Early this morning, apropos of nothing whatsoever, I happened to go to the Amazon page on the smartphone. And Creepy Amazon Cookiebot naturally tried to upsell me a bunch of poorly-selected shit “inspired by your browsing history.”
Honestly, Amazon does not seem very good at this. Among a lot of hipster clothing I’d never be seen dead in and extremely irrelevant beauty products, their suggestions included like four dozen different versions of this very creepy thing…
I’ve seriously never tasted Red Bull in my life but that’s not the point – do these things do what I think they do? Do you buy these for $5 each, one for every regularly expended commodity, and then when you want more you just push this button and AMAZON AUTOMATICALLY SENDS YOU MORE???
Amazon Dash Button is a Wi-Fi connected device that reorders your favorite product with the press of a button. Each Dash Button is paired with a product of your choice, which is selected through the Amazon App on your Android or iOS smartphone during the set-up process.
Apparently that’s exactly what’s supposed to happen.
Does anybody really do that? Are you supposed to stick them on your fridge or something? What if your 5-year-old gets bored and pushes the button a hundred times to see what will happen? Will all your utility payment checks bounce as a trailor-load of Red Bull shows up in your driveway?
I don’t know – really, I’m completely at sea. But this seems like one of the worst ideas in the history of retail sales.
If you put on the special sunglasses, you’ll see that it just says, “CONSUME”.
Those things have been around for a while. They’re a good idea for Amazon. Maybe they’re a good idea for parents whose kids have an appetite for Tide pods.
Certainly a good idea for Amazon. As for the rest of us, well, I think it’s highly dependent on one’s situation. Definitely dangerous to have around young kids but if you’ve got a household of responsible adults I can see the appeal. Five bucks isn’t a very high price to have something I can press the moment I notice that I’m running out of TP and the completely forget about until a new package of the stuff appears in my doorstep a couple of days later. Beats being stuck with plan B after forgetting to put it on the shopping list one too many times.
I’ve done the red bull while on a long, long night shift. Can’t say I recommend it because while it does give you a little jolt it plays havoc with the old ticker. People have died from drinking too much of that stuff.
Ah, the reorder button… welcome to the internet of things. It’s good and bad. Good from a logistical standpoint if you are an unorganized forgetful kind of guy. Bad from a privacy point of view. The hope is in the near future all the devices in your home will chat with each other and as you use something that use will be recorded and tracked. Then before it runs out the product will be ordered.
The problem is privacy. Foe example…
Lets say a guy goes out after having a few. He was going to a party and wanted to get things started early. While on the road he has a car accident away from town and nobody else was involved. The guy calls the AAA for a tow and reports the accident to the cops. Later a cop shows up, but by that time the booze is out of the guys system.
The insurance company gets suspicious because it was a single car accident and the weather/road conditions were fine. An investigator drops by the guys place to do a check. One of the things he does as he’s questioning the guy is check the readings on the fridge to find out when was the last time any beer was consumed. Sure enough the fridge tells him the guy had 4 beers in the hour before he went out. The insurance investigator puts this in his report and the guy’s insurance claim is denied, his insurance coverage is dropped all because he is now a high risk.
Utter nonsense. I have a shopping list. Works like a charm. When I can go shopping, of course.
Anyway, no automatic ordering would do me any good now… I’ve been snowed in for more than two months, and the UPS driver could not get into the driveway now, no matter what I ordered. 🙁 SPRING!! I need SPRING! 🙂
Amazon’s been doing those things for a few years now, so someone’s using them. Personally I don’t see the attraction either. Pretty much everything I use alot of I get locally!
Those buttons with a child would be almost as bad as having Alexa with BlackHat as a houseguest:
https://xkcd.com/1807/
People not only do that. They also do this:
https://thenextweb.com/gear/2018/02/22/dildo-dominos-pizza-order/