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Amazon Moves "Buy Now" Into the Physical World, With the Dash Button
Zothecula writes The Amazon Dash Button is a small device that you can stick to walls or a variety of household appliances. Each button is associated with a certain brand or product, and when you set it up (via smartphone) you associate the button with a specific size or quantity (like, say, two 12-packs of Starbucks K-cups or one 2-pack of 50 oz. Tide detergent) and shipping speed. When you start to get low on said product, mash the button and Amazon takes care of the rest.
This one of those ideas perfectly balanced on the razor's edge between believability and absurdity that make the reader question whether it just might possibly be true.
(Pity it's April 2nd, which just means that somebody at Amazon is merely bonkers.)
Step 2: Add a child-resistant packaging for the button, so your 2-year-old doesn't order you fifty jugs of Tide.
I don't like Amazon as a company. I don't like the way they deal with vendors. I really don't like the way they deal with their own employees, down to the recent non-complete agreements for warehouse laborers! As a consumer, I love Amazon, though I do try to not support them.
Why do I want this button?
We keep paper towels and toilet paper in the garage. When we're getting down to one (or no!) rolls left, either I or my wife will say "Oh, we only have one more roll of paper tolls left--let's make sure to get more next time we go to the store." Of course, sometimes that doesn't happen. Sometimes we forget to add paper towels to the list. Sometimes our beloved family cat will decide to spray rancid piss down the hallway, and we exceed our EPTU (estimated paper towel usage). If we had a button in the garage next to our paper towels, and every time we were getting remotely low we just tapped a button and didn't think about it again...that's brilliant.
I would normally never buy this kind of product from Amazon as the local store prices are _always_ better (especially if you keep an eye out for coupons, sales, etc--but even without that). The button might change my mind.
This is seriously one of those ideas that's so simple and yet so brilliant at the same time.
Amazon's deliveries need to be a lot more expensive to justify my spending over an hour of the precious personal time on errands per week.
I shop a ton at Amazon but are you seriously going to claim that your week is SO packed that you don't even have 1 hour to spend grocery shopping? Really? You'd have to be unbelievably busy or ill for me to believe that.
BTW, I'm a cost accountant professionally. Using your hourly billing rate as an opportunity cost only works if you would actually forgo that income if you spent that time doing something other than earning wages. Since most people shop outside of work hours there is no lost wages and so the opportunity cost is much smaller.
I for one was lazy decades before I got my first cellular (and not so smart) phone.
So you admit your are lazy rather than otherwise occupied. Got it.
It's almost like Amazon thought this out or something.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
I think of it as putting a value on my time.
There is a value on your time. But it is demonstrably not your hourly rate on your job unless you are actually taking time away from your job. The rate is something different.
On a salary, the money keeps rolling in on a regular basis. If I squander a bit of it, I'll get more with the next paycheck. If I squander my time, it's gone for ever.
You haven't thought through the full implications of that statement. Earning a paycheck is essentially trading time for money. If you squander the money you earned, the time you spent earning it is wasted at the same time. The only difference is that the waste is time shifted but it is still wasted time that you will never, ever recover.
Amazon does ridiculous stuff like this regularly. Free shipping for Prime members was a crazy idea when it was first introduced. Now several companies have copied their prime model. I don't think these buttons are the end-game. They may be a wedge/marketing gimic that gets people to start buying household products from Amazon. I buy laundry detergent locally because I usually don't think about it until I'm almost out. Having a button staring me in the face reminds me 1) that Amazon sells it, and 2) that I might want to think about it a few days in advance on needing it. Once I get that habit, it won't be a stretch to get rid of the buttons and simply have a phone app that lets me easily order non-perishables.
Alternately, Amazon is hoping the price for these buttons becomes negligible as "Internet of Things" chips ramp up. Either way, homeowners buying name brand products through Amazon without even thinking about the price, is good for Amazon.