In this video I took Amazon’s highest-rated budget backpack—the AmazonBasics Internal Frame Backpack—out on trail to answer one question: does it still suck, or were the critics just being elitist about a cheap pack? I wasn’t trying to do a full deep-dive review (there are plenty of those already). My whole focus was the “major flaw” that kept showing up in reviews from four or five years ago: shoulder straps that won’t hold tension. On my hike, the pack actually started off pretty comfortable, and if I knew nothing about its history I would’ve been impressed at first. But once I put some real weight in it and started moving, I could reproduce the exact problem other reviewers warned about. The shoulder straps slipped—sometimes just from bouncing the pack, sometimes from simply hooking my thumbs under the straps—and the pack kept feeling off-balance as the miles went on. My takeaway is simple: Amazon has not fixed the issue. And for me, that’s a deal killer. A backpack’s job is to keep the load stable and transfer weight to your hips so you don’t get hurt, and slipping shoulder straps undermine the entire point of the pack.