Blog

Short blog posts, journal entries, and random thoughts. Topics include a mix of personal and the world at large.

Right on queue

Recently I was at Whole Foods picking up an Amazon package. I like to do this for the important stuff, so the eliminate the possibility of theft when going the typical ship-to-your-front-door route. Not that I’ve ever had a package stolen, now that I think about it (knocking tremendously on wood). But when I got to have something for certain, the pickup option at Whole Foods is the method to go when shopping on Amazon.

It also helps the local Whole Foods is but a third of a mile away from me.

Ahead of me at the pickup line is a woman with a cart full items to return. There’s about a dozen things in there, and each of them have to be scanned and bagged individually. Needless to say, this process took way longer than the typical counter transaction.

The guy behind me in line was audibly upset with many groans and grunts. Come on, dude: what can be done about it? The woman with many returns have every right to the service as we do. Word on the street is Amazon actually does ban serial abusers of the return system, but that threshold has got to be high, I presume. Either way, we just got to wait. That’s like getting angry at a grocery store because the person in front has a cart full of products.

Whether or not a person is capable of waiting in a queue in a calm and patient manner can reveal a great deal about their temperament. The folks who are incapable of doing so likely have a strong overlap with the population of road-raging drivers. The most trivial of inconveniences are enough to trigger an adverse reaction tantamount to grievous personal offense. We can also blame this on social media, right? (Sarcasm.) The instant and constant dopamine drip have conditioned us to be intolerant of waiting.

If you can’t be happy waiting in a line, you can’t be happy.

Black Friday strategy

It is Black Friday season. That’s right: what used to be just a single day of sales (the Friday after Thanksgiving, obviously) have stretched onto many weeks. And I hate it. REP Fitness has had a weekly rotating category since the start of November. Amazon has been doing Black Friday flash sales starting last week.

As a consumer it’s frustrating to have to be on alert over a period, instead of knowing for sure that all deals are available on the day of Black Friday. Amazon does these lightning deals where if you missed it on that particular day, it is gone. So you kind of have to scope things out ahead of time, and keep visiting the website everyday during the holiday season.

What I’ve done is add what I want to buy to the cart. On my daily visits to Amazon, I go straight to the shopping cart to see if any items are on Black Friday sale. As of writing I already knocked off two things on the list using this strategy. Black Friday discounts can be rather significant, so it’s worth waiting until the sales to buy what you want. Since the season turned autumnal I’ve been queuing up items at various vendors, waiting for the right prices to press checkout.

Of course there are no guarantees the stuff you want actually goes on sale. In that case the calculus is simple. If it’s a want, no purchase. If it’s a need, then the listed price is the listed price. Like these packs of gum. Excellent for teeth cleanliness, will buy regardless.

Happy hunting this Black Friday. The health of the U.S. economy is depending on us!

The best seating material in a car under $100,000.

You get a layoff! You get a layoff!

Word on the streets is that Amazon is cutting 14,000 personnel in its vast corporate offices. That is a lot of people soon to be out of work. The greater Seattle area is in shambles, as the kids say these days. This news comes only a few days after Target announced similar corporate job cuts. All of this coming right before the (hopefully) busy holiday shopping season. Who has money to spend right now, honestly.

The pending Target layoffs hits close to home as my cousin works there in corporate. The problem is, he’s nowhere near the company headquarters in Minnesota. A corporation looking to trim down will certainly look first at folks working off-site, no? I hope the best for my cousin.

The best did not happen for my friend who got laid of from Stanford earlier this year. Even education, the once believed lead-pipe lock of job security (especially at a world renowned university like Stanford), is not immune from the current economic headwinds. I somewhat worry for my position, because I too work for a university. An institution that just this week forecasts dire budget straits for the coming fiscal year. Not great!

We’ve seen so many layoff news throughout 2025, and yet the U.S. stock market is currently, as of writing, sitting at all-time highs. One suspects, basing on sheer mathematics, the bottom has to fall out eventually, no? Folks out of a job aren’t wont to keep on spending.

I’m glad I recently downsized my car to something cheaper, netting a solid difference to add to the rainy day war chest. The current economy is too uncertain to be making daring money moves, at least for someone in my lower middle class position. If I do get unfortunately laid off, I want to have at least 12 months of money runway. I know, right to privilege jail, right away.

Always work sometimes

It’s always interesting to see just how much of the common Internet runs on Amazon’s AWS. When AWS goes down - granted, not often at all - you quickly find out that half the websites you rely on everyday is no longer accessible. How can I function at work when Reddit doesn't load? Nobody can.

That goes to show how important AWS is, and how it really should have absolutely zero downtime. The backups and failsafes should have their own backups and failsafes.

Qualtrics - the online survey company - was completely non-functional during the AWS outage two days ago. (I know this because it’s a service we use at work.) Qualtric’s IT people must have the easiest troubleshooting job in the world: throw hands up, blame Amazon. There’s not much to do when the contracted third-party server your service runs on is acting up. Calling AWS support isn’t going to make them go any faster in fixing the problem. I don’t email Squarespace help whenever their service goes down (more often than I’d prefer, honestly). There's only the wait.

Good news for me, my livelihood is not dependent on this website. Bad news for Qualtrics, when your core service goes down for much of a work day, that’s a lot of lost revenue, never mind angry paying customers. Perhaps the company’s surely high-deductible insurance plan cover such events? If the cut is deep enough, I’d even think about suing Amazon. Word on the street is, Jeff Bezos has plenty of millions to spare.

Can you imagine your smart home devices stopped working on Monday because the backend is AWS? No doubt Internet-of-things make life convenient, but if a server outage somewhere causes me to be locked outside of my home, that’s not going to work.

The amazing Amazon

I don’t see how anyone can boycott Amazon. When you absolutely need that one thing quickly and you cannot be bothered to go anywhere to get it, Amazon always comes through in the clutch. Prime free next-day shipping is an amazing feet of logistical engineering. Labor exploitation be damned if I can replace a broken water bottle in less than 24 hours, for the cheapest price, with just a few taps on the phone.

Good luck getting that convenience genie back into the bottle. I have to wonder those who claim to boycott Amazon on Reddit: do they really do it? Often times, people’s actions do not back up their words. Those who rail against higher education have gone to college themselves, and will send (or have sent) their children to college. Those who advocate for leniency towards the homeless invariably do not have mobile homes parked in their neighborhoods. Women who claims partner income doesn’t matter have never dated someone who made less.

Talk is easy and superficial when you don’t have skin in the game.

I returned from Korea late April. The trip marked a two week hiatus from weightlifting. I then got sick the week after - as one does. So in earnest I did not pick back up the weights until the start of May.

It then took an entire month for me to get back to where I was - in terms of strength numbers - before I went on vacation. I guess that’s about normal? (I lift three times a week.) That’s the thing about traveling when you are chasing the gains on a barbell: you have to accept the regression. You work so hard to gradually reach a certain weight for a certain amount of reps. Then, like the Itsy Bitsy Spider, you go back down and have to do it all over again.

I’m not saying don’t go on vacation. But if there’s a target weight goal you’re chasing, it’s going to get prolonged.

Not free shipping

A thing we take for granted in the online shopping age is free shipping. Thanks to Amazon, we’ve come to expect free shipping no matter what we buy, from the smallest everyday item to the bigger furniture set possible. Heck, if I buy a Tesla car online, I expect a Tesla employee to deliver the car to me, gratis. How is the guy getting home afterwards? That’s not my problem.

Of course, free shipping is most decidedly not free. Someone is paying for the teams of people driving those trucks and carrying those poundages, and it’s certainly not the retailer. The cost of shipping is baked into the margins the retailers have on the item sold. Any Shark Tank watcher would know, margins between landed cost and wholesale is typically enormous.

We are paying for shipping, it’s just that the norm is to bake it into the price of the product. Except on platforms like eBay. The auctions there are where the true cost of shipping can be seen. No individual seller can afford to “eat” the shipping cost just to placate the customer expectations. The economies of scale is non existent. Psychological test: is it more lucrative to hike up the price and offer free shipping, or lower the price and charge shipping a la carte?

The problem with free shipping is that it sets an unrealistic expectation that shipping should also be free if customers need to return an item. I’m sure Target can afford to absorb the cost to return a pack of pencils, but for something like an exercise bike? Probably not. But then the customer gets pissed once they see the actual costs to ship the bike, which they must pay if they want to return it.

Amazon is kind of genius in purchasing Whole Foods, thereby creating a physical location where Amazon shoppers can return items conveniently for free.

True cost of buying

If the economy is in the dumps, you know how they can spur spending? Give a tax holiday. Perhaps I’m the only one who thinks about this component? The sales tax is highly salient for me when it comes to big ticket purchases.

Remember in the early days of Amazon they did not charge sales tax? Those were the lucrative times. You can buy a television by the thousands of dollars and save hundreds on tax. Now I think we’re suppose to report that come tax time, but honestly, who the heck did that? Besides, doesn’t sales tax go to the state and city?

Never mind! As an employee of a state (at least until Elon Musk’s DOGE gets around to state public workers), I’m a big fan of the sales tax.

Look at buying a new car. The (let’s just say) $30,000 sticker price is not inclusive of the addition thousands in taxes the buyer must pay. Obviously it’s obscured by the mechanism of spreading it over multiple years in payments. (That’s how they get you!) I tend to look at it holistically: do I want to pay additional thousands to not even for the car itself?

What scares me from a mortgage (not that I can afford a house around here) is the amortization table. The amount of interests alone over a 30 year term is freaking outrageous. It seems more prudent to me to keep renting until I am able to pay a majority portion of a house in cash. Keep that money in investments in the meantime and let those interests come to me, instead of the bank.

The true cost of buying something significant is super important to consider.