I’ve posted this a few times but here it is again for you:
I have managed to nearly eliminate Amazon entirely from our lives for the past two years. I usually find things by searching what I want to buy on DuckDuckGo and then adding “-amazon”, “-etsy”, “-walmart”, “-temu” and “-pinterest” as search modifiers.
A lot of little shops are perfectly legit, but watch out for:
Things being ridiculous bargains. Small shops will almost always be more expensive due to higher overheads and less bulk
Too much variety in product (unless they’re a marketplace with 3rd party vendors). A legit shop will have inventory that makes sense together in its theme. If they sell everything from bubblebath to uranium they’re either probably not actually selling it or drop shipping it.
Pictures that look like they come from lots of different sources, or no consistency in images. If they don’t have their own pictures of products or standards of presentation that’s suspicious
Some general recs that apply if you’re in the US:
For anything electronic or computer related: B&H Photo or Microcenter
For music stuff: Sweetwater, but there’s a lot of great small music stores, or you can use a marketplace like Reverb
For clothes: if you have any clothes you already enjoy, go directly to their brand website. If you don’t, go to local secondhand shops and touch, handle and try on some clothes to see them in person. I’ve discovered some brands I like by finding something in a thrift store that was well made but not my size or preferred color.
For house repair and DIY stuff: we order from a local building supply store, but there’s also hardwareandtools.com, 1stoplighting, Waysource, Lightbulbs.com, Timothy’s Toolbox etc.
For food items, local grocery stores often offer online shopping and delivery. If it’s a specialty item or imported the import companies sometimes have their own websites.
For cosmetics, skin care and some home cleaning things, there’s Hive or Grove Collaborative which try to prioritize sustainability
For tea, coffee and spices, Adagio and its sister websites
For that “everything store” experience, Costco will ship a good percentage of its offerings for free with a membership in the continental US.
For something hard to find you can’t find another site for, try Ebay.
I do business with all sorts of independent retailers and have only had good experiences with them. These are sites that I’ve personally bought from but there are a lot of smaller sites just trying to make a place for themselves on the internet
The “laughs” all felt from the outside. There was very little humor aimed at the people who would self identify as nerds and way more “haha look at these nerds and how quirky they are” set ups. Sure there are misogynist asshole nerds but usually they need to grow beyond that to find friends and partners. As far as I could tell none of them did. Sheldon and Howard were still super sexist, Leonard was still passive and whiny, but the story pushed forward foisting “perfect matches” on them.
Throughout the whole thing there was very little actual geek humor, and it felt denigrating to actual nerds.