Amazon Has an Honesty Issue

Recently I had them fail to deliver a 10$ item, flag it in their system as a delivery failure notify me that the failure occurred and then still not give me a refund and tell me that they are doing me a favor by refund it. The service quality really Turing to poop. In December they basically done guarantee delivers either anymore so between that and the sea of counterfeits I only make 5-10$ item orders from them where the delivery costs more than the item.

I think it’s about high time that Amazon disrupts the “leave it on the porch” method. Too many packages are stolen by thieves.

And I mean, they’ve already started to some extend to deal with it. There are many cities I’ve been to that has Amazon delivery boxes where you can pick up your stuff.

I think that when drones get powerful enough, and regulation allows it, Amazon will adopt drone delivery everywhere. You get a notification on your phone telling you that your package is at the local distribution center. When you get back home, or some other day later where you are not busy, you tell the app to deliver now and within short time a drone drops the package off at your home any time that is convenient to you 24x7/365, even if it’s like 3am on a Sunday.

And for the rest of the journey up to that point, rigorous tracking and auditing to make sure packages don’t go “missing” on the way.

I cannot think of a _single_ low-margin global corporation that can get away with it that hasn’t made the trade-off where they accept some of their customers will be treated horribly in order to save _a lot_ of money.

I’ve currently got a DHL package in limbo that’s worth about the same and the main function of their customer service department seems to be to indicate that trying to consume customer service resources is not going to help you. Employees will give you completely contradictory and verifiably incorrect information.

Amazon (US) has really gone downhill in the past ~5 years.

I signed up for Prime a over decade ago because of the reliable 2 day shipping. It worked pretty much as described. It was great.

Shipping is no longer 2 days on most items - "Prime" shipping can now take 7 days. Amazon advertise same or next day shipping, but it's really only for big ticket, occasional purchase items. Most everyday purchases now take 3-7 days, the same as without prime. They show the prime badge, but if you log out you can see that non-prime members get the same shipping.

This feels really dishonest. Amazon pretend that you get huge shipping benefits from Prime, but it turns out you don't anymore.

For the first time, I've cancelled my prime renewal. What, exactly, am I paying for these days? Walmart offer next-day free shipping on the big ticket items too, without the membership.

They have some real upsides, the Amazon return policy being one of them. They also have a huge problem with counterfeits, abusive resellers, rigged voting and so on.

The existence of their best point doesn't obviate the existence of the sort of behavior that should lead to sanction, regulation, and reform.