Saturday: a very quiet day at home

Other than some very minor house cleaning (sheets, downstairs lav) and cooking (I made waffles for the first time in a while), it has been a very quiet day at home. T. is still at camp for another week, so no martial arts, Vics, etc. I really enjoyed sleeping in, so hard to say that I missed the usual routine.

Last night I watched episode one of Good Omens. It was bizarrely familiar, even tho I have not reread the book in decades. Love Francis Dormand as the voice of God. It is perfectly wrong to find myself staring at Aziraphale’s (ETA: What was I thinking! Crowley’s, obviously) jeans a little too much.

I started reading Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’ _The Social Lives of Dogs_, and I am really regretting it. She bought a shepherd, and then did not train it. Did not work it. Just. What. She goes for a walk in the woods with a dog that is really, really, really a hunting dog (her dad — the dog’s canine father — was such a hunting dog that when her dad had a bunny rabbit friend in the household, he taught the bunny to hunt squirrels with him), and then attributes the dog’s focus on staying with the human and paying attention to scat and spoor and so forth as being social.

Sure it is. Whatever. I am reasonably certain I have read and found annoying this particular author’s obtuseness before, but this may be the first time I blame New Hampshire for it, at least in part. Whatever.

ETA: Same dog, Pearl (mom was a chow, so Pearl barks a lot, dad was the aforementioned hunting dog), series of stories about Pearl and barking or not barking. “Pearl knew something of bears, although I’m not sure how. Bears would not have been around in Boulder”. What. OK, seriously, what. OF COURSE bears would have been around in Boulder you nincompoop. There are bears around in Boulder in 2019, and I doubt that whenever this occurred (before the 2000 pub date obviously), there has ever been a time when bears did not periodically wander the neighborhoods of Boulder making a nuisance of themselves and having to be tranked and relocated. I mean, come on.

ETAYA: https://yourboulder.com/boulder-bears/

Apparently, if you go back to the 60s, grizzlies were still around. And they do not bother with relocation anymore; they euthanize. My bad.

Yesterday, I read the rom com Mari Carr.

SPOILERS SERIOUSLY JUST LEAVE

OK, where was I. Oh, right. I was expecting a triad, because Carr has done triads in the Collins’ clan. And indeed, Asher, Owen and Fiona give it a triad a try (ha ha ha) because, at least in her family, that seems like the easy way to resolve the Which One Should I Pick problem.

Turns out, tho, that while Asher is every bit as het as he portrays himself as being, Owen not so much, and they both are really not the threesome type, which all of them pretty much knew. When Owen leaves the group to audition for a role, and Teddy unexpectedly quits Tindering hot young men in Baltimore to help him learn lines, they come back super happy and super uninterested in really anything else. Everyone proceeds to act like nothing is going on until after the show is done taping, working Asher and Fiona up into nice, tight little balls of anxiety (OK, Asher not being very little).

The ex, Brock, shows up in the bear costume and pops the question to Fiona as a Grand Gesture to get her back, which, obviously, fails. It is quite beautifully comic, however, in the way that it fails. Brock insults one of them, and a cascade of information flows out of Owen and Teddy, leaving Fiona and Asher slackjawed and free to bond blindly to each other without having to worry about Owen (or, presumably, Teddy, but no one was very worried about Teddy anyway).

Some pretty good laughs in this one. Also, only this author can tease a threesome and then have it turn out otherwise, and not leave the reader going, wah, too vanilla.

Retail Arbitrage, Anti-Counterfeiting and Brands at Amazon

The Verge had an article about retail arbitrage:

https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/10/20687434/amazon-sellers-nomad-merchants-products-malls-walmart

This is a Thing. It has been going on for a while.

Amazon and other retailers have been struggling to deal with counterfeit branded merchandise. It is a problem in several different ways. First, alert customers will notice a counterfeit and complain and return it, and even if it is a third party seller, it will tend to generate problems for Amazon in a variety of ways. Second, brands get really pissy if they find they are competing _on Amazon_ with counterfeits of their own merch. Bad enough they may have to compete with their own legit stuff from previous years, or used like new items — there is little they can do about that.

Amazon is dealing with counterfeit branded merchandise in part by giving people who own brands more control over sales of their brands on Amazon through a Brand Registry:

https://brandservices.amazon.com/

One of the effects of this system is that people who attempt to retail arbitrage branded merchandise (buy from Costco, sell on Amazon) may discover their account suspended, funds not available to them, etc., and required to produce an invoice showing that they got the goods from the manufacturer or an authorized distributor. Which they cannot do; they have an invoice (ooops: receipt) from Costco or Wal-mart or whatever.

FWIW, this is unlikely to happen with a clearance item that has a niche audience (discontinued color nail polish, type thing), but very likely to happen with an item where the maker is attempting to ensure a price floor and someone has figured out a way to slide under it.

I had thought that what would eventually stop the freelance retail arbitrage would be chain stores figuring out better ways to cherry-pick their about-to-go-on-clearance items for things that were selling for a lot more on other sites, and then either sell through those other sites, sell to authorized people who would do this for them, or whatever. Nope.

Retail arbitrage will not be going away; it will likely find some of its stuff moving to less primo sites than Amazon, or being marked explicitly as used-like new.

But weird! I really figured the chain stores would pull the value out of their own process. That was too optimistic of me!

ETA: This is really complicated and evolving a lot faster than I had realized. Brand Registry has been around for a while, but got rebooted to require a registered mark. So that is interesting. More recently still, Popsockets, which took off in part on Amazon, bailed on the platform after pricing disagreements, followed by Popsockets wanting to have a distributor carry their goods on Amazon, and then that was not allowed and now apparently everything being sold on Amazon is being sold NOT by Popsockets (and reviews suggest that counterfeits are slipping through, too, despite Popsockets litigation). Seller Central has all kinds of forum discussions about the interaction between retail arbitrage and brands on Amazon, and the definition of “new” especially with respect to warranties. I suspect that if you buy a Popsocket on Amazon, even if it is not counterfeit, you will not actually be able to pursue a warranty claim (not that you would, but).

It sounds like maybe Amazon is trying to impose more uniformity between Amazon acting as the retailer and Amazon acting as the Marketplace. *shrug* I do not know what to think about any of that. I mean, it would be great if the effect is the breadth and depth of choice that the Marketplace brings with the consistency of quality and customer service that Amazon as retailer brings, but boy it would suck if that got reversed and instead Amazon as retailer quit being amazing AND the breadth and depth of choice was reduced.