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.