"amazon" news and stories

Now that Amazon.com is selling groceries online, a whole world of opportunities has opened. Obviously, your day opens up since you don't have to spend time driving to the grocery store, pushing a cart around the store, waiting in line at the register, and perhaps even fighting with your kids about what flavor Pop-tart to get.

But an interesting thing has popped up with the Amazon.com grocery store. Customers are rating grocery products,just as customers rate books, CDs, and movies. This gallon of Tuscan Whole Milk has over 350 customer "reviews," also shows what other customers bought when they bought the milk. Hey, if they can tell you that customers who bought the DVD V is for Vendetta also bought Ultraviolet, Amazon can tell you that fellow customers who bought the Tuscan gallon milk also bought bananas, grapes and fresh vine-ripe tomatoes. Good to know.

No gift-wrapping on the milk, though.

Wow.

As if it wasn't already the world's largest retailer (aside from Wal-Mart, of course), Amazon.com has added groceries to their ever-expanding list of "stores." I remember back when online groceries and home-delivery was first introduced with PeaPod and WebVan. Both of them subsequently tanked, but perhaps the idea was ahead of its time. Amazon must believe that now is the time. Currently, they are only offering over 10,000 non-perishable items like breakfast cereal, microwave popcorn, and boxed macaroni and cheese.

Has anyone used it? Do you find that it's any cheaper? Faster? I imagine the convenience factor is likely the most attractive feature, but if you have to go to the market anyway to buy perishable items, I can't see that there is much convenience there anyway.

It's a popular week for the release of new cookbooks and cooking-relating memoirs.  A quick look at Amazon's list of pre-ordered books notes that the Food Network's Giada De Laurentiis has a new book out today, while there's also a new memoir from Julia Child, edited by her grandnephew. Additionally, Amazon's list of summer 2006 books includes a book by Bill Buford, the former fiction editor of the New Yorker. In the very well-reviewed Heat, Buford befriends Mario Batali, and offers a insidery look at the cooking world.

Amazon is now selling gourmet foods--a great idea, I might add. Soon, we'll be able to get everything off of Amazon. But, I was suprised to find out that they also sell bologna. Yes, you got that right: you can now get all your bologna fixes straight from the internet at Amazon. The comments are also quite amusing. And really, do they really need to rate this? It's bologna!

Source

Via the Cooking for Engineers Deals Blog comes this list of kitchen items on sale at Amazon.com. For those not familiar with CfE, the main site is definitely worth a look, if only for the unique recipe layouts. The flowchart-like format is a little odd at first, but after you recognize how the steps progress, it becomes a pretty useful way to get a handle on the basic procedure of a dish—shepherd’s pie, for instance. Also usesful is a built-in unit converter in the top right sidebar.
 
As for the deals on Amazon, some of the more interesting offerings—to me, at least—are the Lelo 4070  Gelato Junior and the Calphalon saucepan for 13 bucks.