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Comment by birdyrooster | Hacker News Reader

As a wrinkle to this conversation, Amazons product and treatment of customers/vendors causes even more harm to the environment. People buy more things that they are unsatisfied with than ever before. There are more returns than ever before. There are likely millions more frivolous purchases and many thousands of tons of cardboard and non-recyclable plastics generated each year thanks to Amazon Prime.

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"treatment of customers"

I know I'm an N of 1 but speaking purely as a customer Amazon has been nothing but awesome. And I know that's probably seen by many as maybe selfish and wrong, and I get that argument totally. But I can the stuff I want* pretty darn fast and pretty darn cheap and if it's not what I want it's easy to send back. I understand that might be short sighted with all the drawbacks, but I still keep ordering. The pluses outweigh the minuses. Am I being selfish?

* Not the stuff I need, but the stuff I want. I think that's an important point.I guess I go to Wegmans for the stuff I need.

They used to be pretty consumer-centric a decade ago, but personally I pretty much stopped buying on Amazon in the last couple of years.

Having to inspect the items for counterfeits, dealing with support if the item isn't functional (or slightly defective), getting messages from sellers to "make sure to write us a 5 star review", eventual consistency on the shopping cart price (eg. if the price of an item increases between adding it to the cart and checking out, there's no big red warning like "hey this item is 30% more expensive than when you put it in your cart three minutes ago, are you sure you want to check out at this new price"), awful delivery experiences, it's just not worth the hassle anymore IMO.

wow. Am I glad to be in a country that bans most of these tactics by regulation. I have two weeks to send back items, no questions asked. Price isn't allowed to change negatively between when I decide to put it in my basket and buy it.

and I have never had an email asking for a positive review.

Another single data point here, this time from the UK.

On the rare occasions where I have a problem, Amazon are great to deal with - no quibbling about returns, no "30 days before refunds" (a lot of companies do this...), and they make it easy.

This is an angle I’ve often attacked when trying to argue (unsuccessfully) with a lot of my peers that Amazon is a scumbag big business. Sure, Amazon’s return policy insulates my wallet against getting garbage, but it doesn’t insulate my conscious. I liked Amazon for a long time because it saved me time and lowered my carbon footprint by saving me from having to drive to the store, but when I have to return an item from a third of my orders, usually having to drive to the UPS store for drop off, it really degrades one of the more compelling aspects that got me into the habit in the first place. Also cheap “good enough” products that don’t have a rigorous design process and carry no warranty are certainly unhealthy for the environment. “Scratching the itch of novelty” as a counter argument is very selfish in my opinion.

A lot of products these days are intentionally poorly designed with no longevity. "Planned obsolescence" is the term. Part of moving everything to as-a-service model :)

They've done everything possible to engineer impulse buying into e-commerce. At a high level, conflating excess with "convenience" is not a good thing for the environment, or for anyone but them.

I don't have Prime or use one-click and for me making an online order still involves the mindset of asking myself, do I really need this?

Avoiding Amazon also saved me money on my last purchase because I picked something up for $4.80 from Michaels on the way home from work when Amazon's price was $8.50.

That’s literally the same behavior of most stores. Your local grocery store probably is not laid out for the best customer experience, it’s laid out to best maximize profit.

That's just consumer culture, of which Amazon is an acute representative.

I am not sure if Amazon causes a net increase or decrease in impulse purchases. Worth looking into, maybe.

They definitely optimize for impulse purchases, which is the whole point of one click checkout and "free" prime delivery.

If you think about the process of purchasing as a series of decisions, each decision that one has to take is a chance to think "Do I really need this?" and bail out of the check out funnel. Say that delivery wasn't free, you could add add a $5 widget to your cart, then as part of checking out one has to think "is this $5 widget really worth $9 because of $4 shipping costs?"

Instead, it's possible to have this one decision shopping experience where the sole decision is "do I want this $5 widget" and if yes, click the button with no further input required.

Physical stores also optimize for impulse purchases.

There are more returns than ever before.

A lot of times when you receive a <$20 product, you just don't bother to return it to China and wait 45 days for a refund.

My fiance ordered a dress from Amazon that was shipped by the seller from China. She then attempted to return it per Amazon's request back to the seller in China. Amazon claimed they wouldn't issue a refund for the return shipping or the dress until it arrived with the seller. It sat with China Post for like a month, then mysteriously ended up back on her doorstep. She then spent another 3 hours cumulatively arguing with different CSRs at Amazon before they would issue her a refund, on the grounds that the package bounce was her fault. Through this process she was following their directions, used the shipping label provided, and generally tried to comply.

After that and after AZL failed to deliver yet another package to me and the ensuing terrible customer service I received there, I canceled my prime membership and have not ordered a single thing from them since.

It's not worth it because you can't even rely on their customer service anymore.

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