Klein Bottle Amazon Brand Hijacking (2021)
kleinbottle.com
kleinbottle.com
I tried to move my purchases to Walmart and surprisingly, even after 25 years, they haven’t got act together. Walmart even haven’t recognized that they should jump on this problem by prominently showing authentic brand logo or something.
I also tried to move all my books purchasing to B&N and again, surprisingly, they haven’t learned any real lesson in past 25 years. Their website is clunky, they charge $7 delivery fee, they can’t even deliver to my nearest their own shop for free!
Amazon is definitely riding on this utterly deficient competitors and that’s why they get to be so complacent.
FWIW my main annoyance with Walmarts website is that it's not clear if you package is coming via shipping service like FedEx, who has access to my apartment complex, or just some dude in his car who needs to call me while I'm at work to be buzzed in
I get stuff from Walmart all of the time from their delivery drivers. The catch: I’ve never ordered anything from Walmart.
I don't remember the item now, but something I'd bought semi regularly from Walmart. It was boosted in my search/you may like results, which makes sense. Except the product was 10x the price, and not sold by Walmart. There's no clear indication of that until you actually click into it, though. So you can add it to your cart and buy it easily without knowing any of that, by design I guess.
It seems 3rd party sellers know how it works, and probably make a ton of money sniping out of stock items. I almost fell for it as I rarely scrutinize prices, I can't imagine how many people go through with it not knowing any better.
Convenience > Quality as dictated by the Median Consumer.
To elaborate - in NYC, I usually avoid ordering from Amazon for anything where it's cheap or something health-related, but even when I've sometimes given up finding it easily elsewhere and bought it there, it's not been, as far as I could tell, a counterfeit item.
That's not to say I can easily prove that or that I'm encouraging people to order from there, but I personally haven't encountered boxes full of things other than the intended item, or the like, and I would suspect the problem's prevalence varies heavily with volume (and thus, turnover) and location.
I don't trust Amazon offers because of this. So I either just buy the super cheap, disposable stuff where a trip to a shop isn't worth it, or things that have guaranteed free returns. Sometimes I'd rather order online because I have a guaranteed window to test and return if it's not what I want. For purchases in person the law here doesn't guarantee a return window for products that work but just aren't what I thought they'd be. Or I have to argue endlessly at the store for them to take it back.
Supplements are a scam industry, so you’re always going to have issues there, that’s a feature of the business.
Walmart's pricing is also accurate but their stock indicator isn't as good as target's.
Amazon perpetuates the stealing of IP to the point that they are the global leader. They use their market power to steal anything that makes money. Whether its directly, or indirectly as above.
This hints at a deeper problem; the fact that you can't trust e.g. the government to have an organization that tests and certifies anything sold, be it online or in shops. You should be able to trust things like vitamins when bought online.
Of course, if Amazon would only sell legit stuff, people would order stuff from abroad because like it or not, the general trend remains that people try to get the cheapest products. This is why legitimate products are pushed out of the market. This is why Amazon and Walmart pushed out local shops. Free rein capitalism.
In the US, for things like supplements and vitamins, the regulations are extremely lax. There isn't really any enforcement of the labels being accurate. There isn't really enforcement until people are already being injured in the market.
The only way to actually know what's in that vitamin pill is for you to send it to a lab you trust. The next step down from there is only buy reputable brands from reputable stores but even then, it can be a crapshoot. With RFK at the helm, expect this to get worse and not better.
Gotta love Mel Gibson's fear mongering political ad about vitamins to really show how absurd the messaging was in '94.
I am astonished that brick-and-mortar merchants haven't banded together to get someone to build a decent e-commerce front end for their local stock. That would be a killer app.
https://www.amazon.com/stores/RIVALZ/page/5690A202-6DDB-42BA...
because my wife found one flavor, slightly expired, at the Amish market and liked it fell through when I tried to buy it straight from the vendor because they charged my credit card with a scammy-looking name neither I nor American Express had ever heard of. Can't get it at Walmart.com, so... (For that matter, Walmart had the first five books of Bocchi the Rock and #7 but not #6)
Ever since the time I saw a product listing though which made no sense at all and reported it and got a reply that they don't care if I didn't buy it I started losing trust. Didn't help that 2 day delivery became 5 days suddenly and the fact that I live in a rural area is no excuse because I used to see an AMZN delivery truck driving around in my neighborhood every Sunday. After I quit Prime they started giving me free trials or a week for $2 whenever I bought something and... now I get the 2 day delivery everyone else gets.
Wonder if it's similar to what this comment mentions about Amazon (even down to the example being 5 and 7 but no 6): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44354938 Maybe Walmart is trying to match Amazon's stock to avoid spending too much to compete with them.
Amazon feels a lot more customer-centric than other retailers. It's a perennial complaint of mine that we still get frickin' cold days in April in upstate NY but all the home improvement and rural things retailers in my town are based in the deep South so they just can't get it that you might need a space heater or your chickens might die but Amazon does. (Well, there was a day that the rest of the country complained everything was run out of New York...)
Amazon lists thousands of junk products from China that violate US laws around product safety. Toys containing lead paint, crib bumpers that can suffocate babies, etc. The process seems to be that Amazon just needs to remove the product in violation but it really appears that this is a wholesale attempt on Amazon's part to circumvent legislation. It should not be this trivial for consumers to find products that are potentially dangerous.
Today, you can only buy two kinds of such products: The (I assume Alibaba-sourced) Amazon Marketplace, fulfilled by Amazon items which are never UL listed, and brand-name items from a brick and mortar store, which cost 8x the price of the equivalent 'Amazon special.'
I know "UL" is just a label and that not having it doesn't necessarily prove anything, but absent any form of certification, an device on Amazon Marketplace may come from a vendor that has literally never even submitted a sample for quality testing to anyone. BigClive on YouTube has shown some shocking (literally) teardowns.
I've heard that insurance companies will deny a claim if your house burns down due to a non-UL-listed device causing a fire. Terrifying.
> insurance companies
UL stands for underwriter's (aka insurers) laboratories
For that point, yes it is "just a label", even though the context behind the label / the label's meaning is very important.
Why are we romanizing middle-men between you and a web form?
At this point, if it's online, it's worse/crap/designed to screw you and whoever you are dealing with as much as it can get away with.
This doesn’t follow.
That's the big thing for me. I don't live close to a big city, so local selection is pretty limited. For some things there isn't even a local store available.
For obscure items, all it takes is once from Amazon to kill you:
He lives in Seattle.
It really feels like people's behaviors have been permanently changed for the worst, even if a "proper" competitor comes in.
I no longer have prime shipping, and seeing "shipping: $5" next to anything on Amazon definitely helps me to do at least cursory searches in local stores... would probably be a net benefit to society to outlaw Prime
As a result, nearly all pharmacies here dropped the entire lines of making medication on-site and selling chemicals, because only the latter kept the former financially viable.
So, your only options left are either: a) buy from Amazon or eBay sellers that outright don't care about the German peculiarities or b) if you manage to qualify, buy from the usual selection of lab supply wholesalers. But something like "start a German NileRed channel", that's completely out of the question. The kind of stuff he buys, no way to get that without a commercial entity, and good luck getting that in place without at least a bachelor's degree in chemistry.
> The kind of stuff he buys, no way to get that without a commercial entity, and good luck getting that in place without at least a bachelor's degree in chemistry.
NileRed has a Bachelor of Science degree in biochemistry with a minor in pharmacology.
You can also just make most things yourself. It isn't cost effective for a commercial entity (due to wages for highly educated professionals) but for a hobbyist, who cares? That of course calls into question the bulk of the regulatory approach. When I can pull up a youtube video of someone making solid rocket fuel with a plastic jug and a phone charger what was the point of requiring all the paperwork?
If you're lucky the recommended videos will even have footage of someone getting arrested for misusing something substantially similar.
TIL, didn't know that. Acetone is right next to peroxide in the local household items store (in the Netherlands) over here. But a few aisles over you can also find CBD oil and melatonin, heavy duty painkillers like diclofenac, etc.
There's a reason why you can't get industrial strength cleaners in a Walmart - too many people would either seriously injure themselves because they don't know they actually need PPE or otherwise this stuff will break down their skin, because they mix it and make enough mustard gas to actually kill them, or because they break down their homes because guess what, a highly acidic cleaning agent and most kinds of stone don't mix.
Of course, yes, one can try to concentrate H2O2 but there's easier and less messy ways to off oneself than this.
his thing was mostly "pharmacies don't have _anything_" which just feels like a pretty spurious claim.
Stoll's site, the Klein bottle hats and Mobius scarves! "Two manifolds for one low price". I'm after those for autumn.
I recently spent a year in Shanghai, and when I would ask a friend where to go to buy something I needed, the response was always a confused "buy it online and have it delivered".
I don't care for that. I'd like to have things available in stores.
It's easy to sneeze at "deficient competitors" as well, but the whole massive spend on infrastructure - warehouses, delivery vans, etc. is hard to replicate. In one sense, it's worth an antitrust look if that whole system essentially stiles competition
Strange in a way how saving 2 minutes is a differentiator online. Back in the brick-and-mortar days you'd spend 2 minutes at a stoplight on the way to the store without even thinking about it.
And ordering from catalogs? If I got the item in two weeks that seemed pretty fast.
Increasingly, I find these just linking to the corresponding Amazon listing.
> or another big retail site such as ebay or walmart.com…
Same strategy/problem there, IMO.
Perhaps that acquaintance was in a similar situation.
Stores may have it, but have it locked up or behind the counter (or just not carry it at all) my (seattle) grocery store carries hand sanitizer, but not on the shelf. You have to find an employee (good luck...) and ask them to go get it from the back/wherever. Or order the same product on Amazon for same-day delivery for the same price or cheaper :-/
(*) Of course you pay for shipping via the purchase price but you do that even if you order individual items and also with Prime.
It’s a tough problem I guess with so many stock systems out there and inevitably whoever creates the site will want to monetise it, then slowly enshitify it.
People are going to discover your prices anyway. Hiding them just means it will take longer. I remember my grandpa used to go to five different grocery stores weekly, just to do grocery shopping, because he knew store A had the cheapest eggs, store B had the cheapest vegetables, store C had the cheapest milk, and so on.
Here's an example:
https://www.google.com/search?q=rubbing+alcohol+nearby&udm=2...
There was a cool design (or at least I thought so) I came up with. Had about 100 of those printed.
Went to Amazon to get a seller account:
1) learned that if I had only 1 tee-shirt with a single design to sell, I couldn't get the account.
2) after researching the competition, discovered that many of the tee-shirt designs for sale were:
a) clearly in copyright violation (e.g. Disney characters on some mom & pop store.
b) their images on their store were just a photoshopped tee-shirt. I.e., not photos of the actual tee-shirt they had for sale. But the design photoshopped on to a photo of a blank tee-shirt.
I'm not complaining, cause I love my Mario/Banksy crossover t-shirt, but it's just how it is, Disney & co just don't bother going after them, they're happy to sell you their official™ stuff through other channels.
If you hire someone to print it on the shirt for you, and then distribute the shirt, you would be liable for copyright infringement, not the printer, because the printer isn't supplying the artwork, you are. It's no different than placing phone calls to perform an illegal activity. The phone provider isn't guilty, but you are.
If you order a custom shirt, and provide unlicensed copyrighted artwork, but don't distribute it, then no one is in a position to get in trouble.
So I assume that a lot of self-publishing type companies may refuse to do copyrighted stuff, even for one-off jobs.
But it's entirely possible that I'm crazy, anyway. You're probably quite perceptive.
It’s still discouraging, though, as the attitude actually hurts the lower-level folks, much more than the bosses, who have learned to “game the system.”
In some cases, though, like at trade shows and tech conferences, we were required to wear it.
So torrenting movies is legal?
That is just not true. A copyright gives the owner thereof exclusive rights to make a copy of his work. Neither the creator nor the copier have to sell anything.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/106
Noncommercial use is a factor to be considered for fair use if the copier is doing it for a protected purpose. (Creating a t-shirt for your personal use is not a protected purpose and can therefore never be fair use on its own though.)
The reason someone making a personal shirt doesn't get sued is because suing people is expensive, that harms goodwill, and Disney isn't getting any money from such a person anyway.
The books are very low quality with poor typesetting that makes them unpleasant to read.
I went to barnesandnoble.com to check this out.
There's a banner at the top of the page:
> Uh-oh, it looks like your Internet Explorer is out of date.
> For a better shopping experience, please upgrade now.
The words "upgrade now" link to http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/internet-explorer/downloa... .
It does look like you're right that they won't ship books to your local B&N:
> Other reasons that an item may not be available for Buy Online, Pick Up in Store include:
> The item is out of stock in your selected store
This is very odd, because they will do that if you go into the store and order from there.
B&N bought Fictionwise, and first thing they did was determine that you need to be physically inside USA to download stuff.
Now only way for me to get those books is pirated. :( Maybe I should just download them pirated and donate the price of the books directly to the author account or something. I really don't understand what is the problem of B&N or how they still exist, they are literally anti-business.
Walmart does (or at least did) something similar.
* About 7 years ago, I purchased a toy drone online from Walmart for one of my sons for Christmas.
* I purchased it before Thanksgiving because the Walmart website urged me to purchase in time for Christmas delivery.
* My son opened the gift on Christmas and the drone was broken (out of the box).
* I tried to return the drone to a brick-and-mortar Walmart store and they told me that they couldn't issue a refund because I bought it on their website, but it was through a 3rd party seller. I had to take it up with the 3rd party.
* Remember the part where I said I bought the drone before Thanksgiving?? Well, I contacted the 3rd party and was told they had a strict 30 day return policy and they could not issue a refund.
It was a cheap gift, but the whole ordeal bothers me to this day.
This isn't just Walmart though. Most non-Amazon websites have a similar option. Lowes, Target, NewEgg...
You'd think they could use some exception for defective items versus just normal return/exchange, but they rarely do
I couldn’t help to think that I wanted anything but that. I want a lot of items, but I prefer quality items over random crap.
My sister works in manga and anime publishing and this is an existential threat to her company. Some of the issues they're grappling with:
1. For some of their titles, the genuine item doesn't even appear among search results on Amazon—only the counterfeits do.
2. The quality issues with the counterfeits can result in losing all future business from a customer. For example, download codes will be missing or non-functional. Irrational as it is, customers blame the publisher when this happens and stop buying further titles from them.
3. Amazon seems to be using some slapdash ML to determine how many of each title to order. They'll purchase 10k of vols. 5 and 7 of a series and only 1k of vol. 6. Guess how many of that 10k of vol. 7 end up selling when that happens?
Amazon is, needless to say, non-responsive to their concerns.
I've noticed that too in manga. It's amazing they screw it up so bad, given their origin as a book seller.
I suspect when there are gaps that either the counterfeiters win or nobody wins.
Maybe you can round up enough people for a common cause as discussed in the article, but that doesn't scale. Take notice that for all its talk about America first policy & general sinophobia, the current admin in Washington hasn't done anything about this either. They don't care about American small businesses or consumers. They only care about people like Jeff Bezos, the Waltons, etc.
Point being: it doesn’t matter if Walmart does this, because it’s already an empty promise from them, too.
Just stop shopping at these behemoths.
At least users will correctly blame some well-known brand for their shoddy craftsmanship.
>Wal-Mart is not just the world’s largest retailer. It’s the world’s largest company–bigger than ExxonMobil, General Motors, and General Electric. The scale can be hard to absorb. Wal-Mart sold $244.5 billion worth of goods last year. It sells in three months what number-two retailer Home Depot sells in a year.
Ah, the innocence of 2003.
What the fuck, guys.
Imagine if you were standing in front of a narcotics officer on the street, and you say to your friend "Hey, I have some Cane-Coke available. wink. Want to buy it?" He's standing right there, and doesn't bat an eye.
That's Amazon. They care about following laws, regulations, etc. exactly enough to have plausible deniability and no further. Oh gee, Sarge, that guy was speaking in code and I had no idea he was selling drugs.
If they cared, they'd ban sellers immediately for evading a filter, and raise barriers to entry until it was painful to start a new account. Like requiring every seller to have a US entity with a real business license and an identity-verified named agent, and ban the agent and anyone else they represent for violations. This is just one quick idea but by no means the only way. But you can bet Amazon would never even try to police their marketplace better because they'd rather just skim their cut of both legitimate and fraudulent or illegal activity.
I actually made pretty good experiences with eBay.
Another pain point is shipping costs. With Amazon I can just filter for free shipping with whatever the current minimum-purchase price for that is whereas elsewhere I am too often surprised by unreasonably high shipping charges designed to make the purchase price look better on comparison sites.
I didn't understand how hijacking worked on Amazon until I read this lucid explanation. Clearly he's still a great writer.
He's on Hacker News as CliffStoll. This makes me wonder how Hacker News deals with someone registering a famous person's name if they are not that person? I'm guessing that it's not a big problem here on HN because there's nothing being sold.
I think most younger readers will be familiar through his videos on the Numberphile YouTube channel.
I had the klein stein at one point, but got rid of it when downsizing. It was hard to clean, so not practical for drinking, and not as pretty on the shelf as a classic klein bottle. I'd recommend one of those if you're thinking of getting one.
"The KGB, the Computer, and Me".
It can be found online, and it's worth a watch just because of him.
The man exudes good humor and niceness.
I registered as britneyspears, but dang got mad and made me change it. :(
I thought the absurdity of Britney being on HN was amusing.
Since then, I've lowered my periscope: my wife, Pat, and I decided to stay home together and raise two kids. They're now fledged - hooray! During that time, I started this micro-business of making Klein bottles - much fun!
Alas, but this past December, my wife left this vale of toil and tears. During the day, staying busy helps keep the grief under control; other times I'm in deep sadness, trying to find my way without her.
To all my friends & acquaintances on HN: my deep thanks for your kindness & support across decades. It's a joy to be considered a member of the tribe.
I saw Cliff speak twice at the Dayton Hamvention. The first time was a retelling of his Cuckoo's Egg story, and the second time was about the joy of learning and all the marvelous things you could get at the flea market to build something.
Thanks, Cliff!
But Amazon Canada listing is still held by Amvoom. I'm unable to sell Klein bottles in Canada. sigh
If anyone knows how to fix this, please send email to me!
Many thanks, -Cliff
All of a sudden, I got three or four Klein bottle orders. That's a lot for an hour! One of the orders (thank you Bryan in Johnstown) mentioned Hacker News. And, well, here I am.If you still handcraft each personally, that's keine kleine Klein problem.
Keep 'em all guessing.
It's how I cheat my chiropractor.
I got hooked on them during college because I got tired of getting shafted by the local university bookstore.
Used to be tax free as well since they were e-commerce related. But state comptrollers later closed that loop hole since they realized how much revenue they were losing.
Then some time in 2020-2021 learned about the abuses to their workers, awful working conditions, near impossible quotas. Then came the merchant abuse stories of AMZN using the purchasing data to push out their own white label items, advertising/ranking merchants below those items (sometimes even cheaper to undercut them). Then as a consumer, the quality of the items ordered from AMZN has dropped significantly.
Free shipping. Free returns. 1-day shipping/same day shipping. It’s all a gimmick and you pay for it in one way or another.
All of those factors have caused me to move my money away from AMZN completely.
Yes I realize warehouse division is nearly subsidized by AWS division. In the long run, it won’t matter unless there is a significant
What did I do:
Easy, purchase directly from manufacturer where possible. Shop local for similar items.
Still try to avoid big box stores as much as possible. For example, using mcmaster.com in place of big orange/blue.
Sure I pay for shipping but I end up buying in bulk to offset it anyways.
Sure it takes 3-4 days to arrive.
I likely won’t get free return shipping, but so far have never had to return items. ("Free returns” at most big box stores are now factored into the cost of items these days. So you pay for it even if you don’t use it)
But in the end, I am getting quality products. I think I can only recall a couple of cases where item did break under normal condition (dog harness). But they were happy to replace at no cost. No need to return defective item.
Yes but I actually much prefer that cost to be included in the list price compared to sellers trying to hide part of the purchase price in inflated shipping costs.
And competition who refuses to offer comparable services to entice customers.
I want to believe, I try to spend my money where I think it matters, but it just seems so pointless at the scale of Amazon, BP, Comcast, etc.
https://archive.org/details/SearsCraftsmanPowerAndHandTools1...
He wrote "The Cuckoo's Egg" which is a riveting tale, capable of entertaining nerds and non-nerds alike.
He sells glass Klein Bottles, huge, medium, tiny, earrings, and more.
He's given a TED talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gj8IA6xOpSk
He's brilliant, bonkers, and wonderful company. I spent a fantastic morning with him early last year (2024) and it was brilliant fun. I will for many, many years treasure my signed Klein Bottle and my signed copy of "The Cuckoo's Egg".
Thanks Cliff
Long may it continue, and I hope to take you up on your invitation to visit again.
It's trading under false premises. It's misleading conduct. It's oligopoly. The sherman laws were designed for this surely?
I could say the same about appeals to google, apple, anyone for account recovery too.
As wikipedia states:
> Carelman is best known for his Catalog of fantastic things (Catalogue d'objets introuvables) also known as Catalogue of Unfindable Objects, made in 1969 as a parody of the catalog of the French mail order company Manufrance. This work has been translated into 19 languages (including Korean, Hebrew and Finnish). Among these imaginary objects are, for instance, a "Kangaroo gun" whose "barrel is extensively studied ... to give the bullet a sinusoidal trajectory which follows the animal in its leaps", or a disposable "Plaster anvil ... (sold by the dozen) to be discarded after use, allowing you to make substantial savings." The most famous item in this catalog was Carelman's "Coffeepot for Masochists", a coffeepot with a backwards facing spout that would scald the user. This design became a symbol for the critique of everyday things and was featured on the cover of Don Norman's book on the topic, The Design of Everyday Things.
(I didn't make the connection with Don Norman's book, another, more serious, classic).
Amazon was built on trust. I bought a book from them in the early days. It didn’t arrive after 2 weeks and they said ‘we believe you’ and they shipped me the book again at no charge. A week later i got 2 books, the first was lost in transit. Contacted amazon and they and no problem keep both and give one to a friend. I and many others were loyal to amazon after these experiences, paying more due to the lack of hassle and high trust. They became the default online bookstore thanks to this trust. It wasn’t even worth price comparisons, you looked on amazon and bought it there knowing you’d get the product you paid for.
That’s now gone. They have fallen to ebay levels of trust at this point. You’re likely to be shipped a box of rocks rather than what you wanted at this point.
People are willing to pay more for trust and the lack of hassle it represents. I want to buy a hard cover book that’s well printed. If i keep getting poor photocopies on tissue paper the trust is gone. I'll happy pay more to buy from a site where that never happens. I won’t even bother with price shopping when one site is a good chance of a scam and the other isn’t. In fact i’m pretty sure that’s where amazons dominance as the default online store came from and i’m shocked at how little care they have for this fact.
Between eBay and Amazon over the years I’ve done thousands of transactions, including probably 100 as a seller on eBay. The way people on HN talk about these companies, you’d think I would have been victim to endless amounts of fraud. In reality, both companies have handled the rare issues that came up just fine for me and the vast majority of transactions were perfectly fine.
The HN comment section version of Amazon is pure hyperbole at this point.
I’m aware that there are problems and some people haven’t been as lucky, but do you honestly believe you’re more likely to get a box of rocks than the product you ordered? Or that people will pay large fees to have average products verified before shipping when Amazon takes returns all the time? This is just silly.
I don't understand. If I want to return an Amazon product for any reason I just return it. You don't have to explain the driver situation to customer support.
This is what I'm talking about when I say internet comments feel like people are operating in a different world: If you get a counterfeit product from Amazon, you just return it.
You can even return a product if you just decide you don't want it.
Amazon used to have the best prices, but that is no longer the case. Just a couple of weeks ago, I needed to get bulk cat food (for a bulky cat). I tried Amazon, but they wanted double what I would pay at chewy. So I got it from chewy, and will never look at Amazon for that kind of thing again.
I also tend to go directly to manufacturer Web sites, and order from there. The price is seldom much higher than Amazon, and I won’t have to worry that I’m getting a fake, or gray market junk.
Also, grey market products aren't junk - they are by definition the official product just without the price gouging the manufacturer does in locales where they can get away with it.
F’rinstance, get a Chinese webcam, and find the latest download.
Also, there’s some controversy over the privacy in Chinese products (but it’s easy enough to make the same argument about almost any brand).
I have found that Chinese versions of products make up the largest percentage of gray market stuff. I suspect that some percentage of that, is outright fakes.
Overall I have a higher level of trust in Ebay purchases than Amazon purchases.
I'm curious, since I never get these (90% of the time I'm buying used anyways). Do you know what genre has this the worst?
I don't buy a lot of books though so maybe that's where a lot of this is coming from?
Strongly disagree. I have always gotten refunds on Amazon when there were issues whereas on eBay I had sellers run away with my money when they knew that pursuing legal action would cost me more than the dispute amount and eBay doing nothing.
The bigger the company, the heavier the penalties for fuckery should be. They should be the ones to live in fear, not the "little people".
They're far more likely to throw a couple hundred bucks at a local lawyer to show up.
On the other hand... It is cheap to try and see what happens, as long as expectations are right.
There's also a dollar limit ($4,000? Maybe 15 years ago?).
But yeah, by law you can't drag companies into small claims court. It's meant to settle minor things like your neighbor accidentally backing into (and damaging) your fence, etc.
I'd love to have a lawyer chime in and say "Go for it, it's easy and it improves accountability" though. Like if it only took a day and $100 it'd probably be worth it to me, regardless of the outcome.
I did get paid in the end, and there was the satisfaction of sticking it to a bully, but financially, it was not worth the effort.
I get it, there's a lot of crap in life and sometimes it seems like it's just not worth the hassle to make something a bit unpleasant for the sake of your principles when there's crap at work and the mortgage is due and timmy is failing english class again but they will not stop unless being shitty starts hurting their business and we cannot count on the captured regulators to do that on our behalf.
It’s not that we don’t have an inability to deal with small inconveniences; we haven’t the time and resources to compete with those who are faster because they tolerate monopolies and anticompetitive actors.
I reckon in the first world, there is nothing that amazon sells that we can't simply skip or get somewhere else that would leave anybody in danger of death or serious injury.
I know it's tre chic to wallow in helplessness wrt certain things these days but we aren't yet completely without recourse even if we aren't going to buy our way into an entirely new order any time soon.
They have completely replaced all other retail for me. Reverting that would cost me 3-5 hours a week.
Or all it takes is regulatory agencies to wake up. After all, preventing the tragedy of the commons is their entire reason for existence. In fact, it's the only reason we give away a large chunk of our income in taxes.
I imagine him as someone who just sits around hacking all day, writing up long essays in between fulfilling orders.
I have fun with every Klein bottle order. When someone buys a Klein bottle, I celebrate by walking through our backyard garden, looking for new blossoms. I usually take a few photos and send these to my customer-friend.
This micro business puts me in touch with fascinating people (I've met kids in elementary school, grad students, Nobel laureates, even a delightful nut who made a 4-meter tall wooden Klein bottle for Burning Man). The kind of people you find here on Hacker News.
PS - with reference to your HN identity -- from my ham radio days of long ago, I once experimentally determined that a 1/2 watt, 600 ohm Ohmite resistor would burn up when inserted in a 120V outlet. Hmmm: 24 watts into a half-watt resistor? Yep, filled the room with that acrid smell... Don't try this at home.If you have experienced an incorrect change in the brand name of an ASIN, please exhaust these self-service options below first:
- Create a case to Seller Support
- Public Notice Form if you are not registered in Brand Registry
- Report Abuse
- Report a Violation (if you are registered in Brand Registry)
For a normal company, one would expect that a single report using any of these methods would be enough to launch an investigation and right the wrong. Nope.
I don't know if it's Amazon's poorly designed automated seller support, or overwhelmed support staff unable to deal with the problem, but regardless the burden is on sellers to "exhaust" all of these options before posting a semi-public plea for help on the Seller Central forums. This apparently will trigger an actual investigation (https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-forums/discussions/t...).
…inside out.
wail sound, puts on sunglasses
Can we please just not turn every online discussion into a melange of puns, memes, pop-culture references and AI slop?
No but seriously, that's Cliff Stoll they're messin with.