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Comment by wyager | Hacker News Reader

I bought an $800 winch from Amazon, shipped and sold by Amazon, in “new” condition. When it arrived, not only was it clearly used, but it had been damaged by improper use and would have been extremely dangerous if I tried to use it. If I hadn’t known what to look for, I probably would have used it and been at risk of serious injury. Amazon is clearly marking returns as “new” if their clueless returns staff thinks they can pass it off.

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Yeah, me too. I imagine it's a process that is difficult to scale without error.

I like buying Amazon Warehouse deals when the item makes sense to me. With larger items I think their quality control is higher, and the saving tend be bigger. The box may arrive super beat-up, but item is just fine.

My motivation is probably less about overall savings, but more about me feeling like I'm doing Amazon a favor. Weird, isn't it? I'm conditioned.

As a tangent: I've also purchased used that ended up being a return of a similar looking, but much less expensive item. So I just re-return it. In this case I assume it was fraud on the original return. With my patterns I doubt Amazon thinks -I- returned them the wrong item. Without customer context their job figuring stuff like that out would be much more difficult.

I wouldn't buy anything I need to trust on Amazon.

That's not just Amazon though. I bought a band saw from Lowes that once I opened the box had clearly been used and dropped, so much that the base was bent.

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