Thanks Amazon

[danalwyn]

Also, in things that make me grumpy, here I am being grumpy.

Surfing over to Amazon today, one can't help but notice that they have a number of Black Friday specials. And, because Amazon knows how to create a browsable web site, they've split those deals up by category. Some of which, honestly, I'm not too fond of:





(Image: Screenshot captured from Amazon)

Now, I suppose the objectionable parts are obvious. I have no particular need for electronic gadgets - in fact I don't have as many as most women I know. I do, however, need kitchenware (I live alone you know), which apparently is going to require a change of gender here.

More importantly though, why is it that men want TVs, and women want Movies and Television? Most of the time I have to say you really need one to use the other. So what's the deal here? Do we expect women to put their DVD collections on the shelf and watch them, dusting them off while endlessly waiting for an opportunity to show them off to guests? Or have women, after so many years of exposure to men who apparently learned their communications skills from a sitcom, finally developed psychic powers that enable them to comprehend the entirety of an object simply by touching it?

Now, casual sexism is one thing, but this is important. If women really have developed psychometric powers this is Very Big news and I think I should know about it. For one thing, is it now possible for them to tell what I'm thinking about. If so is there something I can do to find out what I'm thinking about? Because really I'd like to know.

I would ask Amazon, but given their inability to divine what books I like I'm not sure they'd be able to tell me.

Comments

[silverjackal]

Hah! I had never noticed this particular piece of sexist bullshit from Amazon before, but I tend to judiciously ignore their recommendations in any case. I pay attention to what other items people who looked at the same things as me were interested in because that can help refine my choices but the rest has never been useful so I just block it out.

[danalwyn]

Once you find one item at Amazon they are very, very good at finding similar items, thanks probably to the tremendous number of customers that they have. However, they have a hard time figuring out how to present you with what you want just in general - creating recommendations from your general buying trends.

Their "Deals" pages, and other pages where they attempt to group items into categories that you can sort through easily don't seem to work nearly as well, especially when, as in this case, the categories are stupid.