier "【title】body" text; as if compressing a slide-deck slide onto a single line. That's not what those characters are "for", in Chinese. It's a misuse. A Chinese reader would be confused.
> lots of point form descriptions with emoji bullets,
There are no emoji bullets on Baidu; there are styled bullets. But also, when I say "emoji bullets", I don't mean that they use emoji as bullets; I mean that they use regular bullets, and then use emojis as additional "decorations" for each point. Like this: https://i.imgur.com/xW3uPEP.png . AFAIK, nobody does this, anywhere on the Internet, Chinese or otherwise, other than on these brands' Amazon product pages. Because it's silly.
Consider also: if this was just "the way Chinese people write product descriptions on marketplace websites", then you'd expect to see it happening on e.g. AliExpress, or among Chinese sellers on Wish.com. But you don't. On both of those sites, product listings (from Chinese sellers) just use regular, random+inconsistent styling, with a diffusion of different stylistic techniques spreading via natural selection of sellers; with none of these particular techniques being among them. It's only a certain implicit web of a few thousand Amazon product brands, that have this extremely-consistent style.
Can't believe "【Title tags】body text" notation is washing up here. This has to be, to describe in a William-Gibsonian description, an old Japanese practice in email titles heavily used in 2ch/5ch later became popular in Rakuten listings mimicked by Chinese listings on Amazon JP that ultimately leaked into Amazon US via machine translations.
I have never seen it done in anything other than in Japanese text, and translations of. Not sure about double bullet points, but this usage of 【】 is distinctly Japanese.
> You'd expect, if you allowed someone to study your notes before a test, that they'd possibly end up using similar turns-of-phrase to yours on the test. You wouldn't expect that they'd end up learning to perfectly duplicate your handwriting.
Consider a foreign seller who perhaps doesn't have a great grasp of the English language or the cultural context of the US. When you add your own spin to someone else's idea you are leveraging a lot of implicit knowledge to be able to spin it in a way that makes sense. If you don't have that implicit knowledge (and are not going to be penalized for verbatim copying) why try something different from what you have seen be successful already?
What I'm saying is that it would take an immense amount of effort, looking at literally tens of thousands of Amazon listings, to even realize that "this is what everyone else is doing." I noticed these patterns because I personally went through the top 100 items in every leaf-node category of the Amazon store a few months back (because I treat "finding obscure solutions to problems I didn't know I had" as a hobby.) No new Amazon seller is going to do that; and so no new Amazon seller is going to notice every detail of the pattern.
Or, to put that another way: if this were a "marketplace of ideas", there'd be a certain amount of mutation, of copying error, to be expected, from individual sellers not noticing all of the stylistic quirks other sellers use; and instead substituting something random.
But instead, what you see is perfect copying of style, with no mutation or variation, among what are ostensibly thousands of distinct sellers/brands. That's implausible.
(Also, for a bit of a knock-down argument I maybe should have pulled out sooner: when there's an update to the "optimal style" used by these brands? They all change. All at once. Thousands of different brands got rid of the 【】 — replacing it with [] — on the same day, some time last year. Real independent sellers, even if they notice tiny changes in popular style like that, can't react that fast, and don't have time to be constantly updating all their product listings. But a SaaS sales platform with a post-maintenance bot sure does!)
> What I'm saying is that it would take an immense amount of effort, looking at literally tens of thousands of Amazon listings, to even realize that "this is what everyone else is doing."
You're assuming cause & effect here.
To this point, imagine:
- The crowd following the leader / a particular success story
- Most individual sellers are not actually "individual": Same owner or network
- "Educational" boot camps to "get rich". There are towns where people gathered to learn from "the pros" (search for related documentaries)
- Learning from the same person, e.g. via tiktok-esque platform
- Subscribed to update packages
- Generator to fill forms
> That's implausible.
'thousands' is tiny in terms of scale at China.
Imagine yourself as a seller within a network of an extremely competitive network, with a "succeed or hunger" mindset, would you follow and immediately implement any changes that can improve your chance of success?
e.g. New gossip of the day: "Amazon is going to ban any seller using the characters 【】"
Try to relate why being on the first page on HN can bring certain websites down?
I think you are also underestimating what 'travem' mentioned about language and literacy.
Again, imagine you have a limited or zero grasp of the English language. The alphabetical letters are just gibberish to your eyes, but you know you can copy them as your native language characters on your PC/smartphone. Would you attempt to be creative or play it safe?
> Most individual sellers are not actually "individual": Same owner or network
> Subscribed to update packages
> Generator to fill forms
...are fully in line with my argument. My hypothesis wasn't specifically that this was a SaaS system doing this. Rather, my hypothesis was that there's a Single-Point-of-Failure entity or platform that these listings go through — a Borg Queen that could be taken down; and that doing so would stop thousands of sellers in their tracks. I'm agnostic to what form that entity or platform takes.
You might be interested to hear my own guess as to a possible mechanism for this, though, as it's not listed among your alternatives. That guess is that there are a very small number of Chinese companies that advertise their services as writing/managing English-language Amazon product listings, for companies that have no English speakers. These companies use human labor, not automation, but they have a strict style guide, which both informs the format of their output, and the type of input they require from their clients. The network of sellers whose listings look the same, are all the work of one such English-language post-localization company (the largest/most popular one), and so all adhere to one uniform style guide. This company, at least, has the seller themselves register with Amazon; but from there, takes over responsibility for creating products in their account, managing returns claims, etc. They promise to "take care of" every interaction with Amazon FBA that requires English knowledge, and to only bother the seller for things that are really important.
This would explain the reluctance of these sellers to engage through Amazon customer service (instead sending cards with their products that say "please report any issues to <email address>") — they don't manage their own product listings (rather, the contractor does); and they don't trust the English-language-product-listings contractor to know enough about their product to do customer service; and it's hard to coordinate their separate English-language customer-support contractor (the one you reach via the email on the card) to be able to receive + respond to messages on postings managed by the product-listings contractor.
It would also make an interesting prediction: that you'll only see the particular style I described in my top post, in Amazon's English-language product listings, because each contract company would likely focus on selling product-listing localization services for a particular language, so different language ⇒ different company ⇒ different style guide.
> e.g. New gossip of the day: "Amazon is going to ban any seller using the characters 【】"
You'd expect some people to miss that news. And even for people who see the update — no matter how "hungry" they are — you'd expect some sellers to let the news slip past them. For every such disseminated "Amazon Seller pro tip", you'd expect less than perfect 100% engagement. And yet engagement with these changes is 100% — at least within this network of sellers where engagement has historically been 100%.
(Just to beat this point to death, consider the ultimate in centralized top-down "do it exactly one way" skill dissemination: driving. Does every 16-year-old who is highly motivated and hungry to get out on the road, learn every rule of the road + constantly execute their learned driving skills perfectly? Sadly, no. Humans are not good at perfectly absorbing skills, and are also fallible at executing them.)
> a possible mechanism for this [...] They promise to "take care of" every interaction with Amazon FBA that requires English knowledge, and to only bother the seller for things that are really important.
Very likely.
In my previous comment, I focused on the perspective of individual sellers (i.e. entrepreneurial) who have bulk contracts with the local manufacturers. They are the group who are unlikely to commit to "all-inclusive" packages, as they value financial cost overwhelmingly more than personal time, relative to other groups. Think college students, retirees, unemployed, people from poorer areas, etc. They are ubiquitously known as 'wang dai', literally online retailer or agent. These are the first wave of significant online retailing in China. As they want to expand abroad, those who gained some first experience are packaging courses at minimal entry fee (~10USD!). There were a long period where these courses are bombarded via WeChat. (There still are, but the trend has shifted to other topics)
Naturally, the manufacturers want a bigger piece of the cake and now dominates their own online presence in China. To further expand beyond abroad, as they probably do not have adequate language/platform in-house expertise. This is a perfect match to the services you described - outsourcing to e.g. Amazon/eBay specialists.
In either case the point still stands. There's a snowball effect of following the lead of whoever is known to be successful and became the 'authority'.
> you'd expect less than perfect 100% engagement
I agree imperfect engagement is expected on the whole, but how the 100% metric is derived can be misleading. Is it 100% of the top 100 items i.e. the cream of the crop? How different would it be if the procrastinators or failures or one-offs are also included?
Also, I don't think analogue activities like driving is, analogous. Probably closer to Pride Day / French Flag photo overlay across various social platforms. Or SEO.
> a Borg Queen that could be taken down
I think we are aligned that there's a Borg Queen, but not on the rigidness of the hierarchy.
I believe it's weakly/organically structured, unless there's a monopoly, that I'm not aware of, happened.
Not so: the change happened across all these thousands of brands that had the exact style; but it didn't happen to the minority of posts that were from "real" independent Chinese marketplace-of-ideas sellers, who had copied the style with errors, or independently reinvented it. Those other listings still use the dictionary-headword brackets. So no Amazon-side canonicalization was performed.
This must be something that materializes out of the seller interaction with Amazon, because the same aesthetic does not appear on eBay, or for that matter Aliexpress.
I wonder if the telltale signs are much the same as in spam emails: a tool to filter out customers who are more discerning and thus liable to cause problems with Amazon if they get ripped off (demanding refunds, reporting seller misconduct, etc).
> Either way, it seems like finding that entity, and preventing it from interacting with Amazon, would stop a majority of this in its tracks.
From the comments I was expecting a flood of knock-offs or really problematic products, but it seems the main argument is they’re cheap and delivery takes a boat trip across the globe.
Is there any solid reasons these vendors shouldn’t be on Amazon ?
The knock-offs on AliExpress look to me like a different problem.
There's nothing inherent to these vendors (as people) and/or
(most of) their products that would mean that they shouldn't be allowed on Amazon, no.
The problem is instead with the shell game these vendors are playing — creating thousands of temporary brands, pumping them or "brushing" them with fake reviews, and then discarding those brands at a moment's notice when things go sour for them, only to replace them with another brand selling the same shitty products the next day, with the same people behind it.
Amazon's seller reputation system was designed to function under an assumption of "one persistent brand per group of people who work to sell a thing." But people noticed that Amazon uses "one legal company with a trademark" as a proxy for "one group of people"; and so have created thousands of distinct "legal companies with trademarks" with the same group of people behind them. Which Amazon's reputation system has no way of coping with.
If Amazon could deduplicate brands — i.e. require that the same group-of-people sticks to selling stuff under the same company/brand — then there'd be no problem, because then their reputation system would work: if the stuff was crap, the company/brand would get a bad reputation, and then nobody would buy their stuff any more.
The “hit and run” aspect, coupled with fake reviews are indeed problematic when they occur. It’s also baked into Amazon’s model: their whole goal was to make it more accessible to small and upcoming entities to go sell globally.
The only info is about the last 12 months, and we don’t get much clues about the business behind it, even as it has a full store page in Amazon. And of course Amazon wouldn’t want you to get too involved in a any specific shop, as it would strongly lower their leverage as a marketplace (shops stop being replaceable)
The OA mentioned someone who lost an eye due to improper product design and the vendor was safely hidden behind several layers of false-front entities.
I don't know how common that is, but buyers should be aware that many Amazon sellers, including domestic ones, operate in the way the OA explains.
Biggest annoyance IMO is that they clog up the search results and make it harder to find products you'd actually buy. Many sell the exact same item, which you then have to skip over, over and over again. Someone at Amazon must be bonus'd on adding new vendors.
I wonder if it wouldn’t put them in a problematic position as a marketplace operator, especially as they’re already abusing their position with their “Amazon basics” lineup.
“We listened to customer demand” wouldn’t as a defense for filtering for goods that go through their warehouse (which also doesn’t guarantee you get what you expected)
From the very limited research I've done, it is something relatively similar to this. There's a market in China of selling e-books which teach you various ways to make money on the English-speaking web without having to know much English yourself.
I mean it makes sense, if you go to BlackHatWorld or HackForums there are loads of people selling guides teaching you to do similar stuff, they're just in English. I imagine that given China's position in the marketplace, it's probably fairly lucrative for an individual or small company to make nonsense brands and sell stamped tech-junk for 10x markups to Americans.
>From the very limited research I've done, it is something relatively similar to this. There's a market in China of selling e-books which teach you various ways to make money on the English-speaking web without having to know much English yourself.
From what I've seen on the Amazon Seller forums, Turkey and Pakistan are two other such countries.
But these are the kind of properties where it takes a lot of staring at many different examples to even spot the pattern.
I don't expect that someone deciding to do their own spin on this would bother to notice these little things. It'd be like someone setting out to make their own mass-manufactured chicken nuggets, and accidentally recreating the exact set of nugget shapes McDonald's uses.
There are some alleged frauds in the UK that rely on lots of small ephemeral businesses, one after the other, I could see that being an valid strategy here too
I've listed a few things on Amazon. This is very much true. If you don't have a registered trademark youre a second class citizen. You can't upload a video, for example.
Amazon isn't eBay. In theory, for us punters: we should be flogged goods by Amazon that conform to local standards. Beyond that all bets are off. eBay doesn't even bother with ... anything - it's all caveat emptor.
So even in the wild west of Amazon at least there are a few standards. Sorry if you feel aggrieved but I'd rather buy stuff that had to follow a few standards that I nominally trust. By registering a trademark/incorporating/etc you are declaring your intention to work within the rules or at least some rules.
You are not a second class citizen at all. You are actually trying to avoid being a citizen at all if you don't want to abide by rules designed to protect customers.
Amazon is pretty horrendous already if you are not careful but you seem to imply that you want to use it for ad hoc sales. That is what eBay and the like is for. Amazon is for shop style sales ie vendors with product lines and inventory.
> So even in the wild west of Amazon at least there are a few standards.
Getting a trademark isn't an "Amazon standard." It's a requirement to use A+ Content, among many other things.
However, you can ship product into their warehouses all day long without one. So clearly not a "standard."
> I'd rather buy stuff that had to follow a few standards that I nominally trust.
The standards, like food safety, that people really care about have nothing to do with trademarks. You can say that it stops unsafe knockoffs, but this is factually wrong based on the amount of counterfeit stuff that comes out of Amazon.
> By registering a trademark/incorporating/etc you are declaring your intention to work within the rules or at least some rules.
Registering a trademark only guarantees you are willing to follow the rules of getting a trademark. Nothing else.
> You are actually trying to avoid being a citizen at all if you don't want to abide by rules designed to protect customers.
Non sequitur. Trademarks don't exist to protect customers. They exist to protect businesses from knockoffs.
> you seem to imply that you want to use it for ad hoc sales.
Nope. I just don't want to spend 850 Euro to register a trademark for a low volume product.
> Amazon is for shop style sales ie vendors with product lines and inventory.
There's a "have one to sell? Sell on Amazon" link on every product page.
I doubt many Amazon goods from those sellers legitimately adhere to local standards. For example, I outright refuse to purchase silicone for food use from Amazon.
You are kind of deciding Amazon's business model for them, or describing what you would like them to be. But your description doesn't fit well with their "Do you have one of these to sell?" links etc. It seems fair to say they send out mixed signals.
That's the problem: Amazon gives the false sense of brand identity and quality, forcing these problems, whereas eBay is transparently honest. The latter approach is simply better.
It depends, for parts the only place to reliably find name brand is on eBay. Parts on amazon is mainly just a domestic arm of of Aliexpress and Alibaba.
It's easier to sniff out legitimate items on ebay than it is amazon. That is the only metric that matters and amazon is failing horribly, despite whatever security theatre they put on.
There was an amazing radio piece a while back about an outfit in NYC of a guy who had a very lucrative Aamazon copy-cat service: it was run by a family of Hassidic(sp?) Jews in (brooklyn?) -- and what they did was have a bunch of them scour Amazon for top rated items - then have their connections do quick knock-off and sell them. it was a fascinating story... Ill see if I can find it.
They were on the early side of this phenom as it was a few years ago...
But this model is with pretty much everything these days Etsy, Amazon, Alibabba-importers etc...
After a couple really bad experiences with product quality (think clothing items that don't last after a couple washes) I no longer buy Amazon branded items. It's going to play against them over time if they keep messing up on quality.
I'm not sure what the family's religion has to do with anything, but I was curious about the spelling and put it in my search bar and it's spelled, 'Hasidic'.
Well, I distrust Amazon for anything electrical or buy my electronics and optics from the fine folks at B&H Photo, which is owned by a (Satmar) Hasidic family. Sure, that means I can’t shop on Saturdays and have a much deeper knowledge of the Jewish high holidays calendar than I’d normally care to develop, but I don’t worry about a counterfeit battery blowing up in my face or a SSD upgrade for my computer being a 16GB flash card fraudulently reprogrammed to advertise itself to my computer as a 1TB one.
I learned this the hard way when I received a counterfeit playstation controller, straight from the "Sony" store. For some reason, none of my reviews, even the positive ones, have posted since that one, which included pictures of a teardown.
It was wireless and never connected to the machine, so I'm not sure it was capable of damage. But it also didn't have much of a chance since it would only stay connected for about 30 seconds, after pairing.
Even B&H was susceptible to knock-off batteries. Somewhere in the supply chain, fake batteries were introduced, but not found until sold to customers. B&H actually handled this in the only sane way vs the Amazon shrug of the shoulders.
Supply chain attacks are real and even reputable vendors are susceptible. The difference is how the vendors react with their customers that separates the good vendor from the bad vendor.
The difference is Amazon only pretends to care, and only cares about enough plausible deniability to deflect lawsuits (the courts are catching on and this no longer works). Their practice of stickerless commingled inventory ensures that even buying from Amazon itself is no guarantee of not getting a counterfeit product.
> what the family's religion has to do with anything,
Back in the 1980s, NYC shops noticeably run by Hasidic jewish folk were famous for having the best deals in cameras and hifi.
It was not just local, there was a good amount of mail order business, and a large advertising footprint. I think it faded out in internet e-commerce boom, but for older shoppers the association may be relevant.
Some of it still exists. B&H photo is a very large jewish owned electronics business out of New York. They have some of the best high end electronics selection available online and last time I checked they are closed on the sabbath.
I KNEW people would ask this ; it was a major aspect of the story for some reason. They kept making reference to how these "ultra orthodox jews in brooklyn" were doing some revolutionary marketing/profiteering on the interenet/amazon specifically and how they were making a fortune doing so...
It was _fundamental_ to whomever wrote the piece...
So I mentioned it here.
Sorry I failed your "anti-semetic triggers" - FFS.
Well, to be fair, if "these scammers are ultra orthodox Jews" was central to the piece "for some reason", the author might've been a tad on the antisemitic side. At least your (in this context overstated and seemingly unnecessary) mention of their religion makes it sound like it.
>At least your (in this context overstated and seemingly unnecessary) mention of their religion makes it sound like it.
I interpreted the comment differently to you. To me, it appeared that the GP was merely trying to give all the details he remembered from the story. Each additional detail helps when trying to find a decade(s) old story on google or similar.
When reporting descriptions of people, the more detail, the better. Withholding things like race, religion, etc in an effort to be more PC results in a less accurate description.
SET THE SCENE: "What you may think of sleepy hassidic brooklyn as a religious enclave -check out these guys with curls making a killing on amazon knock-offs.!"
I am pretty sure I remember the article was about Adorama and B&H selling gray-market import photography goods over mail order and having racist practices or something, not about selling on Amazon.
If you failed to clarify in your original post, it really does look like it's not material to the story: we don't have the context so reasonably people are going to ask why you even brought it up. No need to get so indignant about it.
No it’s not and the GP is being a overly sensitive for no good reason. It’s a relatively recent sect of Judaism with a well known insular “ultra-orthodox” (more formally Haredi Judaism) Jewish community in New York, primarily Brooklyn and Israel. This is similar to something like the Amish, and pointing out something about Amish furniture or dairy businesses doesn’t make it automatically racist.
Because they are an insular group they are known culturally in the US for their retail enterprises. B&H Photo-Video being the most famous one. Go there now (bhphotovideo.com), you can’t even order during Shabbat.
Sorry mate - it sounds like I called you out too soon.
Ideally, keep race or skin colour or religion etc out of any discussion. As a rule of thumb I try to avoid noting any difference beyond M:F and even then - advisadly.
I don't think there is any reason to note Jew or Hasidic in your post. I have no idea whether a Jew might be offended by that because I would not even get to that point - no need to pontificate about something you don't know about.
People are people, regardless of race, creed or colour.
Let us embrace similarity and not disparity: Us not Them.
I had a similar interpretation of the wording. I’ll take your response in good faith once because I do get the impression you’re asking sincerely, but be warned that should you have further questions you’ll likely fare better taking some time to familiarize yourself with how antisemitism often proliferates:
Noting a person’s Jewish heritage or faith or membership (or that of a business’s proprietor, or some noted portion of their clientele) when their Jewishness is not directly related to the rest of the point is often a signal, like a dog whistle (which is a term often used for this kind of signal). Particularly taking such notice in reference to New York is a strong signal, and often “New York” is used as a substitute for the signal when similar connections might be expected. The first thing it signals to antisemites is identification of a target—either for immediate ridicule, harassment, some other form of abuse… or for identification which places a longer term target on them. The next thing it signals is that like minds are present.
This was all somewhat obscure for even a lot of Americans, and easy to dismiss as an honest mistake rather than an intentional signal in a comment like yours, only a few years ago. Unfortunately a lot of white supremacist movements latched on to these kinds of dog whistles in the course of an election and ultimately an administration which both directly fostered these kinds of dog whistles and indirectly invited them into the mainstream by dismissively reacting to them (and sometimes rehabilitating them on the spot as “very fine people”).
Even so, when it was so obscure, it was a way for fellow travelers to target victims and find compatriots. It’s just a lot more visible now and a lot harder to take comments like [edit: not yours, sorry!] as in good faith.
I appreciate the explanation, thank you. In my neck of the woods you'll often hear "chinese" used in that way. And yes, it's not always obvious that it's meant negatively.
Ok, now the flood of pseudo-"brand" names that you encounter when searching for electronics on Amazon makes much more sense. I searched for a USB-C dock recently and got a wide selection of items from "brands" such as Lemorele, Sitecom, GIISSMO, Probuk, Baseus, Hulier, Inateck etc. etc. etc.
The New York Times doesn't answer if this is beneficial for consumers, which is obviously the thing smart people want to know. Like why does Amazon put up with this?
Even if zero people bought these weird brand products, their existence causes prices to go down, because prices are at the margin, and that's why it pisses off our Tweeter. Because he has to sell for less profit.
Obviously it wasn't good for the person that went blind.
You can debate, of course, where one should draw the line in terms of a race to the bottom of the quality barrel crosses from "good" to "bad" but intentionally avoiding liability and responsibility through lies and shell companies is a pretty clear case.
There's plenty of foreign-brand stuff available for good prices at equal-to-or-higher-quality domestic US brand stuff. But then there's also complete garbage scam trash, and Amazon should absolutely deal with that.
At least the stupid-ass brand names make it easy so far to avoid this stuff.
The only reason it causes prices to go down is because they don't follow regulations or are outright fraud. If they were legitimate businesses they wouldn't be playing Amazon Ban Whack-a-Mole
My n=1 observation is that these bogus listings cause me to either find a well-known brand and/or go somewhere else that has more trustworthy listings.
I’ve drastically reduced the amount of shopping I do on Amazon, mostly due to my perception that it’s become a toxic waste dump. Amazon is good at getting stuff to you quickly, but the prices are nothing special and the shopping experience is trash. It’s much more satisfying to order directly from the manufacturer (usually with free, reasonably fast shipping) and know that what you’re getting is genuine.
Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/11/style/amazon-trademark-co...