Amazonian riff

Earlier this week Neatorama pointed to a list of shopping cart buttons. Now if you’re really into online shopping, you’ll probably recognize a lot of these, but the only one I immediately knew was Amazon’s.

This reminded me of something my dad had noticed on Amazon a while back. You know how they do those “Better Together” pairings, where you get a discount if you buy the thing you want and something else? Well, the electric razor my dad was pricing was paired with a case of Thai noodles! I love that the algorithm they use doesn’t actually evaluate the likelihood that multiple people will actually want that combination of items.

Anyway, until Dad mentioned the Thai noodles I’d completely forgotten that Amazon had started to sell groceries. Just out of curiosity, I searched “thai noodles” and got 43 results. 43! Most are packaged with sauces (lots of pad thai, of course), but there are plain old rice noodles in there too. But you have to want 30 packages of them. 30!

Now, I love rice noodles, but white-bread, northern-European mutt that I am, it would take me a while to go through 30 packages of rice noodles, especially as these aren’t little single-serve ramen-type packages. I’d probably get 4 meals out of each. Assuming rice noodles with dinner twice a week, that’s 60 weeks worth–15 months! But for $36.96, that’s all of 31 cents per meal. Not too bad, really, as long as you have the storage space.

After looking around a bit more, it seems safe to say that Amazon’s grocery “store” is built on the bulk model. Toilet paper comes in cases of 48, toothpaste in packs of six. Rice, raisins, cereal, and tofu are all available in large quantities. So are vegetables, as long as they’ve been processed. Nothing fresh, nor anything that needs to be kept cold, but pretty much anything else you’d need, all in large quantities.

There’s part of me that’s tempted by this, especially as it would mean being able to avoid Wal-Mart even more. But there’s no way it would be a complete substitute for the usual mode of grocery shopping. I love my fresh fruits and veggies way too much, and doubt that I could make it through the summer without plain yogurt. Besides, I like to engage in occasional destination grocery shopping. Getting groceries online is a long way from the experience of Cao Nguyen.