I tried making a serious effort of avoiding amazon lately. What I found was _generally_ prices are much higher everywhere else.

Charcoal pencils - 30% cheaper on Amazon compared to other sites. More than 2 times cheaper compared to local art stores and the local store only has one crappy brand in stock.

My watch - $40 plus shipping (2 weeks) directly from the manufacturer. Amazon has it at $28 and it'll get here tomorrow.

Pen nibs from Jetpen - $10 + $5.95 shipping. Once again >1week for delivery. $16 from amazon and it gets here tomorrow

I really feel like an idiot trying to boycott this company, but I'm still trying where I can.

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potamic 11 hours ago | parent [-]

Did you ever wonder if it's cheaper because it's counterfeit? The counterfeit industry is huge in contract manufacturing. Designs are easily leaked and near lookalikes manufactured at whatever price point you seek. Sometimes they even claim they're manufacturing it in the same facility as the original brand. These goods have flooded the market for damn near every product out there and unless you can trace the entire supply chain you don't know what you're getting.

	▲	speff 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That's a fair point. I try to stick to name brands on Amazon to try to minimize the chance of fakes (Generals, Casio, Zebra for my examples previously) - and the packaging does look like the one I get directly from the manufacturer. I bought two of the same Casios at different times - once from Casio and once from Amazon - and I'm sure the packaging was the same. But it's one of the things I guess you can't be too sure about. Maybe if we see name-brand prices increase after commingling ends, that can be proof that prices were low due to counterfeits