I often see articles about a tech company delivering an egregiously bad customer experience on HN. I'm sure we all agree that the scenario as presented was a screwup, but I would like to question its relevance. We seem to be passing around such stories as a form of folklore. Why? As a warning to others?

Amazon's a huge company with surely millions of customer interactions a month. Let's assume by now they have adopted a mature supervision process for their CSR interactions. Is this mostly just a random event caused by an unexpected 'bad apple' CSR?

If so, it would suggest the 'error rate' in this type of interaction is really quite low. A customer service cosmic ray, if you will.