Got a dud? Quality not as expected? Ordered two by mistake? Size is not fitting? Take it to nearest post office, scan a qr code and hand it over. Done.
The other day I had to pack a product not bought from Amazon, then drive 25 minutes to a specific company's drop off point at some weird opening hours...
And that's after it took me to write manual email to get return label...the entire process took multiple weeks. And then a few more weeks until getting the refund.
At this point, I'm happy to pay 10% extra just to buy from Amazon.
I totally agree, but I find the quality of the items I get off of Amazon to generally be a lot less than other places I chose to shop. Likely due to the fact that I intentionally shop on other sites for specific products but on Amazon I get things that just aren't necessary for me so I spend less time curating the purchases.
If I think there's basically no likelihood of me returning something, I'll sometimes shop elsewhere, but for anything where there's even a chance of me not liking it for whatever reason I will buy on Amazon now.
But I’m weird like that; I also think ordering everything online is inherently immoral (provided you are an able bodied person living in a city)
recycling isn't convenient, but people do it with an eye to the greater good.
it's not hard to imagine that an Amazon monopoly is not for the greater good.
i believe it also autofilled the address form for me.
The sheer logistics and human will that made that possible is crazy to me.
Extrapolate to multiple locations in Miami alone. Then Florida. Then East Coast. Then USA. Then Europe. Global locations.
Who is in charge of all this? How do they keep track of all this? How do they identify a tiny little podunk location is fucking up and how do they find someone they can trust to run it?
It's crazy! Think about it next time you return something to Amazon.
A person returns a $5000 RTX 5090? A manager will be paged, who will carry it over to the high value items cage, in full view of the CCTV.
A person who returns a $5 bike light? And that person has also spent $$$$ over the years with a 0.5% return rate? Straight on the pallet of mixed returns without even opening the package.
Medium-value returns and customers with an eyebrow-raising return rate get a medium amount of inspection.
The returns processor either boxes up many individual items heading for the same destination into a Master Carton or arranges to dispose of the item somehow depending on how the seller wants their returns handled.
But also if you go to support chat (not via the order details, which often rejects attempts at getting support) via the site footer, and escalate to an agent, you can tell them you don't have a post office that's easy to get to for you and don't drive etc. and they will just issue you a refund (if it's a quality problem). Done this many times when the product was damaged.
I think that if I had to return frequently, I'd find a different vendor well before Amazon would decide they don't want me as a customer.
On the rare occasion I want a return, I've assumed that the reason they handle it without any issue is because they can see my lifetime purchase value vs. my return rate.
Maybe they don't care about my stats I guess but whichever way I'm currently happy in that regard.
I do worry that the competition is being wiped out, but I don't believe in boycotts for idealistic antitrust reasons.
There is too little detail in the GP to draw a conclusion, so this comment seems unfair.
IDK why I'm catching an accusation and downvotes by telling people about Amazon customer support protocols that are internal policy but not documented publicly: that they will ban you for returns past some threshold of frequency and price, and they offer refunds for items that arrive damaged even if they first push you to spend your time returning them instead.
I've never been banned and I don't abuse it. What I said is also true, that I don't drive etc.
I don't need to have been banned myself to know how they've operated with others. And seeking refunds for goods that were damaged upon arrival is not abuse. There's no need to give in to their first preference to return an item when it is in fact their policy to process refunds for them too, they just hide it behind customer service protocols instead of exposing it in UI. You don't need to settle for the first suggested remediation from a business's customer service to be ethical, or shaming people for escalating. That's just being a chump.
One even came with a sticker: "Thanks for giving this product a second life!"
The worst of the worst among us use Amazon as a try-before-you-buy or rental house. Their lax return policy encourages them.
If I buy anything important, especially expensive electronics, I buy it from somewhere else. If it's a reputable store with a strict return policy, I'm doubly sure there will be no fuckery.
Most of my recent returns were for receiving used product.
Amazon is like - we will send you a replacement but you have to print a label, box it back up and drive to a UPS store to return. Why are we working for them for free? You send me soiled bedding and the reply is to make us do work and then get the product we originally bought.
I tried quitting these people years ago, its hard to do.
It is rather gross to me that they let people return clothes and shoes that have been tried on. My current pair of like $110 trail running shoes that I bought on Amazon had been tried on when I got them, and I was a bit unhappy with that, but I decided to see that as more like a shoe store sorta thing. Clothes, not so much. I decided after trying the clothes returns policy once (never tried it on) years and years ago that if I do not want to get things preworn, I feel I should practice what I preach. It is a weird policy, at any rate.
Fuck bezos and Amazon. Since then, I always look for alternatives to Amazon to buy my stuff. I’ll use Amazon to see if I like it, return it, and go buy somewhere else. If I know the product I’ll just straight out buy it somewhere else. It’s often the same price or very close.
Some stuff you can’t really and practically get outside of Amazon. I don’t have a choice then. Because their quality is so low, I’ll just get 3–4 similar items and only keep the one that’s passably usable.
I try to cost Amazon as much money as I can. I hate to give them my money but by doing this it feels like I’m getting some payback for the way they treat their customers, employees, delivery people…
(I would have honestly given up earlier, sent them all back, and gone with a different brand. Except there had been a good one in the first tranche of 3 that I let go past its return date. I hadn't thought the actual failure rate was going to be > 80%)
[0] On my personal account I did have a big red scary warning for a while about "restocking fees", that I think had been prompted by returning a motherboard after having tested it (yet another poorly described product with no way to find out the IOMMU groups short of buying it). I have no idea if it was merely that I had opened/tested a computer component, or if it had gotten smashed up on the way back, or what. But eventually that nag screen did go away.
The last straw was getting a blood pressure monitor (which they don’t even sell) in place of £400 smart glasses. They insisted I returned the monitor, then said I failed to return the glasses. Took months for them to refund me.
9 out of 10 I ask say it's about reliable delivery (not necessarily next day). Most people order things because they need them and have read the reviews, not because they are speculating at something they may need or are ok with getting something else. Clothing being a notable exception, unpredictably sized and variable quality, which nobody is happy about.
And there's just a lot of stuff that research can't tell you. Sometimes listed dimensions are incorrect or missing. Sometimes it turns out that you buy a simple electronic device that seems like it will do what you need but it emits a high-pitched beep noise every time you press a button that drives you nuts and you're going to return it because of that. There are so many things that just simply are not captured in a product description, and sometimes are not captured by user reviews.
I've just ordered an inexpensive steering wheel to use with a racing game. And everything I can find online is contradictory as to whether it suffers from a dead zone problem or not. I simply cannot tell if the people complaining about the dead zone have missed where it can be configured or if it's a problem with the hardware itself. So literally the only way I can figure it out is by ordering it and trying it out and then returning it if it has a dead zone problem.
There are plenty of things that you just have to return that cannot be solved with research and have nothing to do with being scammed. Which is why returns are a big part of the economy and a big part of customer service.
I used to take advantage of Amazon's return policy by deliberately buying 3 sizes of the same item (1 below and 1 above my expected size) because clothing manufacturers are not consistent with their sizing. I can then try them all at home to choose best size and return the other 2 that don't fit. I did this for pants, shoes, etc. This really seemed great because I hate going to the store and changing clothes in fitting rooms.
However, I stopped doing this many years ago because I found out that some online retailers like Amazon do not restock the returned items for re-sale and instead, throw it away so it eventually ends up in a landfill. In those cases, the sellers just eat the cost of unsold goods that got thrown out.
It seemed illogical to throw away perfectly good clothes that are still NEW but somebody explained that Amazon does this because they're paranoid about bodily fluids etc tainting the returns. So to play it safe, they just throw away the returns.
I have no more insider knowledge of how Amazon operates than you do, but judging on the amount of items I’ve received that were clearly used (stains, other people’s hairs, dust, dirt…) but sold as new I’m fairly certain they’ll resell everything that gets returns without even looking at the items.
Also Zappos was clearly founded on the idea of ordering 3 pairs of shoes and keeping the one that fits. They say the returns go back for sale unless used and then go to charity/reuse, but happy to see other sources you have. I think a lot of that Zappos dna went into Amazon's policies.
The food and groceries I already knew about. However, Amazon throwing out returned clothes was a surprise because I've seen clothing retailers like Macy's just put the returned items right back on the rack for re-sale. When you go to a shore store, they don't throw out every pair of shoes that customers tried on and didn't buy. So I just thought Amazon just did the same thing at their warehouse. I've also returned car wax to an OReilly's Auto store and I watched the clerk just put the bottle right back on the shelf for the next customer to buy.
It was disconcerting to find out I was adding to the landfill just because I returned clothes to Amazon. Nowadays, I don't order clothes from them unless I'm 100% sure I won't be returning it.
This was essentially false, and FUD spread by the anti-Amazon crowd.
You will observe official Amazon Resale listings for many items, which is precisely Amazon restocking the returned items. For goods of any signficant value, it is bizarre to suggest that Amazon wouldn't be reselling them. Like, it's ludicrous to suggest they're tossing a $50 shirt instead of reselling it, as long as the return is in resale condition.
What Amazon sends to landfills is when items (mostly third-party seller items) aren't selling and the seller doesn't want to keep paying for warehousing or to have them shipped elsewhere so Amazon sends them to landfills. Because nobody is buying the items, there's no demand for them. Not everything sells.
Wherever you got the idea that they're paranoid about body fluids, that's somebody who doesn't know what they're talking about. People make up all sorts of things. That's why that have a small army of people inspecting returns.
To clarify, I'm already aware Amazon re-sells returns. I often buy "Used Like New" electronics from Amazon Resale which are obviously customer returns that Amazon re-boxed. However, the category of clothes is different where it customer returns are often thrown out.
>What Amazon sends to landfills is when items (mostly third-party seller items) aren't selling and the seller doesn't want to keep paying for warehousing or to have them shipped elsewhere so Amazon sends them to landfills.
No, that's not the full story. What's also happening is that a seller has different options for Amazon's reverse logistics and they have different costs.
E.g. pay $1.50 for Amazon to inspect and resell or pay a lower $0.52 to throw it away. A lot of sellers just pay 1/3rd less and let Amazon throw it out.
That possibility of me inadvertently adding to landfills is enough to stop me from buying 3 sizes and returning 2. Maybe in some circumstances the other 2 returned items won't be thrown out -- but I can't know for sure so I won't do it. I'll continue to buy clothes from Amazon but only do so when I'm 100% sure I'm going to keep it no matter what.
Deep link to a video comment about online returned clothes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66qOop6J8Q8&t=2m56s
Because it's not about $1.50 for inspection vs $0.52 to throw it out.
It's about -$1.50 + $8 profit = $6.50 gain for inspection vs. -$0.52 + $0 profit = $0.52 loss for throwing it out.
You're missing the entire resale price on the return. Companies aren't leaving money on the table. They are looking to maximize profit and minimize losses. In most places, sending resellable stock to the landfill isn't doing that.
However, there is an obvious incentive to minimize these no-return refunds and require users to print labels and go through the motion of returning items that won't be restocked.
It discourages fraud: people abusing the no-return refund as a way of getting free stuff!
The no-return refund has to be a kind of perk for the customer who rarely returns anything or whatever.
I would say that it would be astonishing if Amazon pretending to accept returns and then throwing away is a thing that absolutely does not happen, and honestly cannot blame them for it. We are a throw-away-stuff society, and Amazon is not outside of that society.
What Amazon does with returns doesn't have anything to do with what kind of "society" you think we are.
What it does with returns is determined by the profit motive.
And in most cases, the more profitable thing to do is to resell returned merchandise. Yes, return inspections cost money, but usually less money than what is gained by reselling the item.
Returned merchandise has value, and businesses don't make profit by throwing value away when they can make money with it or reduce losses with it instead.
I genuinely don't understand all the people who think it's more cost-effective for Amazon to send a $50 shirt to the dumpster rather than resell it. That's not how anything works.
> It's more cost-effective for Amazon to send a $50 shirt to the dumpster rather than resell it.
It's not a $50 shirt. It's like a $5 shirt to them, which some sucker is willing to pay $50 for. Used, it becomes a $10 shirt.
A dumpster can be found right in the neck of the woods of where the returning customer lives, whereas it may have to travel far and pass through more processing if it goes to another customer elsewhere.
It needs to be inspected, repacked.
There is a risk in every returned item. Sometimes people return a perfectly good item. But sometimes it's because there is something wrong with the item, such that the next buyer is also likely to return it, even if they get it cheaper.
Basically returned items are entirely outside of the profit-optimized delivery path. They incur costs and risks, at a reduced revenue.
I'd never return an item which matches the description and isn't damaged.
If it isn't damaged in any way but does not match the description, that's a problem; if it is sold with the same description, the next customer will also see that it doesn't match. A new listing has to be created for that product. Not gonna happen, or not in the processing time frame of that particular return.
I was surprised since I usually do research and stuff on the options. But it turns out a lot of people just click next until they can start watching some tv.
They then invested heavily in logistics, so now they could replace their support to annoying bots and use their market position to increase their margin.
I had to call to get a refund; admittedly, I think I may have been slightly outside the ordinary return window. The customer service representative was pretty reluctant to accept it, somewhat heavily suggesting that I didn't assemble it right.
I actually just recently cancelled my Amazon Prime, which I've had for probably 10+ years. Not solely based on this one experience, but a general decline in how much perceivable value I actually get out of it.
Different forms of marketing work on different people. This one works on me. I'm going to shop at Amazon and Costco because, in the very few instances where I want to return an item that didn't live up to its promise, I can do so without incurring penalties.
When this happens, I'm already frustrated. I assembled a floor lamp for far longer than an adult should spend assembling it, and it's wobbly as shit. A corporation than nickel-and-dimes me at this point will incur my irrational wrath. Canadian Tire (a big box retailer of mostly low-quality wares here in Canada) has lost my business over a decade ago because of this. I tell myself: most Canadians are meek sheep that will return after being told "well akshually you can't return this because technically blah blah", but I'm not a sucker, I won't shop here on principle.
A company that doesn't create this experience for me will get my business and exploit whatever other blind spots I have with their marketing, dark patterns, opaque pricing, etc, because they didn't piss me off when I was ready to walk away for good.
That's the Right of withdrawal[0] by EU law, though. Do you mean something else?
I mean, sure, smaller shops might not cover the costs for the return shipping, but I don't really mind.
[0]: https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/shopping/ret...
I order books from a local indie bookstore and just wait a couple weeks for the books to show up from their wholesaler.
But for other stuff, including tools, why wouldn't I just order from a place I already have free 2-day (often overnight) shipping for, when my alternatives are physical big box stores? Like why go to Lowe's to buy a cross-cut jig when I can get it delivered right to my house in 24 hours for the same price? It's not even like my money could possibly go to an indie hardware store. They don't exist. Certainly not within an hour of me, which not only requires my time, but also money in the form of electricity to drive my car, plus the wear and tear on my car.
Why? If I sell a quality product I have no fear of excess returns.
Some of that is intrinsic to a good chunk of what they're selling (poorly described imports from the Chinese market). I just ordered an assortment of cabling for shuffling PCIe signals around. Apparently there are a few different "standards" for pinouts on SFF-8643 and SFF-8654, but nobody actually describes them in their product listings! So I'll see which ones work with what I already have, and with each other, and the rest can go back. Sellers could have avoided that by doing that work once and describing their items, but they'd rather I do it instead. So when I do it, I don't feel bad about the returns.
But a lot of it is the dark patterns Amazon themselves choose to play. Nonstop pricing games make me push my actual purchasing decisions down the line. If something is on sale at a great price and I'm in the market, I'll just hit buy to lock in that price. I'll then try to do some research before it ships, but in general I've got 30+ days to make the actual purchase decision. This is what the seller must want, right? Or the same pricing games but after a purchase - if the price on something significantly drops, the answer I've gotten from CS is to buy a new one and return the old one. So if I already have other stuff I need to make a return trip for, that's what I do!
Or when I'm in the middle of building/repairing something, especially when I don't have a "trial" of "prime" (aka sunk cost fallacy), I'll order a few different types of items I think I might need. This way when they show up in a week+ (Slow, Spiteful Shipping) and I'm back focusing on the project, there is less chance of "oh I really needed this other thing" and having to wait another round trip.
With other web stores I just don't feel these type of dark pattern dynamics. Whereas Amazon is practically begging people to call their bluffs. So I call them.
And that price is supposedly separate from the shipping cost.
You could also flip around the reading to.. boohoo poor sellers have to raise their prices elsewhere and take higher margin?
Why don't they figure out how to ship/delivery more quickly with a competitor with all those extra margin dollars they are being forced by Amazon to take elsewhere?
How could a regular webshop possibly compete with a behemoth which has warehouses in literally every major city, which has its own dedicated fleet of delivery vehicles, and which has its own fleet of cargo planes? When you've got a single warehouse and have to rely on DHL/USPS/FedEx, you will never beat them on delivery time when Amazon is actually trying: Amazon can trivially offer same-day delivery and eat the cost until you go out of business.
And don't forget: Amazon has an even bigger margin. If they were to compete on price, they would easily win. But they aren't competing on price because they know they have a quasi-monopoly, so they can just enjoy the extra profit.
Everyone likes stuff showing up at their door reliably wherever they are, and this isn't possible unless you have a service with warehouses and dense customers ~everywhere, and this isn't possible unless enough people use that same service. So in one sense it's in everyone's interest to have an assurance contract where everyone says "I will use this service if you do." Then in that sense Amazon's price rule is building a mechanism to support such an assurance contract: you can't force people to sign such a contract, but you can prevent people from defecting to slightly lower prices outside of the "stuff just arrives fast" system.
In a system that was very good at collective action outside of markets, a cleaner solution in terms of consent and power might be to build an actual explicit assurance contract for an app-to-door-everything-delivered-fast service, get everyone to sign it, and make a public utility and/or separate dis-aggregated markets for the different levels of service provision, whatever they are (consumer facing app, supply, warehouse, delivery, etc.). But anyone who has ever even thought about doing anything like this will know that it's much easier said than done, and will appreciate the kludge Amazon and their investors pulled off, at least a little bit, the next time they buy a thing online.
Maybe the answer is just: use Amazon until technology (robotics e.g.) makes it easy to create something better? At this rate, we shouldn't have to wait too long?
[0] I had been fond of "Albany County Fasteners" but I've soured as they've gradually jacked up the prices while removing free shipping. I don't even like free shipping, but it is a way for ordering to be more convenient as it prevents me from wanting to sit on an order for a while to batch it up.
[1] as opposed to stocking up on an assortment
If I buy a handful of bolts from McMaster or BoltDepot, I'm paying like $10 to ship, on an order this is probably $10 in goods :(
So I'm basically always picking between Amazon and AliExpress.
Time frame it really depends - delivery dates a day or few days out are generally accurate. Most items they stock at a local distribution center, so I get them next day. Some things come from further warehouses of theirs and take a few more days. There are also third party vendor items that are all over the place for delivery time, but you know those by their estimated delivery time being more than a few days out, and saying ground shipping only. (They're slowly taking away "free shipping" from items that require LTL though, heh heh)
For fasteners specifically, their parametric search has gotten better. I'd have Digikey's interface everywhere if I could.
In the last year I've seen this other kind of consolidation where most of the brands that don't have an AMZN-hosted or fulfilled store are using shop.app (now shop.com!) from Shopify. I did a stint of investigating boutique perfumes [1] and it seems almost everyone in that business uses Shopify.
[1] you gotta try "Under the Lemon Trees"!
They don't get those margins because extremely few people are going to use other sites if they have to pay just as much.
And then for consumers it increasingly sucks because you can barely find anything below $5 despite the shipping supposedly being "free".
Sure their logistics are better but it’s functionally tying Amazon’s logistics to access to selling on Amazon. It’s not a fair burden to say “you must convince customers to buy inferior shipping at superior shipping prices in order to not use us.
Behavior which is often ruled anti-competitive and illegal.
https://ec.europa.eu/competition/antitrust/cases/dec_docs/40...
These kind of contracts are standard for all kinds of third party marketplaces. You don't have to sell through them if you don't agree with the contract.
When the price advantage is the size of the fee difference or smaller, that's fair and good for competition and I support legal restrictions on contract clauses that want to block it.
Demanding price parity is completely standard for all resellers and market places, pretty much on all scales and all around the world.
Of course you want more legal restrictions and regulations. That's the standard hacker response to anything that comes up, probably including if you want suger in your coffee or not.
But try to think about why Amazon would put such a thing in their contract. If they were just out to abuse any power dynamic, they would of course tell sellers that they have to put a more expensive price anywhere else. Price parity is fair for all parties involved. And if sellers think Amazon's fees are too high then they shouldn't use Amazon - which is what the great majority of product sellers have decided to.
Massive monopoly power. Some profit is better than none, even as Amazon works to make 'some' as small as possible.
> Demanding price parity is completely standard for all resellers and market places, pretty much on all scales and all around the world.
Price parity would be great if they were selling the product to Amazon, and Amazon was demanding that price be the same among all retailers. Because of the structure of the deal with this markup, we need to consider the numbers with and without the markup.
> the standard hacker response
Wha.
Also I want quality competition and I only want to regulate anti-competitive things.
> But try to think about why Amazon would put such a thing in their contract.
Because it benefits them.
> If they were just out to abuse any power dynamic, they would of course tell sellers that they have to put a more expensive price anywhere else.
That would get them more scrutiny and be too obviously unfair. Demanding the same price sounds fair until you look into the details.
> Price parity is fair for all parties involved.
Parity is fair when you properly include or exclude markups based on context.
> And if sellers think Amazon's fees are too high then they shouldn't use Amazon
And lose most of their sales? It's an abusive relationship because of the power Amazon has, and they structured these rules to limit the ways other companies can compete.
Out of the last ~20 orders (I don't order that often from them, so that's probably spanning the whole last 12 months or more), more often than not, the predicted delivery date has been adjusted upwards, often by ~2 days, and a few times by ~a week.
This may be specific to Germany/Berlin, as from what I hear, they (/ their subcontractors) have troubles finding delivery drivers. Mixed with the growing counterfeit issues, and degrading product description / details for most products, Amazon doesn't seem to be in it's prime.
Maybe 2 years later I tried the free trial of Prime, if only to quiet the ads, and it was great... they must of extended their logistics network into my area and I get a lot of stuff in 1 day or 2 days now. I went through a phase of taking discounted or free Prime offers when I could but broke down and I've been maintaining a Prime subscription. It's probably not really worth it because my pattern is that I am typically heads down doing this or that and every other month or so I do a burst of buying stuff that I'd wanted for a while or I am doing some project that requires a lot of stuff. Then I might go a month and buy nothing on AMZN.
Most recently I ordered 10 items on September 18th (I had a gift card). All prime eligible. The first arrived on sep 20, the 4 on sep 28, 5 on sep 28, and the last is scheduled for Friday.
I didn’t get any estimates until after purchase.
Amazon is no longer good. They are coasting on their customer base and are slowing ratcheting up prices and squeezing their costs (keeping all their gains).
It seemed the interface was designed to hide the true delivery estimate in the last step and trick me into thinking the item would arrive on time.
If they are not going to tell me the day it is going to arrive, I am not buying. Thats the "prime" reason for using Amazon these days.
Before checkout, it’s a generic “free super saver shipping” then a few hours after with proper estimates.
That sounds incredibly unlikely unless we're missing something.
My point is that Amazon used to be good. Now it’s not as fast. And the price hasn’t dropped.
Every general store in every town everywhere can't possibly stock millions of individual products. When some item has a potential customer base of a few tens of thousands of people in a country of hundreds of millions, most stores would never get a single sale for that item. But when you can serve the entire country at once via the mail, having a single centralized warehouse specializing in that niche category of items is quite viable.
The only difference with Amazon is that you are buying from a single website, rather than going to the website of a small webshop specializing in your flavour of niche items. And the drawback is that Amazon has zero quality control, so rather than a store where you can browse for known-good curated high-quality niche items you will instead be drowned by piles of absolute garbage - with the occasional decent item hidden in between.
Sure, Amazon might beat your local store, but that doesn't mean it is good for buying niche items.
But in the last couple of months, as I progress through a kitchen remodel and more importantly a kitchen reorganization, I've been seeing precisely this phenomenon every time. The most visible signs are the machine generated "brand names" ("Howonder", "Jaico", etc. etc.), closely followed by multiple instances of clearly the same low quality, SE-Asian-manufactured product being sold under 4 different brand/product names.
I think the difference is that in the past, I've actually known the product I was looking for, and amzn showed me that one and little else. At the moment, I'm casting blindly ("stainless steel kitchen turntable") and there it is: low quality, uncurated crap, everywhere.
Still .. not yet quite as bad as Aliexpress :)
[disclaimer: i was employee #2 at amzn]
I remember a friend in the 90s excited about his job at UPS. He laughed about the pee bottle. Same for people I know who work for usps and fedex.
Kind of makes sense. Where do you expect someone to pee who is driving around for 10 hours a day.
...and I am being generous by focusing on the pee instead of the deaths: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Amazon_worker_fataliti...
Assembly line jobs are rough and people pee in bottles, and die. The important piece these articles leave out is how much more common these are at Amazon.
I remember my first jobs at random companies where I was hourly and needed approval for bathroom breaks. It sucked and I would plan my day around break times.
I think these articles are more a function of being surprising to us because we work cushy desk jobs where we can break all we want and use unlimited sick days because we program.
You phrase this as if it's acceptable that people work in terrible conditions and sacrifice their lives so that the rest of us can buy cheap products with fast shipping, and this is completely normal. "Another Amazon warehouse worker dead? Oh well!"
It would be one thing to stop shopping at Amazon because of how they treat their workers if you also stopped shopping at other companies whose workers are peeing in bottles behind the scenes. Do the things you buy get shipped at some point by truck-based logistics? If so, piss bottles are already involved, it is just that we were all blessedly unaware.
It's a shame neoliberals hallowed out US manufacturing but at least consumers around the world are benefitting.
Unfortunately, the counterpoint is... China has us all by the balls. Do something China doesn't like, such as, say... support Taiwan? Whoops, where are you going to get stuff such as medication now?
And China isn't able to cut off your medication because you support Taiwan: it would have to be a country-sized ban, which for the US would immediately spark WW3. China isn't stupid, they have a sense of self-preservation. Why start a fight with the US when you can slowly milk it dry?
No one benefits from US foreign policy outside of elites or capitalists, everyone else suffers under imperialism.
The problem with China is, they play the loooooooooooong game, and their game is explicitly to destroy our industries. As a German, this has me worried, because we have seen it with solar panels (we used to be the world leader), with medicine (similarly, a lot of compounds came from Germany) and now we're seeing it with cars.
I'm sorry but this is quite sad. You're willing to blame a foreign country that is providing high quality goods that make your life better instead of your own political leaders or supposed allies that have no issues with selling your country down the drain?
I can see why people are voting for AfD.
I assume they want to limit the amount of customer support more than advertising their logistics.
Given that Amazon has 40% of the e-commerce market (I'm surprised it's not more actually), this is exactly what antitrust laws were designed to stop. Customers and vendors/manufacturers should be free to use the distribution channels that meet their needs of service and speed and price the best, but Amazon, through its big market share, is preventing that.
I've gone back to local stores. They're less convenient, but the prices are better and the quality is MUCH better. Amazon is for commodity name brand stuff that's harder to find.
In Poland we have Allegro and 99,9% of sellers basically ships on the same day (for orders before 15:00) and it arrives next day.
This basically applies to most of the online stores in Poland…
There should be some kind of federal law against needing to do this.
Buying direct from vendor should always be the cheapest, and at least 5% cheaper than Amazon (since everything on Amazon is automatically 5% off)
In Tokyo I would get my stuff from Amazon in a day or two, and accuracy of time of arrival was in hours.
In Stockholm, even amazon regularly delivers a week or two later than what it says. To the point I don't see the point buying from Amazon if I can find a reliable local alternative, because they'll both be late.
At least in my experience, UPS, Fedex, etc., tend to deliver when the estimate says.
UPS is generally pretty good.
It makes sense because shipping is a volume game and they have the most volume. Their electric van is coming down my street twice a day whether I order or not. I wish I could ship my own packages with their shipping.
My biggest problem with Amazon these days is that you can't really know if what you're ordering is any good. Amazon should start their own product testing lab and do in house reviews. Or find some other way to get trusted reviews on their product pages.
FedEx delivered my Steam Frame - first it said Friday delivery by 1pm. Then on Friday, it kept saying 1pm until about 3pm after which it updated to “by 8pm”. Then, after 8, it said the item never left their facility. The next day it said delivery would be Monday by 1pm. Actual delivery was Monday around 6pm.
Amazon _rarely_ has these issues. Especially for an expensive delivery like the above, I’d want to know when to expect it and possibly actually be at home to receive it.
This depends heavily on where you live. I recall it used to be true, but in the three places I've spent significant time since the pandemic, all three have been less than 50% on time -- and less than 75% even giving an extra day. Because there's apparently no consequences for the last-mile delivery contractors to claim a package is delivered and not actually take it out of the truck until the next week, your local contractor determines your experience.
I used to think there would be more opportunities for a patient consumer to get a discount, but perhaps what happens it that even a low-priority package takes up certain kinds of capacity once it leaves the vendor, and the delivery-system's incentive to maximize throughput leads to a kind of floor.
You’ll get something to show up on schedule but it’s frequently needs to be returned because of a problem on their end. No I don’t accept paying full price for a used product in subpar repair. No I don’t want a convincing fake.
The hassle of even 1 return in 20 isn’t worth faster delivery. Worse even if I just throw away their junk I still need to make a new order.
The other month my wife ordered something inexpensive from Best Buy that got shipped. I am 90% certain the FedEx delivery person took it, impossible to find the easiest way to resolve the matter with BestBuy. Amazon while historically it was not always intuitive to find the chat feature. I could always get there and the problem was fixed.
In the 90s and 00s Amazon would fix things. The last time Amazon lost a “delivered” package they told me that they could do nothing about it. My ticket got escalated a few times and they offered a discount on ordering a replacement. I just did a chargeback with my credit card. I was frustrated with Amazon because I probably ordered 30 things a year for 10+ years and they trusted their driver over me saying I never got it.
I've never had such a poor experience, including being repeatedly lied to by CS, and this was the last straw for me. I honestly don't miss Amazon, I buy less stuff and feel better about it.
Maybe if you live close to a distribution center. The rare occasions I order from them anymore packages are routinely delayed by a week or more
Don’t think any other online stores offer that in Norway, really annoying
I used to buy a lot on ebay.com, however they began to transition to a new page layout a few years ago, which made it too difficult to screen against scam-sellers(scamming was always a bit of an issue there). I briefly switched to walmart.com, however their site started giving a stupid error page for anything but the latest version of google chrome; this started about 2 years ago now.
anyway, here's a quick test i did(in firefox-esr) of a few sites which came to mind:
ebay: still has the dumb new design; certain js features appear broken(can't read customer reviews).
walmart: still get the "technical issues" error page.
newegg: main-page still loads mangled.
zoro: is it working again!? seems functional today... surprise!(i'll have to look into this more later; i did not test checkout)
thriftbooks: the search bar does not work.
so there it is. a bunch of sites i just simply can't shop on anymore. i'm surprised by zoro. will it work when i go to checkout?
Examples: 1.) Bought my wife a dress, it came and had multiple defects that were not in the photographs. I reached out to the seller and they didn't offer a refund but said "sorry". I have no recourse if I don't open a dispute. If I open a dispute I get penalized. 2.) I bought "Mid Century Modern" metal wall art. The listing said 1960's and the photos were of two metal wall art items with no markings. The items came with a clear "Made in China" marking on each of them that was not in the photos. These are modern inspired pieces not actual mid century modern. I opened a dispute and got my refund from the seller who didn't even ask to have them shipped back. 3.) Purchased a video game that showed NTSC ESRB rating on the front of the game in the photos. What came was the european PAL release. Not only is that version not playable on this console but the value of the two items is distinctly different (PAL is worth far less).
I'm done shopping on eBay until they have new management. At least Amazon honors their buyers policy.
This is a market for lemons.
As a market's trust lowers, buyers are less willing to pay a reasonable price for a square deal because of the probability being higher that it isn't. This, paradoxically, lowers the value of legitimate products from legitimate sellers because there's no way to differentiate. The risk adjusted value of the product lowers. Legitimate sellers leave. Things spiral. Everyone loses.
Trust is the real rare commodity.
It's always been bad but it's gotten worse and there's no recourse other than a dispute. I had a seller label a midi device a particular version (known to work with Linux and Mac) but when it arrived it was an older version that requires a proprietary Windows-only driver. I went back to the listing and the photos were of different versions. Seller refused the return. Ebay was unhelpful. Great.
I also run an ad blocker in all my devices and have to periodically disable it because it’s breaking random sites in ways that look like the site’s fault.
Amazon, no problem, browse from anywhere. Amazon has similar functionality, but they just do it a lot more intelligently. The most I've ever seen on Amazon is a simple captcha before the login page, period. Whereas on other sites, if a user is logged in to a longstanding account with a history of real purchases, and that logged in session isn't requesting pages at some exorbitant rate that goes well beyond enthusiastic middle-clicking, then it should never end up blocked. Yet I've had this happen on most sites that aren't Amazon - they've lost sight of the primary goal being to serve customers!
Of course to me every webshop has their bread and butter of what types of things make sense to purchase there. I'm certainly not going to buy stuff from Amazon that is twice the price as it is elsewhere because it's only on Amazon becomes some enterprising seller put it up there as a convenience. But I can understand how others would, given how hard the other webshops want to actively reject your business.
Try a different browser. I use Waterfox for most general purpose browsing and it rarely works with Walmart.com, while Chrome works fine.
Responding before coffee maybe? They already stipulated this
It arrives when it arrives.
We never do impulse buys for frivolous throwaway consumerism junk but fast ~2 day delivery is still very helpful because... Life Happens ... such as stuff unexpectedly breaking and you want to have a replacement to quickly fix it.
Example of 2 events just in the last month: (1) garage door screw coupler broke. It's the piece that connects the motor shaft to the screw drive. You cannot buy this type of oddball part from Home Depot or Lowes. Amazon had it and delivered it the next day so I was able to repair the door immediately. The alternative of waiting a week+ for slower delivery means the door has to be disengaged from the track so it can be manually raised and lowered. This is not acceptable because I don't have the specific key to the garage locking mechanism from the outside. Why don't I have a key?!? Because life happens. I guess I could manually lock it from the inside and leave the car outside the garage for a week but I didn't like the idea of leaving a catalytic converter exposed to drive-by theft.
(2) was my Skechers work boots had the sole separated from the shoe. I bought the same model shoes from Amazon for $59.99 and had it in 2 days. I could drive to the local Skechers store but they charge $79.99. So either wait a week+ for slow delivery or pay $20 extra plus round trip gas money to buy at the local store.
Amazon quick delivery acts as a JIT (Just In Time) inventory system to take care of unexpected things that happen in life. That's a more sane alternative than holding a bunch of inventory of random parts for things that might go wrong.
Btw, Amazon often offers extra reward points credited to your account if you voluntarily choose slow delivery instead of 2 days. This is what we do the majority of the time. I assume Amazon does this pseudo "cashback" incentive as a way to consolidate as many customer orders as they can to optimize their delivery routes and reduce costs.
Having a predictable delivery date for that on top of it most of the time being way faster than anywhere else is really nice. If I buy some of these somewhere else I might wait weeks for a small part due to logistics issues or low availability compared to Amazon
Not all purchases are things that are just consumable/materialistic. I find most of the time the stuff I buy on Amazon nowadays are things like this, where I want something I need but can't easily get locally or am too busy to go out and get during stores hours.
Saves you the frustration of wondering if they'll actually deliver.
https://toolguyd.com/another-horrible-lowes-shopping-experie...
You guys are hilarious. Where are you going to get such cheap plumbers?
I just had a plumber out for nontrivial work. Definitely over $200 per hour!
(Although I will say: If you have CPVC pipes, best to call a plumber and tell them up front you have CPVC and let them take the liability...)
A citizen goes to buy a Trabant. The salesman tells him to come back to pick it up in nine (or ten) years.
The customer asks: “Shall I come back in the morning or in the evening then?”
The salesman asks: “You're joking, aren't you?”
The customer replies: “No, not at all. It's just that I need to know whether the plumber can come at 3:00 PM or not.
Purchasing decisions for "this arrives in 2 days" are different than "this may take 2 weeks".
It's the difference between saving me a run to the local big box store or not.
Yeah, but will I be at home when it does? We no longer live in a world where everyone has a nuclear family and the wife is always home while dad is at work. In 2026, only the rich can afford a housewife.
Most of the time I am indeed not in a hurry to receive my purchases. For most items I genuinely could not care less if it arrived tomorrow or two weeks from now. But I do need to know when it will arrive, so that someone is home to receive it.
"A month from now, on a Monday morning" versus "A month from now, on a Tuesday afternoon" makes a huge difference for me, as one of them would result in me having to walk to my front door and the other would result in me having to rent a car and spend an entire afternoon having to go to the other side of the city to pick it up at some warehouse.
90% of the time I choose next-day delivery it is because I know I will be home tomorrow, and the alternative is "some random day next week". If they offered me the option to pick out of a bunch of guaranteed delivery moments next week which are convenient for the seller/shipper, I would!
I'd win because I could remove the late-night impulse buys and de-duplicated things added by multiple family members.
They win because it simplifies shipping logistics/packaging and actually encourages more loose/impulse driven buying ("just add it to the cart, we'll review it later").
Basically everyone else I keep the latest status mail (ordered / shipped / arriving tomorrow) in my inbox because they have not earned my trust, and orders have fallen through the cracks before.
Anecdotally Amazon is 90% of my online shopping (by order volume) but only 10% of my unshipped/wrong item/misdirected/lost packages. I have had mis-delivered packages from USPS/UPS/FedEx even on large/high value items.
The reason everything else is worse than Amazon is itself because of Amazon. Once you've taken over the entire market; subsidising your delivery networks to the moon keeps the moat.
Amazon is just rentseeking the entire US consumer market while being a rather bad online marketplace. The only solution left is a antitrust breakup.
Luckily local alternative(galaxus/digitec) is so much better, reviews and rating are trustable, each category has 1000s of items, services and communication stellar etc. that for me, that name symbolises just some not-so-cheap cloud I used to work with some years ago.
I don’t care so much for specific delivery dates (although they are a plus). Most important are free returns. Hence, I prioritize shopping at Costco/Target/Walmart/Home Depot/Lowes/Old Navy/Amazon/etc.
I've started to use more "mom and pop" stores - Philadelphia Luthery instead of Stew Mac (Stew Mac shipping is a joke, they want you to "subscribe" for $120 a year now, and places like "The Acoustic Shoppe" in Missouri for strings.