Warning. Was real good, now dishwater: conglomerate takeovered Good Earth Tea. Ugh.

[duccio]

Panama Reds, after the farmers' market today.


Good coffee at Reds - then I go home and find my tea delivered from amazon.
Good Earth Tea review: ★☆☆☆☆. Aww-full! Blecch-ch-cch!

Comments

[shinsetsu]

Yes. This is what you get for dealing with Amazon. Amazon is evil. I don't even visit their website. Seriously.

[duccio]

No, no, no. The Good Earth Tea was bought about a year and a half ago by Tata Corporation in India. The box Good Earth used to have first, pale yellow, with old fashioned, 60/70's hippie sort of design, that stuff was good. I used to get it at the store, and then for several years got it from Amazon and it was just the same and good. Then the boxes turned a dark red color and there was a noticeable drop in flavor. Now, the boxes are happy design with yellow/orange and buzz "natural" scrawled all over the place. No taste at all, awful, makes you feel a twinge of queeze.

I got 6 boxes of 18 teabags this time like I have been doing for several years. I'm gonna toss them they are that bad. TaTa Corp must have purchased this tea, seeing it as competition to some other crummy product they produced, and planned to ruin it. Nobody would see this stuff as anything but awful. The good reviews at amazon must be really old, or shills. I don't think Amazon had anything to do with this tea being degraded. It's totally something different and now, no good.

I get a lot of stuff frim amazon. I get pens and pencils, cell phone batteries and charges, other stuff. I like to buy books at the stores though - used if I can. I like bookstores, and don't want them to disappear.

[shinsetsu]

Funnily enough, I just read this tonight:

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/dec/01/week-amazon-insider-feature-treatment-employees-work

[duccio]

They're the same as WalMart. I didn't think they were so bad although I have heard a few things. I think I will de-emphasize my Amazon buying. Mostly, I buy from the "other sellers" there, like this terrible tea I bought, and hard to find books used from thrift stores through Amazon. I recently heard that thrift stores and "dollar stores" have awful work conditions and special unfair loopholes to enslave their workers too, like WalMart does. Damn. We need strong unions everywhere. Period.

[shinsetsu]

Have you tried Alibris for books? I always liked them.

http://www.alibris.com/

[duccio]

Oh, yes, Alibris, and that one Powell's Books in Portland OR. http://www.powells.com/

Lately, I have not been buying a lot of books from stores or online. Instead, I have been going to the auction house where I occasionally see collections of auction catalogs like Christies and Southeby's which are like fabuolus art books. I finally bought my first batch of them. 100 catalogs for $75. They sell before the auctions they catalog for about $35 a piece, so I got a good score. It was 4 milk crates full of art books - all recent! I'm still looking at them.

This coming weekend is the next auction. I'll be looking for some book bargains there.

Thanks for the Amazon article. Makes me sad first, then angry. I think it must be about time for the pendulum to swing back though. A work action/stoppage or riot there could wreck Amazon's operation. Keep their capitalist shit up and it's only a matter of time.