Amazon Has an Honesty Issue
bentasker.co.uk
bentasker.co.uk
I signed up for Prime a over decade ago because of the reliable 2 day shipping. It worked pretty much as described. It was great.
Shipping is no longer 2 days on most items - "Prime" shipping can now take 7 days. Amazon advertise same or next day shipping, but it's really only for big ticket, occasional purchase items. Most everyday purchases now take 3-7 days, the same as without prime. They show the prime badge, but if you log out you can see that non-prime members get the same shipping.
This feels really dishonest. Amazon pretend that you get huge shipping benefits from Prime, but it turns out you don't anymore.
For the first time, I've cancelled my prime renewal. What, exactly, am I paying for these days? Walmart offer next-day free shipping on the big ticket items too, without the membership.
How do I know that? Amazin charges your card only when they actually pack and ship the item. But the tracking on UPS will not appear until 3-4 days later
Another annoying thing about Amazon is the subscribe and save. They see it as one way contract. Many times I have subscribed to a product only to get a notification when it’s fulfillment time that was saying that the product was out of stock and I should choose a replacement.
That’s not how it is supposed to work Amazon. I take up the obligation to buy a product monthly and you should take the obligation to make sure it’s available.
It ended up being death by a thousand cuts for me and Amazon. I barely use it anymore
The shipping ETA problem seems to be very hit-or-miss. I've spent more time than I'd like to admit sifting through pages of "prime" results trying to find something that can arrive sooner than 3-7 days out.
And then sometimes every search result shows same/next day--but you absolutely can't rely on it because the packages have a ~50% chance of "running late" and get assigned a new ETA of what the non-prime shipping would have been. For order after order.
Not sure the logic in that.
That, or we're being experimented on. "What will the mice do if we poke them this way? The ants really hate it when we shake them this way."
That being said, I'm actually moving in the opposite direction since that creates a lot of waste. Unless I really need the item quickly I use Prime Day delivery so it all comes in one box. If my whole family didn't share the account I wouldn't pay for Prime.
I figure at some point I’ll fall below whatever metrics Amazon has internally, they’ll stop resending/refunding packages, and I’ll have to fight the same battle as in the article. If anything, OP unfortunately/correctly teaches that empathy, common sense, and treating level 1 workers as human have no place with Bezos…you have to assume the worst and treat everything as a cost/blame situation.
Edit: though my family in Rogers Park and the suburbs have never complained about this issue so I'm not sure it's that common.
I just don't give these tech companies any benefit of the doubt for the situation. My home is on a major street next to a door that has the street number displayed very prominently. As mentioned above, FedEx and others have 100% success rate. Amazon's delivery drivers just don't care, because Bezos has created a system where they are incentivized not to care.
Though Amazon usually is no help in the last mile delivery there. Encountered numerous stories of high rise package rooms that have just been overwhelmed by Amazon/since COVID. If anything, most improvement/success stories I've heard have been from a startup in the space, Luxer.
Several times I've bought something that I don't need that week, so I chose Amazon Day delivery, which allows all of my packages get delivered during the same day the next week.
I expected those packages to arrive, e.g. buying something for a gathering I'm hosting that weekend, but they are often days late and don't arrive in time.
Amazon was great for a few years, but it looks like something happened. They still claim they are customer obsessed and "Day 1" thinkers, but anyone can see the delusion. I wonder if Jeff Bezos sees that Amazon has gotten worse; it seemed like he truly believed in the company until his departure a few years ago, but maybe it was always just about the money.
Shipping is 1-2 days for nearly everything that is sold/shipped by Amazon, in my experience. Occasionally it's a day late.
The idea that most shipping takes 3-7 days isn't my experience at all. Maybe you live somewhere more inaccessible?
I always thought paying for Prime was about free shipping on small items anyways, not about faster speed.
If you’re in a metro area you’ll still have it.
I would not generalize from my experience. I would suggest that you do not generalize from yours.
I have no inside knowledge, but I suspect what happened is a bunch of crooks were hired during the massive hiring spree to keep up with Covid demand, and there wasn't capacity to investigate every fraud, theft, and scam. Internal fraud went from zero to prolific almost overnight. Prime also stopped being able to deliver in two days, and never recovered.
It's been three years, and it seems a permanent culture change at this point. The only CEOs I've seen recover a business from this sort of shitshow were Steve Jobs and Satya Nadella. Most businesses can't recover from this. I hope Amazon can, but realistically, I'm very sceptical.
On the upside, there's a huge opening for a competitor, if anyone wants to do a startup :)
However, it takes 25 years and unprecedented investment to build Amazon, warehouses, delivery schemes… Unless Amazon sells some of them with the automation, it’s extremely hard to enter the field.
(1) We are in an era of massive investments, much more so than when Amazon started. The billion dollar plus fundraising round is increasingly common over time.
(2) An entrant does not need to operate the same as Amazon. The sharing economy provides a lot of alternative models. To give a fictitious example, connecting with existing rideshare vendors for delivery and a network of local stores for fulfilment could give a lot of the same product without the same investment. Ditto for existing logistics players like FedEx (who do a lot more than delivery).
(3) It's possible to start in different markets, and especially foreign markets. A company which could do this play easily might be something like Aliexpress which already has a leg in.
There are many more models possible too, but the point is that building Amazon today does not need to the same as building Amazon in the nineties. Even building the same Amazon would be cheaper today, since we can learn the lessons of the existing Amazon.
In fact, just yesterday I ordered some vitamins for overnight delivery and they actually showed up in 3 hours, so sooner than promised.
That has happened on several occasions, and I can't recall every not getting something on time.
That's shipping.
But I do think Amazon has a serious problem with fake, incentivized reviews, and I have heard of, but not yet experienced (to my knowledge) counterfeit products.
Friends in other locations seem to have more of your experiences. I actually dread ordering from anyone but Amazon since the shipping is such a crapshoot for usually the same money.
What's more is if you filter for "arrives tomorrow" you'll get a bunch of results, but there's no guarantee they will arrive tomorrow - you have to double and triple check at every step of the order flow.
And yet, here I am, years later, still with a Prime account. I really need to make more of an effort to get off Amazon.
Maybe after Christmas...
The guy keeps on making this out to be the driver's fault, when only circumstantial evidence points to that. Everytime he was mentioning reasons to think it was the driver I, as a person who has worked in shipping and delivery as a hoi polloi, thought of reasonable reasons why the driver would act that way.
- The driver probably isn't even there when his van is loaded, so easy for a package handler to swap things out.
- A package with mandatory code instructions may have been in another part of the van, and could have been missed the first go-around by a busy driver. (edit: assuming it wasn't loaded into another van entirely.)
- Online tracking being off happens all of the time.
The police department will ask whether it was stolen from your porch. No? It was stolen from Amazon? Not a crime against you.
The insurance company will ask when it was switched. Switched before delivery? Not on us. We don't insure for that, only for what happens on your premises.
Instead of asserting their rights, they’ve allowed themselves to be subordinate to Amazon and Amex corporate internal processes. I struggle not to label that as vassal thinking.
No, he's told Amex that he will take legal action against them under section 75 if they do not fulfill their obligations.
> Since I have over the decades made several insurance claims that were paid out
By which kind of insurance and for what? It's important to note that for this transaction Amex is the primary insurance company (providing purchase insurance for things bought with it). Why would homeowners insurance provide coverage?
> I feel qualified to say that is a sack of lies
Prove it then.
Are you from the UK? I'm not.
Figured I'd reply once, at the current bottom of the thread.
> Since I have over the decades made several insurance claims that were paid out
I assume that either wasn't for this situation, or you are not in the UK.
House insurance *might* cover a package that was stolen after being left on the front doorstep, but it certainly doesn't cover items that never actually arrived at the insured property.
When purchasing with a credit (rather than debit) card, the "insurance" we have is provided by Section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act. For purchases over £100, the card provider (Amex in my case) effectively indemnifies the purchaser against anything that the retailer would be liable for under the Sale of Goods Act.
That's not a "provider being nice" thing either, s75 means that the contract for purchase of goods is with them.
> they’ve allowed themselves to be subordinate to Amazon and Amex corporate internal processes. I struggle not to label that as vassal thinking.
Or, perhaps, you know, understood how the law works where I am.
> When this happens, you call the police
Here, I'm definitely assuming that you're not in the UK. If you were, you'd be well aware of just how stretched and underfunded the Police currently are. They're not turning up for this.
I laid out in the post why I don't believe it's me who needs to, but as we're here lets take it one step further.
If I were to report it to the Police, Amazon may well try to use that as an argument that it's my problem to solve, not theirs. They would, almost certainly, pull "we can't do anything whilst there's an ongoing investigation".
That, by the way, isn't something I've pulled out of the air. Since publishing the post, I've been contacted by a lot of people - a lot of them have been told by Amazon that they "must" get a crime number: if they can't get the crime number, Amazon refuse to proceed. Those that did get a number... their cases are still stalled.
Reporting it to the Police not only wastes Police resources, it gives Amazon a means to try and drag this out further.
The correct procedure is:
- Raise it with Amazon - If Amazon do not/can not resolve, invoke section 75
I've no idea how the Police in your area would handle it, but here we'd be lucky if we were given a crime number.
> thought of reasonable reasons why the driver would act that way.
I completely agree, it could equally have been someone in the warehouse. That doesn't change my gut feel that it was the driver though and, really, it doesn't matter what my gut says: ultimately it's for Amazon to investigate and root the problem out.
I’ve currently got a DHL package in limbo that’s worth about the same and the main function of their customer service department seems to be to indicate that trying to consume customer service resources is not going to help you. Employees will give you completely contradictory and verifiably incorrect information.
* Packing people who don't care if high-value items are broken
* Delivery people who fake deliveries and steal
* Co-mingling of fake items with sellers
... and so on.
Because the delivery person wasn't investigated, they'll steal again and again, and that will spread to others in Amazon culture. Good companies do investigate issues like this one, and keep the business clean. Once a culture of theft creeps in, it's a lot harder to fix, and it oozes $$$ at a crazy rate.
This costs them a massive amount of money. My guess is there is no one in the corporate hierarchy who cares enough about their employer to fix it (everyone I've met who works for Amazon is a disgruntled employee).
There is a slight bit of short-term savings, but around two years back, I stopped ordering anything from Amazon which might be subject to fraud or safety issues (e.g. high-cost items, food, medicine, SD cards, SSDs, brand-name clothing items, etc.). This year, I cancelled Prime. There's just too much fraud going on.
I can't imagine Amazon is saving money when XBoxes and similar items get stolen, and I can't imagine long-term success if they're bleeding customers and brand value.
If AWS wasn't tied to the retail division, I'd be shorting Amazon retail right now.
Here, none was necessary, since I wasn't going out on a limb. I also do know enough people who work at Amazon to know that many of their SWEs despise their employer. Reporting (in newspapers) about warehouses is horrific. That strongly supports that Amazon is not tending towards the happy end of the "employees acting in employer best interest" curve. My own experience, my friends, and anecdotally on posts like this, has been very negative about the honesty and customer service from Amazon starting around 2020.
Now:
Corporate corruption is complex.
To give an extreme example, if one is at an Enron, one keeps their job by keeping their mouths shut and participating in the fraud. It's the likely whistleblowers who get fired.
This is not at all uncommon in organizations. It's a stereotype that working too hard at some union shops is not good for one's long-term job prospects.
One step down from that is employees who don't care about their employer. They want to keep their job, have decent salary, future options, work-life balance, and enjoy work as much as possible. If an employer doesn't fire people who don't work, no one works. If an employer has no means to check if items are correctly packed, very quickly no items are correctly packed. This is not uncommon at the CEO level either (at least for external CEOs), who mostly want to pump up short-term profits to get bonuses and prepare for their next gig.
Acting in corporate interest is only occasionally correlated with keeping ones job. In general, you need to keep your stakeholders happy (probably your boss), and the extent to which that correlates with business success is... mixed.
This impacts a majority of large businesses.
At scale of over ≈20-1000 people, organizations are dominated by incentive structures and dynamics you can model with game theory (ref: Bruce Bueno de Mesquita). The hypothetical business where everyone is aligned is, well, almost hypothetical beyond some scale.
It's not uncommon that in a large organization, zero people care about that organization. If there's a problem, no one fixes it. It survives in the free market simply because their competitors are no better (and how well large businesses manage this largely determines their success).
That's not to say Amazon has no limits - they do background-check for felony convictions, and having one would make it harder to get hired by an Amazon warehouse. However, they've still built a hiring system that optimizes for hiring the precariat[1] and underpaying them so they stay precarious. They've built all the economic incentives for them to be stolen from. We don't necessarily need to prove specific allegations of theft in the same way we don't need to prove that specific cracks in the road are caused by water getting in and freezing.
[0] For the record, this is a good thing, but Amazon is doing it for incredibly terrible reasons.
[1] The class of people in permanent precarity - i.e. people who you can get to do anything, including run a marathon across a poorly-organized warehouse filling boxes for eight hours for little pay.
To me, the issue is that credit card companies no longer exist to protect and defend consumers the way they used to. They're deep in the pockets of vendors, massaging their backs for a kick of the churn. There's room here for a very heavy handed, national agency in each country that makes these companies lives hell when they lie or drag their feet.
The word got out you can just call your bank and they will back you very few questions asked. This was abused by many, and now it's no longer a sure thing. Anything outside of outright fraud is very much a coin flip likely depending on how profitable you are to the issuing bank.
Perhaps I'm over-tired and missing your rationale, but: Why? Why do you think they're going to do that? Because the corporation will feel bad? Because you'll go elsewhere (like a different bank that issues cards that are either Mastercard or Visa on the backend)? Because "it's just as secure as debit, but they give me a free 30-day loan every month"? Have you ever tried to get money back from an authorized transaction through your bank where goods weren't satisfactory? They don't have your back at all - why the hell do you expect Mastercard to?
I think you need a lot of examples to draw any conclusions and self-reporting is going to be almost entirely negative experiences.
One of thing that most on people on the planet, including those on HN dont realise is just how hard logistics are in real world.
The existence of their best point doesn't obviate the existence of the sort of behavior that should lead to sanction, regulation, and reform.
I went to Amazon's site and tried to report the issue, but, at least for that item, there was no automated way to report a package as "not delivered".
But then there was one time where I literally got hundreds of dollars in refunds for a screw up on their end. I didn’t even ask for it — their guy volunteered it and I couldn’t believe he was serious. But he was: he refunded me for a dozen or so purchases to make up for one (expensive) item that was delayed past a birthday that it was supposed to be for. I got the item for free, and then some.
if not, you are screwed, because the customer support is worse than useless, it's infuriating
On a different note, it is not Amazon's interest to scam you. But unfortunately it is one rando's word (yours) against another rando's word (the driver, or whoever), without a lot of proof that could be sent to the police.
Personally, I'd never do a CC chargeback against certain companies. Too much risk of being cut off from a crucial vendor by a "customers who do chargebacks aren't worth the trouble" automation/SOP.
(For household consumer issues... if customer service was exhausted, I'd escalate to the CEO's office "?" email address, and if even that didn't work, but I really needed it solved, I'd consult a lawyer about whether they could negotiate a solution with a letter or phone call.)
Aren't there various payment methods?
I asked them to cancel the order after seven days, and repeatedly asked them to cancel, but they wouldn’t.
They seem to follow the old Ferengi adage of “Once you have their money, you never give it back”
Edit: I returned it for a refund, but was out a decent amount do money for a while.
In fact I tend to buy most goods via local same-day delivery or pickup.
I ordered a present last year, it was "delivered" to the side of my house when I was out
I found it a few days later, completely ruined by the winter weather
I explained to what they call customer service that their delivery had ruined it, they said send it back, which I did
few days later they're blaming me for returning damaged goods and trying to charge me for the damage
I contacted jeff@ too and the "executive support" were just as bad as the idiots on the website
I had an account for 20 years, now closed and I now happily pay more not to use amazon
I’d even go further and make sure there’s uninterrupted video evidence showing delivery and opening of the package. Open them on your front porch in view of your doorbell camera.
If you’re a victim of a fraud like this, first make a police report of the theft. Then contact the merchant. If you aren’t given a refund or replacement within the same time period of the original delivery, start the dispute process with your bank. If that fails, take the matter to small claims court against the original merchant. This is where you can take your evidence to someone who is local and who doesn’t work for the merchant. They don’t care about whatever terms of service, procedures of the company and operate under the law.
Most of the time the company won’t even show up and if they do it likely will be one of their juniors from their legal staff.
As long as you have evidence and a police report, you’ll get a judgement in your favor. Once you get the judgement, if still within 90 days of the purchase, send it to your bank to have the chargeback redone.
If not within 90 days, you will need to collect from the merchant themselves. Send a copy of the judgement and a demand letter certified mail to the merchant. You need to check your local laws on how long they have to pay it.
If they don’t pay, you’ll need to go back to the judge in most cases and follow the process of civil seizure. Normally this involves the sheriff or local law enforcement. One of the easiest ways to collect is to show up to a local branch of a bank where the merchant has money and have the bank execute the seize money from their account.
If you can’t find their bank, or they have no money, you can show up with the judgement and law enforcement (call them when you get there or follow the process outlined by the judge, sometimes this involves the local sheriff). You can then seize any property that might be at the location.
They are, however, habitually unwilling to investigate Postal employees in all but the most exceptional cases (and the value of the thefts is not sufficient to be exceptional).
Theft is much more likely than with UPS/FedEx overnight services, and it's nearly impossible to arrange the delivery so that the parcel is on camera for its entire journey, something easily accomplished with some other carriers. And if the package lost, prosecution is almost an impossibility, as is therefore recovery.
In the event of a loss, Postal Inspectors are typically useless for pursuing package theft committed by USPS employees, even with very high value because they live in perpetual fear of the APWU (their explanation, not mine). They also hilariously attempt to pass the investigative buck to local authorities, who rightly note that it was a Federal crime committed by a Federal employee on Federal property.
The Postal Inspectors recently had a high-visibility thread on another site that very much overstated their value, and ever since that thread went up that's been the narrative. It's wholly unjustified.
Registered Mail is the only USPS service worth considering for such items, and it's actually incredibly good, and tightly controlled. It's arguably the most secure service of the major carriers, and probably where that recommendation comes from. As bad as the USPS is at delivering everything else securely, they're excellent at getting Registered Mail items where they belong. Insurance up to $50K can be purchased (and sometimes over that amount).
For someone with no experience doing a one-off, high-value shipment, that is what I would strongly recommend. The insurance also comes without the endless hidden caveats one finds with UPS that requires a complex decision tree to validate, or the BTW-it's-not-actually-insurance aspect of FedEx's declarations (for which they'll happily charge).
Third-party insurance services are worth their (very reasonable) cost, but can be difficult for the average person to secure. Services like Brink's enter the picture when you start talking about moving items above that level.
But Priority/Express is the absolute wild west in terms of secure package delivery. Temporary employees working with no oversight, with a union that will reflexively and aggressively defend people even when it's fully aware it's defending criminals (sound familiar?), and unmotivated inspectors. It's a recipe for high rates of package loss, which is exactly what it has.
So, UPS/Fedex overnight is better.
Game consoles and guitars I generally buy in person. Sure, there's corner cases, like buying used (generally retro) consoles on eBay, but these won't be clearly marked as a game console.
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/amazon-workers-steal-140k-goods-dep...
I ordered a fairly fancy mechanical keyboard and instead got a used motorcycle cover. I did a proper return through Amazon, they even said via live chat that they were processing the refund. But the refund never came.
After two months of back and forth with I filed the dispute with AMEX. Amazon disputed the charge back. I had to dispute the Amazon dispute. finally, Amex did end up refunding the money even though Amazon did not.
You would think that fixing this would be simple: revoke the PSN cards and reverse the credit card transactions. Turns out, they don't do that. At all. Amazon insisted that they wouldn't do shit without a bank chargeback. I of course had already started that process with Chase. About a month later, I get a call from Chase saying they need to "move the transactions to the new account"[1], which sounds like a stupid technical thing, so sure, whatever. A few weeks later I get a letter in the mail saying the dispute was closed because "it was a dispute with the merchant" - no explanation what that means. They give a phone number to call that goes to voicemail - I called at least five times and never got a call back, and all $400 worth of fraudulent transactions were right back on my statement.
I gave up trying to fight shit because I don't want to sue my bank, nor do I want to fight Dread Pirate Bezos. I'm not suicidal[2]. However, it did teach me two things that have stuck with me:
- Amazon has a blanket opt-out with the credit card companies and issuing banks. I don't know how, it could be as simple as "don't waste time investigating likely false accusations of fraud", but they are able to win[3] chargebacks with credit card companies using explanations that look like someone just picked the first option on the form that denies the dispute.
- PlayStation Network cards are apparently as immutable and uncensorable as Bitcoin[4]. If you want to do crimes, do them with PlayStation.
[0] Yes, I was reusing passwords. Yes, I did change every password I had over the next few days. Yes, I completely wiped the machine and reinstalled everything. No, I don't think I should have been liable for fraud because of any of this.
[1] They had sent me a new card and card number at this point.
[2] I'm pretty sure the "slow and horrible" option in the suicide booths involves burying yourself in legal fees.
[3] Keep in mind that not-monopolistic merchants almost never win chargebacks or disputes.
[4] For an extra layer of irony, a few days prior, I'd written a long screed at a Bitcoin fanatic on Reddit about how credit card chargebacks are a feature, not a bug, and that immutable transactions are a design defect.
Not what I expected when I signed up as a Prime customer.
Honestly, a single chargeback will cause Amazon to cancel your account and block you from the platform forever. It's the cost of getting your money back :(
Recently they have been causing issues with a return they lost after receiving it and want me to recharge the amount.
High ticket items I usually shop around a lot to get the best deal and that's rarely on Amazon.
And I've found myself buying more and more from independent shops.
Anyone else notice similar trends in their habits?
https://apnews.com/article/jeff-bezos-leaves-seattle-miami-a...
Does it suck that it took extra messages for the return to be acknowledged, and extra weeks for the refund to finally get approved and go through? For sure. Does this mean "Amazon has an honesty issue"? No. Dealing with a package where the expensive contents were swapped out for other content is probably going to take weeks to resolve with any major retailer.
Trying to shortcut the process by filing a chargeback isn't going to help anything. You only do that if Amazon ultimately denies the return.
Of course it sucks it ties up that money. But they can also just leave the balance on the credit card for an extra month and pay, what, $8 in interest? Everything about:
> remain in a state of financial limbo for the better part of 2 months, spending Christmas wondering whether we'd ever see our money again.
feels overly dramatic. Anyone who can put a $600+ Xbox bundle on a credit card isn't going to be left in "financial limbo". In the end, they can rest assured that a chargeback with Amex will work even if it didn't on their first attempt.
Yes this is all annoying. But it's not some conspiracy. These cases are hard for companies to deal with, because for every delivery person who's a thief, there's a customer who lies and gets a free Xbox out of it. So they do take time and effort to resolve.
Maybe - but as he correctly mentions, in the UK, he's effectively buying the console from American Express because they gave him credit for it.
if they don't do it in time, chargeback is a perfectly reasonable
That's what I was saying -- the author wasn't even willing to wait that.
Naturally that was the end of my eBay account, PayPal unfortunately I do need from time to time.
I suppose this is just standard practice in the industry but wonder why it can be so consistently bad even with real evidence.
3rd package in a month that has gone missing. Posted in apartment letter box in mail room. Each time it is missing. No sign of any amazon packages. Neighbours reporting the same with their stuff.
On top of the shit show that has been the support situation during Re:Invent I'd rather use any other retailer or cloud provider.
Amazon are a fucking shit show race to the bottom and we should stop giving them money and let them burn.
And I mean, they’ve already started to some extend to deal with it. There are many cities I’ve been to that has Amazon delivery boxes where you can pick up your stuff.
I think that when drones get powerful enough, and regulation allows it, Amazon will adopt drone delivery everywhere. You get a notification on your phone telling you that your package is at the local distribution center. When you get back home, or some other day later where you are not busy, you tell the app to deliver now and within short time a drone drops the package off at your home any time that is convenient to you 24x7/365, even if it’s like 3am on a Sunday.
And for the rest of the journey up to that point, rigorous tracking and auditing to make sure packages don’t go “missing” on the way.
An Xbox was ordered that's classed as a "high value" item so requires a OTP being given to the driver to release the package.
The package was hand delivered to the customer when the customer provided the OTP, but it turns out the contents of the package were swapped out with junk.
The vast majority of them don’t (think/care to) use it. At this point I’m actually glad, lest they let themselves into the secure area and steal other packages.
Amazon knock on the door, if you're not in then they'll come back tomorrow, and if you're not in, then they'll try the next day. If you're not in three days in a row they'll hold the package for three days, to give you time to arrange one final delivery attempt to your home, Amazon locker or pick-up point (neighbourhood shop). Eventually they'll just take the package back and refund you automatically.
- Expected delivery on Wednesday, instead "delivered" Tuesday when I'm out by just leaving it in front of the front door, 1m from the street.
- Sitting downstairs eating dinner, my phone pings, Amazon package apparently delivered. But nobody rang the bell or knocked the door. It's just been left outside the front door again.
- Another "delivered" notification but no knock and nothing left outside the house. Check app, status is "handed to resident". Assume it's been nicked, but check with the neighbour just in case - thankfully they got it!
- My parents ordered some glassware, delivery driver dropped the package (marked Fragile) from waist height onto their doorstep, again without even attempting to knock/ring the bell. Footage captured on security cam. Obviously glassware didn't survive.
I'll still occasionally buy stuff from Amazon that's actually sold by Amazon, but I'd pick almost any other retailer over an "Amazon Marketplace" seller. Scam city.
(I'll search for stuff directly on camelcamelcamel these days, as the "sold by amazon" filter is gone from Amazon's own website.)
That's a huge loss of value.
The strategy was the right one, though. To put all of that in perspective, in 2018, it earned over 10 billion, and many businesses have since followed the Amazon model.
It's sort of a classic case study in business schools now.
(For reference, AWS was founded in 2002, and took some time before it made any sort of dent in much of anything.)