It is and it really sucks.

>By hiding the price until cart, Amazon forces comparison shopping to happen inside their ecosystem rather than on Google.

If that's what they actually did all the time, you'd be right. However, pretty much all the time (except in the past few hours), Amazon does not do that.

All you need to do to confirm that is a web search. What's more, if that were the case, sites like CamelCamelCamel[0] couldn't exist. Yet they do.

Amazon is and does objectionable things all the time. If you wish to dump on Amazon, more power to you.

But if you're going to do so, why not do it based on actual issues and not ones you made up based on what appears to be a back end outage (which seems to be resolved now, with prices, as is normal, prominently displayed on product pages ) at Amazon over the past few hours?

[0] https://camelcamelcamel.com/

Edit: Removed extraneous and incorrect assertion.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47266233

Once I worked out what I wanted to purchase, clicking the "Proceed to Checkout " button returns a "Sorry, something went wrong" error.

So not only are there issues with getting prices, one (at least me) can't even buy what they want.

It's not a huge deal (for me at least). Hopefully it will be resolved soon.

[0] https://www.menufy.com/

Yep. cf. Snyder v. United States[0]

[0] https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/06/supreme-court-limits-scop...

Hackers Expose The Massive Surveillance Stack Hiding Inside Your “Age Verification” Check

[0] I have no connection to this code, its github repository or its author(s).

And before the transistor, we had flagpole sitters[0] and dance marathons[1] and dozens of other memes, just in the 20th century.

This kind of thing is nothing new, and has been going on for as long we've been us. Now this is accessible to a larger and more varied audience, not just those who are nearby.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pole_sitting

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dance_marathon

What hassles have you experienced?

I use the Archive Page[0] extension which is really easy to use.

The only thing that annoys me about it is the repeated requests (starting about eight or nine months ago) to complete CAPTCHAs.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/archive-page/

What does this annoy you

Prior to that I was rarely prompted with a CAPTCHA. Now it's every. single. time. I archive something or open an AT link.

Why doesn't that annoy you?

I don't use archive.today. Why would it annooy me