You live in Europe, where everything is harder, and when it comes to shopping, you have maybe one-fifth of the choices Americans have.

I spend a good four months every year in Poland and Austria, and there’s really nowhere in the world except China that offers consumers as much choice and availability as the U.S. does.

▲

retired 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It really baffles me when an American can just walk into a store and buy car parts for their fairly niche model from the 1990s.

Meanwhile in Europe I spend many evening on internet forums and Facebook groups doing research trying to find a part that will work with my car, then finding someone willing to sell it and finally using Google Translate getting someone to ship it to my foreign (to them) country. I even had to resort to proxies just to get car parts from Eastern to Western Europe.

▲

shimman 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Weird, I rather have more government mandated vacation, public healthcare, and a pension system that doesn't mean I have to work in my 60s but I understand people have different priorities in life. Hopefully you move beyond the consumerist phase as it's probably the lowest rung of the human experience.

	▲	TaLiTr 22 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		What a strange and pretentious comment. They're not mutually exclusive, two things can be had at the same time.
	▲	retired 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Jokes on you, in my part of Europe I don’t have access to public healthcare, I don’t have mandated vacation, I don’t have a pension system. And I can’t even have a consumerist phase apparently since car parts are so hard to acquire.

▲

AlanYx 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>there’s really nowhere in the world except China that offers consumers as much choice and availability as the U.S. does.

This is true, although I find it interesting that so many people then gravitate to Costco, where consumer choice in a given category is deliberately restricted to one or two product variations selected by the head office.

	▲	pirates 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Over time I have come to trust Costco’s curation. Their standards seem high, and there are definitely products and brands that they sell that I don’t like, but those are subjective tastes vs objective low quality in my experience. I don’t buy everything there, but I take note of the brands and products that they either keep for a long time or dump quickly.