61–70 of 113 posts
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That's the ultimate lost bet when bidding on Amazon returned merchandise. A pallet full of dirt likely in the boxes of expensive brand name items.
Based on the people I’ve seen doing it, they actually make quite a bit of money. You’ll find a few bad apples in the world, sure, but most of the time you’re not going to get people like this guy doing return scams at a scare large enough to impact the sheer size of Amazon’s operations.
Things must have changed lately. I returned a set of DVDs and forgot to include the cover and got dinged for over half the cost of the item almost as soon as it was received by the warehouse. I guess I got lucky since they could have charged me for the whole price. But now a guy is sending dirt and he gets full credit. Wow!
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> Theranos. How many people with advanced degrees worked there without ever catching on to how screwed they were? Tons of people inside Thernos asked questions and then eventually left when they realized there was no answer. Especially the smart guys at the top who knew the most. The book said the securty guy described an almost constant flow of people turning in their badges/fobs from getting fired by the Balwani gu…
Sure, but there were also plenty of people who didn't leave. And honestly, I think VCs are another good example of the problem here. They are notorious for being herd animals. They celebrate "pattern matching", by which they mean repeating the behaviors that previously led them to make money. If investors were all that good at thinking things through, they wouldn't have burned $1.4 billion dollars on Theranos.
Some of the investors were old and they were just happy to have a relatively attractive woman founder.
I'm curious why Amazon didn't investigate what was happening until his returns totaled $370k.
When I had an ecom company, a line worker used to check the package content and appearance (dents/scratches) and then he would measure it on a scale and check with the package's recorded weight before it was dispatched and algorithm would flag the orders where weight varied more than some specific ratio.
It was pretty rudimentary but worked at scale just fine.
Now, Amazon must also be using something like this.
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I'm curious how it even totaled 370k. Returning enough items to get that high should set off alarms!
Forget returning that much. Even just spending that much at Amazon to begin with should set off an alarms, e.g. is this a stolen card? money laundering?
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Forget returning that much. Even just spending that much at Amazon to begin with should set off an alarms, e.g. is this a stolen card? money laundering?
No way, I've spent that much on Amazon and I buy nearly everything on Amazon. Pretty sure there are many others who shop at that level or beyond.
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> What did this man think was going to happen? I think you're giving him too much credit. People try things. They repeat the things that work. Most thinking happens when the behavior stops working. That's why long/broken feedback loops in systems are so dangerous. E.g., a big reason the Challenger disaster happened is NASA ignoring warning signs because they had gotten away with it before. If a zillion NASA engineers…
> Theranos. How many people with advanced degrees worked there without ever catching on to how screwed they were? Tons of people inside Thernos asked questions and then eventually left when they realized there was no answer. Especially the smart guys at the top who knew the most. The book said the securty guy described an almost constant flow of people turning in their badges/fobs from getting fired by the Balwani gu…
I just ordered a MyQ garage door hub from Amazon Warehouse (listed as missing or damaged original packaging). When I opened it up it felt a little off. The protective film on the device had obviously been removed and reattached and nothing fit very well in the designated slots in the packaging. The device itself had faint scratches and dust on it. I decided to check the model number and sure enough, it was the previo…
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> Theranos. How many people with advanced degrees worked there without ever catching on to how screwed they were? Tons of people inside Thernos asked questions and then eventually left when they realized there was no answer. Especially the smart guys at the top who knew the most. The book said the securty guy described an almost constant flow of people turning in their badges/fobs from getting fired by the Balwani gu…
Sure, but there were also plenty of people who didn't leave. And honestly, I think VCs are another good example of the problem here. They are notorious for being herd animals. They celebrate "pattern matching", by which they mean repeating the behaviors that previously led them to make money. If investors were all that good at thinking things through, they wouldn't have burned $1.4 billion dollars on Theranos.
The idea is great, everyone wants a lab on a chip. MEMS is coming, etc. Someone will eventually make it.