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Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

> You'd have to be insane to buy anything you'd put in your body from Amazon. Just this week I received an obviously used item that was "Shipped and sold by amazon.com" and sold as "new".

I bought a new mp3 player from Fry's once which, oddly enough, turned out to be stocked with a sizeable music library already.

I'd still be pretty comfortable buying a candy bar from them though.

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In the case of Fry's, you have evidence that they've received a counterfeit product from a single supplier. It may be rampant, or it may not be. With that single datapoint, it's hard to say.

In the case of Amazon, we know them to have a long and extensive history of selling a wide variety of counterfeit products. There is not nearly as much ambiguity to the situation. Elsewhere in this discussion the comparison to a flee market has been made, and I think that describes it well.

No, in this case is Fry’s selling a returned product as new. This is actually the main reason I stopped shopping at Fry’s. It could be the case that the customer re-sealed and returned, but I’ve seen it often enough at Fry’s that I suspect the store is re-sealing returned product and re-sell as new.

I once received a Garmin GPS as a gift (back before cell phones had GPS in them). I took it out of the box and plugged it in and started setting it up. It had a bunch of information in it already, including a "home address" and several trips around Detroit at over 100 miles per hour! I'm pretty sure the gift-giver was not the one who had used it since the home address didn't match, and they were unlikely to be driving there that fast. I'm not sure whether they bought it online or from a retail store.

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