Amazon sells crap (not all crap, but it's a thing)

I freely admit to hypocrisy when it comes to Amazon. I used to decry Walmart as a destroyer of small retail business, but of course Amazon is far, far worse, having launched a largely successful assault on nearly all brick and mortar retail, with devastating effects across the land. Yet the convenience and fantastically honed service is addictive, and I shop at Amazon more than I care to admit. Which brings me to my comment. Not entirely original, of course, but worth repeating. Amazon engages in, or at least tolerates from its "merchants" and suppliers, a curious phenomenon in the realm of caveat emptor. I call it "quality counterfeiting." Frequently, if you buy a part, piece of hardware, or just some small utilitarian item (such as a sink stopper, which is what prompted this), and you buy one of the cheaper listings, what you get is an object that looks like the desired item, but which, in fact, is of such poor quality that in many cases they will fail in a short time or just not work as intended at all. They know most people will not bother to return something that only cost $5 to begin with, but it's really very insidious. Even things like fasteners and electric switches are sold that simply don't work, or break soon after purchase, and are essentially worthless. A savvy buyer learns to recognize this, and avoid the cheapest items, or items with few or no reviews (although once they acquire a bunch of bad reviews, they just pull it and release it as a slightly differently described but actually the same item; indeed the same item is often sold at different prices by ostensibly different producers, when in fact they are identical and equally worthless). So, indeed, caveat emptor. I've started buying things like this in... mirabile dictu ...hardware stores, where the price is higher but the damn thing actually works and lasts longer than a month.