Is This How Amazon Ends?

When you’re shopping around for something on Amazon, you’re probably hoping to end up with a product that is good enough. Many of the site’s stock images and product descriptions have an unpredictable relationship to the objects you’ll actually receive; to guard against surprises, you frequently need to peruse the ratings and reviews left by the shoppers who came before you. In exchange for this low-stakes gamble, you get a huge selection of products, decent prices, and very fast shipping. Often enough, you also get a good enough result.

This balance is part of what has made Amazon a fabulously business. Over time, the company has transformed itself into something that functions more like a global flea market than a traditional retail store. Most of the products on Amazon’s website are sold by millions of third-party sellers, many of them outside the U.S., who construct their own product listings and mostly store their inventory in Amazon’s American fulfillment centers. Since