One Serious Disadvantage with Ordering from Amazon, vs. Local Shopping [View all]

[MineralMan]

This discussion thread was locked as off-topic by Omaha Steve (a host of the General Discussion forum).

Amazon is so easy. You look until you find what you want and then order it. What you order arrives in a couple or a few day. As an alternative to going to brick and mortar stores, you can just stay home and pick from hundreds of similar things, rather than visit local stores and pick from what's in stock. That's why Amazon is doing so well.

But there can be disadvantages: Here's an example:

My wife said, "My old friend is coming for a visit. She'll be here for a couple of days. We need a bed in the family room. You know, like a day bed that's also a twin bed."

"OK," I said. "Sounds good, and if one of us injures ourselves or whatever, a downstairs bed will eliminate the need to climb stairs. Let's do it."

So, she went exploring on Amazon. The next day, she sent me links to things she liked. There was a wrought-iron looking day bed, a "mattress-in-a-box," a daybed cover with pillow shams, and a couple of decorator small pillows on her list, all color coordinated, sheets, a blanket, new bed pillows, etc..

"OK," I said. "Order 'em."

Of course, the wrought-iron looking daybed would need assembly, but that's OK. I have tools. And then, someone would have to figure out how to put on that daybed cover. So, a few days later, everything showed up, in boxes. I dragged the little love seat that was where the new bed would go into the garage, to go with the other love seat that didn't fit into our new digs. We'll have to have those hauled off, I suppose, or put them on Facebook Marketplace for FREE!.

Assembly. I hate assembling furniture, and this wrought-iron looking day bed was the very epitome of the kind of thing I hate to assemble. To make it fit into a smallish box, it had been broken down into almost 50 components. Bags of metric hex-head screws of different sizes and lengths were in there, too, along with cryptic assembly instructions. there were three little Allen wrenches in there, but I know better than that. I have both inch and metric hex drivers that work with my cordless drill.

Even so, it took me a couple of hours to assemble the thing. I'm pretty good at that sort of thing, but the hardware was not sorted, so I had to start by sorting that into sizes and lengths, so I could find what I needed. The drawings that were supposed to illustrate the assembly steps were poor, and referred to hardware labeled with double letters, but not defined by size or length, so that was on me, too.

Assembly completed, I turned to the mattress. Uffda! Three layers of plastic to hold in the almost explosive compressed foam. I finally got it out of its packaging and it started expanding on the new day bed frame. Sheets, blanket, pillow shams, decorative pillows, a daybed cover. All had to be put on the thing, neatly and straight. My wife was deliberately absent for the entire process. She hates stuff like that. So, when it was done, I had been messing around with it for almost four hours.

Anyhow, we may have spent less by buying this on Amazon, and we may have gotten the perfect colors for everything more easily there than locally. But, what a pain in the rear end going from boxes to day bed! And then, there was all that cardboard and plastic and who knows what all. I had to make a trip to the county recycling center with the cardboard. I took all the other accumulated empty boxes from Amazon on the same trip. Filled up the back of my compact SUV with it.

All so my wife's old friend will have a place to sleep for a couple of nights. Oh, well. Next time, though, I think I'll check out a local store and have something like that delivered and set up by someone else. I'm too damned old to do all that crouching to assemble things like that. Amazon's nice, but so is not doing that kind of thing.