My Advice About the Perils of Online Shopping

This is why I removed some of my photos in my articles. https://medium.com/illumination/people-are-being-sued-for-using-creative-commons-images-adc5c8ba1491

So you like to shop online. Good. What could go wrong? What could go wrong where you do not yet know that something is not right? What can you do about this?!

It inspired me to write this brief article after I shopped for ordinary batteries on Amazon. Usually, I buy batteries at any good old walk in store, but after the Lockdown happened, and I live in a locked-down senior home, I have to buy most things online. I needed batteries. They sell lots of batteries. Why, though, did the reviews have from 5% to 8% one-star reviews, for every battery from every major company? I was curious to find out.

Ugh. While I have to accept the realities of fake reviews, there were many, many, one-star reviews where the complainer writes that the batteries either were dead or that they died soon after they were put into a device, or they leaked and ruined the device. One person called Duracell to complain. Their advice? To *never* buy a battery at an online store! Always buy from a walk-in store.

I can see why people. Many of the “stores” in Amazon buy these batteries in huge bulk lots and then store them in a warehouse until every one is sold. You just do not know how long they have stored them and at just what temperature. DOA. Dead on arrival. My advice, here, is to buy batteries from a high traffic store, only.

This advice goes for *any* items that have a shelf life. For instance, I tried to buy two chocolate bars. Not only were they so expensive, again the one-star reviews stated that often the received bars were all white-colored, the sign of age! Again, who knows how long they have been sitting in a warehouse.

More advice: Always check the one-star reviews! Sometimes they might, for instance, mention that their purchase did not work because of a compatibility issue and that *you* have that same device such that your 95% five-star rated Thing will not work if you were to buy it!

Then there is the problem of counterfeiting. Amazon tries very hard to pull these products out, but the sheer number of counterfeits overwhelm them!

[I just saw a video the other day from Allec Joshua Ibay, on Youtube. He specializes in making videos of airplane crashes and of the whys of the crashes.

An example is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxDZU6WnmDw

This video, which I watched a week ago, shows that there is an enormous market for counterfeit aircraft parts! Even simple bolts and screws are often counterfeit. They might only have less than half of the metal-strength of “real” screws that they imitate. This airplane, {not the one in the linked video} crashed because some counterfeit bolts failed in the flaps! How can this maker sleep at night?! He must have no conscience at all!].

Fake reviews. Watch out for them.

My brief article is long enough, folks. I hope that you get some idea of what can go wrong with online buying. Of course, a walk-in store has its own issues. My sister would rail to me at no end about how the small country stores would sell things like potato chips that were *way* out of date! Of course! Their profit is in that last bag and they have to sell it. There was such a store near my childhood home where after the owner died, his widow gave to the church give-away program for the poor, many of the canned goods. My job as a volunteer there at that church, this one day when the hundreds of canned goods came in, was to help check the expiration dates. Here was a bunch of canned string beans; first I had to wipe the dust off of the tops and then look at the date.

“Expires June 30, 1990”. Today was about June 1998! EIGHT YEARS beyond the expiration date!! Still for sale. Probably would still be there today, in 2020, if he were still alive!