I hate Amazon bait n switch

https://www.recode.net/2017/3/30/14831602/amazon-walmart-cpg-grocery-price-war

Sounds like Amazon and Wal-Mart are working pretty hard at racing each other to the bottom

Okay, so yeah Amazon is doing it too but this:

“Once every three or four years, Walmart tells you to take the money you’re spending on [marketing] initiatives and invest it in lower prices,” said Jason Goldberg, the head of the commerce practice at SapientRazorfish, a digital agency that works with large brands and retailers. “They sweep all the chips off the table and drill you down on price.”

He’s not talking about recently. Wal-marts been doing this for decades. They just demand lower and lower prices from their suppliers, and they will happily bankrupt a company to get it.

If you face that kind of aggression, how would you expect them to compete. No one has really been able to compete with Wal-mart… until now. Those who have, you can see their big box corpses all over.

FOr those of you feeling guilt for ordering your 40lb bags of litter, I’ll just toss out that one of my good friends in the area who’s been really hard up for work spent the last couple of months as a warehouse worker for UPS, working the line sorting boxes. She’s about 5’2" and maybe 110 soaking wet. She did not like kitty litter people :)

How about those of us that bought 110 lb?

You provided an interesting lesson in physics, if nothing else!

Guys, all you folks ordering your own weight in cat litter should really take a look at this

We switched to this earlier this year and I love the damned thing so much. There’s a bunch of holes in the tray and the urine goes straight through onto this big diaper-like pad underneath. When our cat had raging diabetes, we were changing the pad every 3 days, but now it is about every 6. Instead of litter, there are pellets, and 3.5 pounds of pellets lasts a month (plus a bit extra here and there to replace from an open bag).

The stuff looks expensive, but if you buy in quantity you can get pellets for about 7 bucks a month and pads for about a buck a piece (bearing in mind that’s for one cat).

Compare that to the cost of litter and add in how easy and quick it is to clean the box (literally seconds because there’s no clumping litter) and this is one of those “where has this been all my life” things. I used to dread cleaning the box and it often didn’t get cleaned every day. Now I’m happy to do it.

I recently got a metal scooper from Amazon, and that makes a difference over a plastic scooper.

Also, I usually get my litter from Target, using as many promotions as possible, but Walmarts deal was a 24 hour deal. I just grabbed the only thing I could think of that I would need in the future and couldn’t go bad.

10 dollars off a 35 dollar order plus free 2 day shipping.

Looking back, besides games, the only stores I actually go to are Aldi and Target. Walmart is only ever on the list if I need Ice or Municipal Trash bags.

How’s the smell.

I’ve tried different litter and always went back because the smell was awful.

I had an automated system that used litter but the plastic gears would just… break, and if kitty had an issue that kept the solid from being well, solid, it did a terrible job with that.

I keep going back to the old way because it’s reliable and 144 pounds of litter I get from Costco breaks my back when I get the 5-6 bags in but it will last me half a year… and is something I just don’t worry about after that.

The pad has a light scent, but I think they make unscented as well. Odor control is generally better than clumping litter, imo. If the pad gets overly full it can start to smell a little (more an issue when the diabetes was out of control) and it starts to become a bit noticeable when the pellets are about due (or overdue) to be changed out. We found that a little sprinkle of arm and hammer does wonders if needed.

The pellets job is to dehydrate the poop. If they have flat out diarrhea, I could imagine it being a bit of a fuss to clean up if it got into the grooves/holes the urine runs through, so if that’s a regular thing, that might be a hassle.

That Tidy Cat litter box system is great if you have a single cat, it doesn’t scale very well for multi-cat households in my opinion.

Yeah, I believe they recommend multiple boxes for multiple cats. Definitely good to keep in mind.

Yeah 1 per cat, plus you would have to label them, so that cats know which is theirs.

For our cats, we’d need 7 or 8 of them.

Right! Can’t have cat fights!

Seriously, we started with this system and it worked well until our cat got to around 12-14lbs. Once full grown, I think she was too long for the box and would always pee in the corners, which would overload the pads in one area and spill out. We had to get a large covered standard box after that.

The other issue is that I couldnt figure out if the pellets decompose, so I was always wary about throwing in the trash. We use Dr. Elseys ultra premium now, and I sprayed the bottom of the box interior with a water repellant to keep litter from sticking to it. Seems to work ok.

I have one cat who refuses to use the Breeze boxes and another who prefers them, so it works out well.

They’re made out of zeolite, so no decomposing.

Not a problem here, even though ours always pees in the same corner. This is why they make the tray easy to rotate.

Talking about bait and switch, this is awful. What the fuck Amazon!

On Amazon, not BY Amazon. Look for Lords of Xulima in the bargain thread for an example. Frankly, I don’t find this to be nearly as reprehensible as Apple allowing clones of stuff like Pokémon or various pc games onto the App Store (a much more protected marketplace), which happens all the time.

“On Amazon, not by Amazon” and “on the App Store, not by Apple” are functionally identical these days.

“Selling a pirated copy of someone else’s entire game” and “selling a knockoff game using someone else’s IP on a different platform,” while both bad, are very different scenarios, and it’s weird to think the latter would be worse than the former.

I disagree. Amazon is, to the best of my knowledge, not curated in remotely the same way as the App Store is. Yes, Amazon has some culpability, and they should absolutely seek to put a stop to it, but they didn’t approve the item for purchase.