Absolutely. Even though I find the Costco in-store experience stressful and the online experience lacklustre, I put them at the top of my list for all of my non-fashion shopping (unless I'm looking for dad clothes). I can always trust their products will be as high or better quality than anywhere else, and at the best or close to best price. And I have no worries about returns.
Compare that to Amazon, which I have zero trust in. I absolutely can't trust the reviews, and I can't trust any products are genuine (even for minor things: my last purchase several months ago were steel wool dish scrubs - name branded, but I'm certain they were fake). I also don't trust them to do anything about it, because I've reported fake reviews, and fake products several times, and all of those sellers are still selling with thousands of 5 star reviews. The only thing it has going for it is price and convenience.
The latest trend on Amazon seems to be selling items packaged for non-us markets and shipping them to us customers. I bought a two pack Duracell lr44 battery and I think the entire packaging is in Turkish? Or maybe some Eastern European language. Regardless, the battery is definitely not packaged in a way that’s legal to sell in America and the Amazon page did not say it would be packaged for another country. Super shady. And I’m not even sure how to tell if it’s not 100% fake and not just the packing for another country.
It would never occur to me to care, at all, whether something as trivial as a dish scrubber was a genuine name-brand item. What difference does it make? I suppose this is why I have experienced none of the trust issues people have begun talking about with Amazon, recently.
I think you're missing the point. The brand is irrelevant. The point is if they are faking the brand, you can no longer trust the integrity of the product at all.
In this case, it began deteriorating with steel 'hairs' coming undone immediately after first use. Should I be concerned about that? Is it even steel wool or another material? If the latter, is it safe and tested against items that humans will be consuming food from? Is it sterile? Were some other chemicals used to treat it for something as trivial as attempting to match the colour of the brand?
Compare that to Amazon, which I have zero trust in. I absolutely can't trust the reviews, and I can't trust any products are genuine (even for minor things: my last purchase several months ago were steel wool dish scrubs - name branded, but I'm certain they were fake). I also don't trust them to do anything about it, because I've reported fake reviews, and fake products several times, and all of those sellers are still selling with thousands of 5 star reviews. The only thing it has going for it is price and convenience.