For me, Amazon cuts delivery times, improves reliability and makes returns 10x easier.
It has made life worse in small but tangible, concrete ways. I don't need it that fast, probably neither do you. You can blame enforcement or the individual drivers or whatever but I think that's a cop out. Amazon demands efficiency of its drivers, this is what efficiency looks like.
I was even able to get another 30% off an already sale price for a Kindle because my old one (>5 years) died, and they couldn't fix it.
Not justifying any particular actions on their part, but their customer service has been above and beyond and other major retailer I've interacted with.
Amazon earned my business back in the day, but they don't seem very interested in it anymore.
Hah, I have the opposite experience. My shampoo bottle leaked and filled a bubble wrap. Amazon said, "We'll send a replacement, but you need to return this." After discussing it, I went to the UPS Store for the return. UPS, reasonably, refused to accept it.
Had to debate this for far too long with another customer service person before they would agree that "We don't really want a ziploc bag of shampoo back".
But that's increasingly offset by an inability to find quality products.
You not only have to consider the money spent on shipping it back to them at their own cost but also then deciding whether the product is still in good enough condition to be resold or most likely it would just go wholesale directly to a business that sells returns at a cheaper price and they handle that checking / repackaging. That by itself still probably costs money to handle. At Amazon scale, all of that together is a lot of money.
If the amount of profit they made from selling to you is offset by all those costs, why not let the customer keep it and get free goodwill and repeat business?
Makes dumping what would otherwise be useful goods into landfills 10x easier*
I grew up in a place and time where scams were everywhere. I now invest in garage stage startups, and endlessly amused.
This is probably by design, but I don’t return a whole lot.
Unless Mr. Bezos has been putting on a disguise, and secret-shoppering his own company, I have a suspicion he has no idea how much his Leadership Principles have been eroded in the last few years. I don't think metrics will tell you that, when your staff has been conditioned to desperately make their metrics look good. The short-term quantitative metrics will be hit, at least on paper, and everything else will be neglected or outright cannibalized.