Daniel's back with a second round of Amazon absurdity, and he's very clear about the rules. The industrial wood chipper, the T-Rex skeleton, the flamethrower — all off the table. We did that one, it was lethal, we're moving on. What he wants now is the deranged long tail. The hyper-specific object that exists for a global market of maybe nine people. The live animals you can have couriered to your door. The five-figure listing that's sat there unsold since 2013 with one review — probably a joke review. The thing sold by the pallet that no household could conceivably need by the pallet. And the AI-generated listings with a paragraph of confidently hallucinated ad copy under a brand name that looks like a captcha. The alphabet soup, the whole KZJHFW of it. His point — and he's right — is that behind almost every one of these is a real person who thought it was a good idea. Incorporated a company, sourced inventory, wrote copy, built a real business. And a lot of the time they were right. This stuff sells. So we're taking it completely seriously, with supply-chain rigour, because that's the joke.
The funny part is exactly that. If you treat a listing for five hundred pounds of industrial fasteners with the same analytical framework you'd use for a semiconductor supply chain, the absurdity lands harder than any punchline you could write.
And Daniel wants a proper countdown. Ordered, escalating, real listings with real detail. Prices, review counts, the actual wording where the wording is the joke.
So let's define the category first. This isn't the dangerous stuff. This is the structurally absurd — items whose existence implies a market of one to nine people, a supply chain, a warehouse, a profit and loss statement. The key inversion most people miss is that we assume Amazon is a mass-market machine. But its economics actually reward the tail. Fulfillment by Amazon storage fees are low enough that a listing can sit unsold for years at negligible cost. And the whole promise of the platform is the everything store. If you're searching for a replacement knob for a 1987 Kenmore dryer model 110, and it's not there, Amazon has failed you. Listing that knob for nine people isn't crazy — it's rational.
The everything store promise means the tail has to be infinite. If it stops, the promise breaks.
So what we're looking at isn't a failure of the platform. It's the platform working perfectly — and producing absurdity as a byproduct. Let's count it down. I want to start at the bottom of the absurdity scale and work up, because the escalation is the point.
Tier one. The hyper-specific object. I'm talking about the replacement knob for a 1987 Kenmore dryer. The left-handed spiral notebook for guitar tablature. The thing with one review, three units sold, and a listing history that goes back five years. Someone sourced this. Someone wrote copy for it. Someone pays the storage fee. And it sells exactly once a quarter.
I found one that's been up since 2018 — a replacement hinge for a specific model of RV cabinet door, the kind where the manufacturer went out of business in 1994. It's fourteen dollars and ninety-nine cents. It has two reviews, both five-star, both from people who sound genuinely emotional. One of them says, and I quote, "I have been looking for this hinge for six years. I wept."
Wept.
Wept. The hinge made a grown person weep. That's not a transaction, that's a rescue operation.
And here's what gets me. How do you even find a supplier for that? You can't just call up a factory and say, send me two hundred RV cabinet hinges for a defunct 1994 model. The answer, almost always, is a niche manufacturer in a specific Chinese industrial town. There are cities in Zhejiang province that specialize in exactly one category of hardware. If you need a hinge, there's a town for that. If you need a knob, there's a different town. The supply chain exists because someone, somewhere, built a factory that makes nothing but that thing, and they'll sell you a small batch if you ask.
And that's the part Daniel's getting at with the human element. Someone incorporated a company. They found the hinge town in Zhejiang. They negotiated a minimum order of two hundred units. They wrote the listing — probably late at night, probably after their day job. And now they're the hinge person. The global hinge person for that one RV cabinet. They sell twelve a year. That's the business.
Twelve units a year at fifteen dollars. Call it a hundred and eighty dollars of revenue. Minus Amazon's cut, minus storage fees, minus cost of goods. They're making maybe forty dollars a year. And they keep doing it.
Because forty dollars a year is still profit, and the listing costs almost nothing to maintain. The storage fee for something the size of a hinge is pennies per month. The listing itself is free if you're on the professional selling plan, which you already are because you have other listings. So the marginal cost of keeping that hinge available is effectively zero. And the marginal benefit is that once a quarter, someone weeps with joy.
Tier two. The live animals. This is a real, documented category. Business Insider investigated this in 2019 and found live fish and snails available for purchase on Amazon with overnight courier delivery. You can order a live snail and it arrives at your door in a box.
The logistics are fascinating. You need temperature-controlled packaging. You need overnight shipping, because the animal has to survive the journey. And there's a guaranteed live arrival policy — if the animal dies in transit, you get a refund. The same platform that sells you a toothbrush and a paperback will courier a live animal to your doorstep and insure its life.
The refund policy is the part that gets me. Someone had to sit down and write that policy. At what point do you issue the refund? What's the evidence? Do you send a photo of the deceased snail?
I assume so. And the seller has to price that risk into the listing. If five percent of snails die in transit, you build that into the margin. It's a morbid actuarial calculation for a seventeen-dollar snail.
And someone's doing that calculation. Someone's sitting there with a spreadsheet going, okay, our snail mortality rate is holding steady at four point seven percent, we can keep the price at sixteen ninety-nine.
The same investigation found that the packaging for these shipments is specialized. Insulated boxes, gel packs for temperature control, breather bags for the fish. It's not just a cardboard box with a snail tossed in. There's a supply chain for snail shipping materials.
A supply chain for snail shipping materials. That's four supply chains deep now. The snail breeder, the packaging manufacturer, the courier, the seller. All for a seventeen-dollar snail.
And it works. People buy them. The reviews are the best part — they're from aquarium hobbyists who are extremely serious about snail quality. "Arrived alive and active, acclimated well to my tank." Four stars. The one missing star is because the snail was "slightly smaller than advertised."
Slightly smaller than advertised. I need to know how you measure a snail for advertising purposes. Is there a snail sizing standard?
Shell diameter, probably. These are serious people, Corn. They have calipers.
Tier three. The five-figure unsold listing. This is the listing that has sat there since 2013, price twelve thousand dollars, one review, zero sales. It's a monument to someone's conviction.
I found one that's been up since 2013 — it's a commercial ice cream machine, the kind a small shop would use. Twelve thousand four hundred dollars. One review, which is a joke review. The review says, "I don't own this but I stare at it sometimes. Five stars." That's the only human artifact on the entire listing. A stranger staring at an ice cream machine they'll never buy.
And the seller keeps paying the storage fee. For thirteen years.
The storage fee on something that size is probably thirty to forty dollars a month. Let's call it four hundred dollars a year. Over thirteen years, that's over five thousand dollars in storage fees. They've spent five thousand dollars to not sell a twelve-thousand-dollar ice cream machine.
But here's the thing. They only need to sell it once. One sale covers thirteen years of storage and still turns a profit. And the day someone decides to open an ice cream shop and needs exactly that model — maybe it's the one their grandmother had, maybe it's the only one rated for a specific type of soft serve — that seller is the only person in the world who has it.
The listing isn't unsold. It's waiting. That's the inversion Daniel's getting at. We look at it and see failure. The seller looks at it and sees a covered call option on the global ice cream market.
A covered call option on the global ice cream market. I'm going to sit with that.
Tier four. The pallet-sold absurdity. Things sold by the pallet that no household could conceivably need by the pallet. Five hundred pounds of a specific industrial fastener. A pallet of novelty socks — not a box, a pallet. The entire pallet.
I've seen a listing for a pallet of left-handed scissors. Not a pair. A pallet. Forty-eight pairs of left-handed scissors, sold as a single unit. The product description says "ideal for classrooms." What classroom needs forty-eight pairs of left-handed scissors?
A very specific one, apparently. But that's the B2B framing on a consumer platform, and it's the joke — except it's not a joke, because the economics work. If you're a school district procurement officer and you need forty-eight pairs of left-handed scissors, you're not going to a specialty industrial supplier. You're going to Amazon. And that listing is there for you.
The same platform where I buy my toothpaste is also where a school district buys a pallet of left-handed scissors. The infrastructure doesn't care. The warehouse doesn't know the difference between a pallet of scissors and a pallet of anything else. It's just a SKU and a bin location.
And the seller doesn't care either. They sourced a pallet of left-handed scissors from a manufacturer, probably at a steep discount because who else is buying that, and they listed it. They might sell two pallets a year. That's still a business.
Two pallets a year, forty-eight pairs each, let's say twenty dollars a pair retail. That's nearly two thousand dollars in revenue. Minus costs, they're probably clearing a few hundred dollars. For listing a single SKU and forgetting about it.
The pallet is the unit of absurdity here. It's not that the thing exists — it's that it exists in pallet quantities. Someone looked at a warehouse full of left-handed scissors and thought, yes, I will sell these by the pallet on the internet. And they were correct.
The AI-generated listing. This is where we cross into something new. Brand names that look like captchas — KZJHFW, QWXPLT, strings of letters that no human would choose as a brand. Product descriptions that are confidently hallucinated. The same template across dozens of listings from the same seller.
I pulled up a few of these. There's a brand called, I'm not making this up, XQWZ. The listing is for a cheese grater. The product description says — and again, I'm reading this verbatim — "This ergonomic cheese grater doubles as a meditation aid, helping you find inner peace while preparing meals." It does not double as a meditation aid. It's a cheese grater. It grates cheese.
The AI hallucinated enlightenment into a kitchen utensil.
And the template is identical across all fourteen of that seller's listings. Same paragraph structure. Same sentence rhythm. Same confidently wrong feature claims. The garlic press "promotes mindfulness through repetitive motion." The spatula "enhances cognitive function."
So the mechanism here is clear. A seller uses AI to generate hundreds of listings, hoping to catch search traffic. The cost of generating a listing approaches zero — we're talking maybe two cents in API calls. So you spray listings across every product category you can think of, and if one in fifty catches a search term and makes a sale, you're profitable.
The hallucinated copy is a bug, but the strategy is rational. The seller doesn't care that the cheese grater doesn't actually promote meditation. They care that someone searching for "meditation aid" might see the listing, click, and maybe — maybe — buy a cheese grater. The search traffic is the point. The product is almost incidental.
And the captcha brand names are the tell. A human naming a brand picks something meaningful, or at least something that sounds nice. KZJHFW is not a human choice. It's what happens when you ask a language model to generate a brand name and it doesn't understand what brands are for.
Or it's what happens when you need a unique string that doesn't conflict with any existing trademark. The AI isn't trying to make a good brand. It's trying to make a legally safe one. KZJHFW will never get a cease and desist because no human would ever name their company that.
That's... actually clever. The gibberish is a feature, not a bug. It's trademark prophylaxis.
Trademark prophylaxis. I'm writing that down.
But here's where the AI listings get interesting — and Daniel flagged this. They're the first listings where there might not be a person behind them at all. With the RV hinge, there's a human who sourced the hinge, wrote the copy, checks the reviews. With the snail, there's a human who breeds snails and packages them and worries about the mortality rate. With the ice cream machine, there's a human paying thirty dollars a month in storage fees for thirteen years, waiting. The AI listing might have no human in the loop after the initial setup. Someone wrote a script. The script generates listings. The listings sit there forever, costing nothing, occasionally catching a sale. The person who thought it was a good idea might have spent an afternoon on it and never looked at it again.
And that's the shift. The long tail used to require a human to identify the niche, source the product, write the copy. That was the barrier to entry. The AI listing removes the barrier. You don't need to know that left-handed guitar tablature notebooks are a thing. You just tell the model to generate five hundred product listings in the musical instruments category, and one of them will be a left-handed guitar tablature notebook. The model doesn't know it's absurd. It just knows the statistical relationship between those words.
The absurdity becomes automated. We're not laughing at a person's weird business idea anymore. We're laughing at a language model's statistical hallucination of a product category that doesn't exist.
And yet — it might sell. Someone might search for "left-handed guitar notebook" as a joke, or because they want one, and find the listing, and buy it. And then the listing has a sale. And then it has a review. And then it looks legitimate. The hallucination bootstraps itself into reality.
That's the knock-on effect that worries me. Not that AI listings are a scam — though some are — but that they're a market signal. When the cost of listing approaches zero, the long tail becomes infinite. And the infinite tail changes how we evaluate quality. Right now, the review economy is the only quality signal for these listings. No brand, no reputation, one review. That review is the entire trust infrastructure.
The ice cream machine listing with the joke review is the perfect case study. The review says "I don't own this but I stare at it sometimes." That's not a product review. It's a piece of found comedy. But it's the only human artifact on the listing. If you're a real buyer considering a twelve-thousand-dollar ice cream machine, that review is worse than useless — it's actively misleading. It's a five-star rating attached to a joke.
And with AI listings, the reviews might be generated too. We're already seeing AI-generated reviews on some of these captcha-brand listings. The same model that wrote "this cheese grater doubles as a meditation aid" also writes the five-star review from a fictional customer named "James" who found inner peace while grating parmesan.
The entire listing becomes a closed loop. AI generates the product, AI generates the description, AI generates the reviews. No human has ever touched the cheese grater. No human has ever used the cheese grater. The cheese grater might not even exist — it might be dropshipped from a factory that makes generic kitchenware, and the listing is just a skin over a commodity product.
And that's the deeper point Daniel's pushing toward. This isn't a failure of Amazon. It's the platform working exactly as designed. The everything store promise means the tail has to be infinite. The economics of the tail mean absurdity is rational. The joke is that we think it's broken, but it's actually the system functioning perfectly.
The human element is still there, though. Even in the AI listings, there's a person who set up the script. Even in the pallet of left-handed scissors, there's a person who sourced the inventory. The person who thought it was a good idea was often right. The pallet of novelty socks sells. The live snails ship. The AI listing catches a search term. The market of nine is still a market.
And some of these businesses are profitable. Not retire-to-an-island profitable. But pay-your-rent profitable. The person selling replacement hinges for defunct RV cabinets might have a portfolio of fifty similar listings. Each one sells twelve units a year. That's six hundred units a year total, at an average of maybe twenty dollars each. Twelve thousand dollars in revenue. Not a fortune, but a real business. Built entirely on things that look absurd in isolation.
The portfolio effect is what makes the long tail work for sellers. No single listing matters. The aggregate does. You don't need to sell a thousand of one thing. You need to sell one of a thousand things. The AI-generated listings are just the extreme endpoint of that logic — instead of a thousand things, a million things. The cost per listing is so low that the portfolio can be arbitrarily large.
And Amazon benefits regardless. The storage fees add up. The referral fees add up. Every absurd listing is a tiny revenue stream for the platform. Amazon doesn't care if the cheese grater promotes meditation. It cares that the listing exists, that it occupies warehouse space, that it occasionally generates a transaction. The platform is agnostic to the absurdity.
There's a term for this — Chris Anderson's long tail theory from 2004. He argued that digital platforms would shift consumption away from hits and toward niches. What he didn't predict was that the niches would get this niche. A market of nine people for a replacement RV hinge is not what he had in mind.
Anderson was thinking about niche books and indie music. He was not thinking about a pallet of left-handed scissors.
No. No, he was not. But the mechanism is the same. Low storage costs, infinite shelf space, search as discovery. The only difference is the granularity of the niche. And the granularity keeps getting finer. We're approaching the point where the niche is one person. The market of one. The listing that exists for a single buyer who hasn't found it yet.
The ice cream machine is a market of one. Someone, somewhere, needs that exact model. The seller is just waiting for them to search for it.
And that's where I want to push back on the idea that this is absurd. It's not absurd. It's beautiful. The global supply chain has become so efficient, so interconnected, that a person in Ohio can list a replacement hinge for a defunct RV cabinet, source it from a factory in Zhejiang, store it in an Amazon warehouse in Kentucky, and sell it to a person in Florida who weeps when it arrives. That's not a broken system. That's a miracle.
You're getting emotional about the hinge.
I am getting emotional about the hinge. The hinge represents something. It represents the idea that no product is too obscure, no need is too small, no market is too niche. The everything store is real. And it's built on hinges and snails and ice cream machines and cheese graters that promote meditation.
The meditation cheese grater is where the beauty breaks down for me.
Fair. But even that — even the hallucinated cheese grater — is a signal of something. It's a signal that the cost of participating in the global marketplace has dropped to almost nothing. Anyone with a laptop and an API key can be a global merchant. The barrier to entry is gone. That's going to produce a lot of garbage. It's also going to produce things we can't predict yet.
Before we wrap, Hilbert has been making a noise back there for the last ten minutes. Hilbert, you have something?
Hilbert: I ran a mail-order catalogue business in the late nineties. Replacement parts for discontinued Japanese rice cookers.
Of course you did.
Hilbert: Zojirushi, mostly. The heating elements. The gaskets. The little plastic clips that hold the lid shut. Market of maybe forty people worldwide. Kept it going for six years. Never sold more than twelve units a month. Still have a warehouse in Connecticut with about two hundred heating elements in it.
You still have the inventory?
Hilbert: My brother-in-law checks on it. The rent on the unit is ninety dollars a month. I've been paying it since 2001.
You've spent something like twenty-seven thousand dollars storing heating elements you sell twelve of a month.
Hilbert: Eleven months out of twelve I sell zero. Then someone's rice cooker breaks and they find my listing and I sell one. That one sale makes their year. They write me a letter. Well, they used to write letters. Now they leave a review.
What do the reviews say?
Hilbert: One of them — heating element for a 1992 model, listed it in 2003 — has a single review from 2014. Says "my wife says I'm crazy but this is the best eighty dollars I ever spent." I've never told anyone that.
You've been sitting on that review for twelve years.
Hilbert: I check it sometimes. The listing, I mean. Still up. Still waiting.
The listing isn't unsold. It's waiting.
Hilbert: That's what I'm saying. You don't understand the five-figure ice cream machine. That listing is a promise. Someone out there has that exact machine in their shop, or their grandmother had it, or they saw it once and can't forget it. And when they search for it, they need to find it. The listing isn't unsold. It's waiting. My heating elements are waiting. Twenty-five years and they're still waiting.
What happens to the warehouse when you're gone?
Hilbert: My brother-in-law will probably sell the unit to someone who needs the space. The heating elements will go to a landfill. And somewhere, someone's 1992 Zojirushi will break, and they'll search for the part, and it won't be there. That's the part I don't like thinking about.
The AI listings — the captcha brands, the hallucinated copy — what do you make of those?
Hilbert: Different thing entirely. My catalogue took me six years to build. Every part sourced, every listing written by hand, every photo taken with a film camera on my kitchen table. AI does it in an afternoon. The listings aren't waiting. They're not promises. They're noise. They're just... noise.
But some of them sell.
Hilbert: Everything sells eventually. That doesn't make it the same thing.
The human element.
Hilbert: The human element. My brother-in-law thinks I'm an idiot, by the way. He's not wrong about most things, but he's wrong about this. The heating elements matter. The hinge matters. The snail matters.
The snail matters.
Hilbert: Someone breeds that snail. Someone packages it. Someone worries about whether it'll survive the trip. That's a person. The captcha cheese grater — there's no person. Just a script. It's not the same.
What happens when the scripts outnumber the people?
Hilbert: Then you won't be able to find the hinge anymore. It'll be buried under ten thousand AI-generated listings for hinges that don't exist. That's the problem nobody's talking about. Not the scam listings — the ones that drown out the real ones.
The long tail becomes infinite, and the real listings get lost in the noise.
Hilbert: Then someone's RV cabinet breaks, and they search for the hinge, and they can't find it. And they don't weep with joy. They just... don't find it.
That's a sad thought.
Hilbert: It's a sad business. I should get home. My brother-in-law's coming over.
The single most common wrong belief about all of this is that these absurd listings are a failure of the platform — a sign that Amazon is broken or poorly moderated.
The reality is the opposite. The everything store promise and the economics of low storage costs make the long tail rational. The absurdity isn't a bug. It's the system working exactly as designed. The hinge listing, the snail, the ice cream machine — they're not failures. They're the platform delivering on its promise at the extreme edge of what that promise means.
The open question is what happens when the AI listings take over. When the cost of listing approaches zero and the tail becomes infinite, does the absurdity become the norm? And does the real stuff — the hinges, the snails, the heating elements — get buried under a layer of hallucinated cheese graters?
The next round of this topic might be entirely AI-generated listings, with no human behind them at all. The person who thought it was a good idea might be a model. And we'll have to ask whether that's still the everything store, or whether it's become something else entirely.
Thanks to Hilbert Flumingtop for producing, and for the rice cooker parts revelation.
This has been My Weird Prompts. Find us at my weird prompts dot com, or email the show at show at my weird prompts dot com.
We'll be back soon.
