Caveat Emptor

It’s a jungle out there! When you are trying to buy a hammock, jungle doesn’t say the half of it. This article is intended to guide you past some of the pitfalls unscrupulous hammock sellers have strewn in your path. By the way, ten or fifteen years ago this whole internet hammock landscape was pretty serene. Most of the folks selling hammocks on line were actually human beings who had discovered them on their travels and wanted to share the good news in the frontier world of the internet. Not anymore. Many of the companies these days follow the pillage and burn philosophy of corporate greed. Listed below are three common tricks these folks like to play on the unwary shopper.
1. The first trick, which is a common one, is simple exaggeration, what is known legally as “puffing”. This can be as simple as calling a hammock “large” when it is not. In fact I would pretty much say that across the board if a hammock is called “large,” it isn’t. Most hammock lines start out with the smallest hammock in the line called “large”, and then add X’s and L’s until you are reeling.
2. The second trick is the fanciful measurement ploy. The length of a hammock is a pretty straightforward thing. You lay it out and measure it. But the width, ah, that is another matter. For bar hammocks and fabric hammocks this is not a big issue. But in the open sprang woven hammocks like the Mayan and Nicaraguan this is a big deal. If you lay a Mayan hammock or a Nicaraguan hammock on the ground you will find it is hard to know how wide it is. What some folks do is to have one person on either side pull the hammock as wide as they can and then measure the distance. A lot of 11 and 15 foot wide hammocks have been born this way. Unfortunately few of them can hold even one person, let alone two, in real comfort.
3. The third trick is free shipping. I have to tell you that hard as I have tried to get FedEx or UPS to ship for free, they just won’t do it. As shipping accounts for 8-10% of the revenue of an online business, one way or the other it is packed into the price. Now I will grant you that free shipping can be convenient in that you know the total cost up front. But it is not free. Not ever.
So the next time you see the ad for a Kowabunga XXL super huge family hammock “Shipped Free”, dig a little deeper. Maybe it is a really good deal on a really good hammock. But then again, maybe it is not!