Day 230 of writing every day.
My landlord offered to take me to a nearby electronics and home appliances store after I told him about the problem with my washing machine. Before taking me to the store, he also spent some time looking on Amazon for price comparisons before driving me to the store to see what they had to offer this morning.
Some of the products on Amazon stated that they offered installation and removal services. This meant not only getting the washing machine delivered to your door, but also the labor challenges of setting it up and removing the old and clunky washing machine you no longer need for you. My landlord’s getting a little old and maybe his expectations of good deals are different from what mine are, but he thought that meant it was all included on the listed price for Amazon.
It wasn’t stated as free, so I thought that there had to be a catch, but I just went along with him and waited to verify it myself after I got back to my room. The sticker prices at the store were more expensive than the ones on Amazon and the variety was smaller, as to be expected when comparing stores that optimize their business by selling popular models versus e-commerce that has warehouse storage to house a wider variety of products.
However it wasn’t that drastically different in the end when it came to products that I recall seeing at the store that were also on Amazon. The difference of maybe 3000 or 4000 yen, which is still significant for anyone looking for bargains, but the thing that my landlord got his hopes up about was probably around the same in cost. Amazon’s set up and removal services came at a fee, but the final cost of getting an old washing machine recycled was to be determined when the service team examines the actual machine at the same time they deliver and install the new washing machine.
The delivery industry’s system in Japan is probably more reliable than in the US in that deliveries for smaller items don’t have to necessarily be to your address but can be set to a delivery locker in a train station or even to a convenience store, for example, where you can go and pick it up at your convenience. Packages aren’t left at your door nowadays if they don’t fit inside the mailbox, and apartments that are more progressive might even have delivery lockers set up for the convenience of tenants.
The Amazon delivery service for washing machines is partnered up with a major delivery service company, and I was surprised to see that a warranty was even advertised for the product through the delivery company and not the manufacturer. I decided not to pay for it after reading some reviews and seeing that it didn’t cover things you’d expect with a warranty and it’d be better to try contacting the manufacturer instead.
Nowadays, you’d have to be a fool to believe a deal that sounds too good to be true. Greed drives a lot of businesses and no matter what kind of deal they say they’re giving you, it’s all rigged so that they come out with a profit both from immediate short-term to long-term. There’s hardly any betting on customers staying loyal to maintain a profit, which is sad. I’d be happy to support businesses that need to make a profit to sustain workers, but I don’t like it when it’s just profiteering to line the pockets of those at the top.
The idea of investing in stocks for retirement because they offer a higher return than banks is a sound idea to an extent, but when you think about how those returns are made by relying on a system that perpetually runs on exploiting people and resources to maximize profit which then gets shared to shareholders on top of executives, management, and workers, then it seems like an unsustainable system.
To fuel this system is to create demand for new products and even more consumerism that’s just not ecologically sustainable. Everything comes at a price, there’s no such thing as a free lunch, etc. I think the younger generations who have to live into old age will bear the brunt of the consequences of the naivety of previous generations that believed there would be a constant neverending source of wealth.
If anything, the younger generations are getting the life leeched out of them to sustain the older generations with a much heavier load, and they’re still getting called privileged because of all the things available (but which no one can really afford) that has the potential to make things easier to do but at the cost of forcing everyone to do more work (produce more) for less money while being constantly available.
I’m starting to get sidetracked, but I guess people who think about how things were so good in the “old days” never really did what needed to get done to keep things good, and it was their generation that allowed greed to overtake conscientious growth.
Thanks for reading!
One Chance Works 