Why Amazon (AMZN) Isn't Always The Best

In this post I am going to explain why Amazon (AMZN) is not always the best.

Pictured to the left is my one and a half year old son with his lawn mower.

Now please understand, his lawn mower is by far his favorite toy.  He loves mowing the grass with dad, and is always asking "go outside, go mow grass?".

So, as a result, I. mow. my. grass. Often.   Read on!


Unfortunately, it had been several seasons since I last changed my real lawn mower's blade.

But no problem, I look at my lawn mower make and model, quickly hop on amazon and see the blade I need, it's reasonably priced, and it can be here in two days with Amazon Prime. Great.

I am about to click the order.

But then I think, "Wait. Two days. Two days? Do I really want to wait two whole days for this thing just because it was easy for me to find and get from Amazon?  And only becuase I'm so used to getting things from Amazon because, well, Amazon is the best!?"

There had to be another option. So since I had bought this lawn mower from Sears years ago, I decided to give Sears a chance to earn my lawn mower replacement blade business.  I went to Sears.com, saw that they had the blade for a similar price, and that I could order it and reserve it for "In-Store Pick Up," and have it by the time they opened at 10am, which was literally in about 15 minutes from when I got on their website.

"Wow, 15 minutes is better than 2 days," I thought.  "I could mow today if I wanted! And with a new blade!" Of course I don't necessarily WANT to mow.  But if my son does, we could, I suppose, if I made my purchase with Sears.  But oh, gosh it's SEARS!

And then the reason for this article happened: I saw that Sears had an APP that you could download. I then quickly saw that if you download the APP that you could have an employee BRING YOUR PURCHASE OUT TO YOU IN THE CAR.

Picture of the infamous lawn mower blade

What!  Now that sounds interesting.

To give some more context, it happened to be raining that day. Hard. Sears claimed they would bring your item out to your car within 5 minutes, guaranteed.  I thought, "Hey, Sears isn't even open yet. I'm placing an online order, using their App, and having them bring my purchase out to my car. It's pouring rain. Sears probably isn't going to be able to do this, and I may be getting my blade for free when they don't get it to me within 5 minutes."  So I placed my order.

BUT GUESS WHAT? SEARS DELIVERED! I  was waiting in my dry, comfortable car, I got my item at 10:04 and I was back home by 10:23am.

BOOM.


Nothing against Amazon, but don't always think that's where you should get your items.  There ARE other ways.

Anyway, I had to share some context of my life with my readers outside of solely investing and dividends, and I also think this is somewhat of an important reminder for how to 'life-hack' your purchases, save time, and do the things that really are important.  Like mowing with your son!

What do you think?  Thanks for reading.

Passive Income Dude