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Amazon Has an Honesty Issue

bentasker.co.uk

111–120 of 151 posts

Re: Amazon Has an Honesty Issue

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still a civil matter instead of a criminal matter. Amazon has the lawful right to both protect their interests and perform their process of refund (whatever errors and pauses they may make during this process). As such the state of mind necessary for criminal complicity has yet to be shown.

So what? You're not personally responsible for prosecuting Amazon. For that matter, neither are the cops. This tunnel-vision mode of thinking is how people talk themselves out of calling the police and the insurance company. The claims unit will want a police report number to start their process, and the fact both are now involved will exert direct pressure. So do it. The point is to be maximally assertive of any rig…

You're just asking to waste your own time, and theirs, with that approach.

The police department will ask whether it was stolen from your porch. No? It was stolen from Amazon? Not a crime against you.

The insurance company will ask when it was switched. Switched before delivery? Not on us. We don't insure for that, only for what happens on your premises.

Re: Amazon Has an Honesty Issue

#112
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have relevant industry experience, and I would advise anyone to never, ever use Priority or Express Mail for a high-value item, under any circumstances. Even with third-party insurance. Theft is much more likely than with UPS/FedEx overnight services, and it's nearly impossible to arrange the delivery so that the parcel is on camera for its entire journey, something easily accomplished with some other carriers. And…

Thanks for sharing your experience. USPS says 'Registered Mail is kept highly secured and is processed manually, which naturally slows the speed at which it travels.Registered Mail is not recommended if speed of delivery is important.' So, UPS/Fedex overnight is better.

That's a good point. Registered Mail isn't fast. In fact, it is, at times, very slow.

Re: Amazon Has an Honesty Issue

#114
post #110
post #76

This isn't just an Amazon problem. I requested a refund from Expedia because their search listed a hotel from another state with a city by the same name when I made a specific city & state search. Their search functionality clearly had a bug and we reserved a hotel in the wrong city. Upon realizing this an hour later we phoned Expedia who told us to phone the hotel; when we talked to the hotel the person that answere…

The problem is chargeback fraud has become rampant since COVID, at least from friends stories in the payments and retail spaces. The word got out you can just call your bank and they will back you very few questions asked. This was abused by many, and now it's no longer a sure thing. Anything outside of outright fraud is very much a coin flip likely depending on how profitable you are to the issuing bank.

I'm sympathetic having worked in anti-fraud adjacent fields before, but this extreme pendulum swing - if that's what this indeed is - is at least inappropriate and at worst nefarious. All of my transactions go through this card; they owe me to represent me well when I'm a customer like that. When they fail to, someone needs to deliver some ire with sticking power. Same way that there's ire that can be felt by a consumer facing charges of fraud.

Re: Amazon Has an Honesty Issue

#115
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not ≈5 years. Three years and 9 months. Amazon's retail division was broken by Covid and will probably never fix itself. I have no inside knowledge, but I suspect what happened is a bunch of crooks were hired during the massive hiring spree to keep up with Covid demand, and there wasn't capacity to investigate every fraud, theft, and scam. Internal fraud went from zero to prolific almost overnight. Prime also stopped…

I was despairing that those big internet companies were settled for 80 years, but I see that there might be movement. However, it takes 25 years and unprecedented investment to build Amazon, warehouses, delivery schemes… Unless Amazon sells some of them with the automation, it’s extremely hard to enter the field.

I actually don't think so. A few points:

(1) We are in an era of massive investments, much more so than when Amazon started. The billion dollar plus fundraising round is increasingly common over time.

(2) An entrant does not need to operate the same as Amazon. The sharing economy provides a lot of alternative models. To give a fictitious example, connecting with existing rideshare vendors for delivery and a network of local stores for fulfilment could give a lot of the same product without the same investment. Ditto for existing logistics players like FedEx (who do a lot more than delivery).

(3) It's possible to start in different markets, and especially foreign markets. A company which could do this play easily might be something like Aliexpress which already has a leg in.

There are many more models possible too, but the point is that building Amazon today does not need to the same as building Amazon in the nineties. Even building the same Amazon would be cheaper today, since we can learn the lessons of the existing Amazon.

Re: Amazon Has an Honesty Issue

#116
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon was losing money for nearly the first decade of its existence. It was a bit of a laughing stock among the traditional business community: "Lose money on every sale, but make it up in volume!" The loses were considered astronomical at the time; in 2000, it lost over a billion dollars. The strategy was the right one, though. To put all of that in perspective, in 2018, it earned over 10 billion, and many business…

You are conflating Amazon with Amazon.com, and vice versa at your convenience. It's much too sloppy of analysis to sustain a worthy discussion.

I agree a discussion is unwarranted. Your comment is a personal attack with no substance.

(For reference, AWS was founded in 2002, and took some time before it made any sort of dent in much of anything.)

Re: Amazon Has an Honesty Issue

#117
post #72

> and have even contested credit card charge-backs. Personally, I'd never do a CC chargeback against certain companies. Too much risk of being cut off from a crucial vendor by a "customers who do chargebacks aren't worth the trouble" automation/SOP. (For household consumer issues... if customer service was exhausted, I'd escalate to the CEO's office "?" email address, and if even that didn't work, but I really needed…

How they can cut you off?

Aren't there various payment methods?

Re: Amazon Has an Honesty Issue

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what? You're not personally responsible for prosecuting Amazon. For that matter, neither are the cops. This tunnel-vision mode of thinking is how people talk themselves out of calling the police and the insurance company. The claims unit will want a police report number to start their process, and the fact both are now involved will exert direct pressure. So do it. The point is to be maximally assertive of any rig…

You're just asking to waste your own time, and theirs, with that approach. The police department will ask whether it was stolen from your porch. No? It was stolen from Amazon? Not a crime against you. The insurance company will ask when it was switched. Switched before delivery? Not on us. We don't insure for that, only for what happens on your premises.

This is still the bizarre but all-too-common line of thinking in which someone talks themselves out of marshalling available resources. It’s negotiating against yourself, and a recipe for failing at life.

Re: Amazon Has an Honesty Issue

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're just asking to waste your own time, and theirs, with that approach. The police department will ask whether it was stolen from your porch. No? It was stolen from Amazon? Not a crime against you. The insurance company will ask when it was switched. Switched before delivery? Not on us. We don't insure for that, only for what happens on your premises.

This is still the bizarre but all-too-common line of thinking in which someone talks themselves out of marshalling available resources. It’s negotiating against yourself, and a recipe for failing at life.

When you know before hand that it will 100% just waste time, then the value is in not making you and others more aggrieved and annoyed.

Re: Amazon Has an Honesty Issue

#120
post #100
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this saves Amazon money. They have a huge problem with internal, for lack of a better word, corruptions. * Packing people who don't care if high-value items are broken * Delivery people who fake deliveries and steal * Co-mingling of fake items with sellers ... and so on. Because the delivery person wasn't investigated, they'll steal again and again, and that will spread to others in Amazon culture. Good…

You posted the same theory above, except there you included the important disclaimer that you have no inside information — is this just a hunch that you have? Because it seems like a Hanlon’s razor type of situation to me. Without some sort of evidence of the fraud you speak of, it seems far more likely to be them simply struggling with challenges of scale. Every business deals with bad employees but the majority of…

No, I posted a much more specific theory above with a disclaimer.

Here, none was necessary, since I wasn't going out on a limb. I also do know enough people who work at Amazon to know that many of their SWEs despise their employer. Reporting (in newspapers) about warehouses is horrific. That strongly supports that Amazon is not tending towards the happy end of the "employees acting in employer best interest" curve. My own experience, my friends, and anecdotally on posts like this, has been very negative about the honesty and customer service from Amazon starting around 2020.

Now:

Corporate corruption is complex.

To give an extreme example, if one is at an Enron, one keeps their job by keeping their mouths shut and participating in the fraud. It's the likely whistleblowers who get fired.

This is not at all uncommon in organizations. It's a stereotype that working too hard at some union shops is not good for one's long-term job prospects.

One step down from that is employees who don't care about their employer. They want to keep their job, have decent salary, future options, work-life balance, and enjoy work as much as possible. If an employer doesn't fire people who don't work, no one works. If an employer has no means to check if items are correctly packed, very quickly no items are correctly packed. This is not uncommon at the CEO level either (at least for external CEOs), who mostly want to pump up short-term profits to get bonuses and prepare for their next gig.

Acting in corporate interest is only occasionally correlated with keeping ones job. In general, you need to keep your stakeholders happy (probably your boss), and the extent to which that correlates with business success is... mixed.

This impacts a majority of large businesses.

At scale of over ≈20-1000 people, organizations are dominated by incentive structures and dynamics you can model with game theory (ref: Bruce Bueno de Mesquita). The hypothetical business where everyone is aligned is, well, almost hypothetical beyond some scale.

It's not uncommon that in a large organization, zero people care about that organization. If there's a problem, no one fixes it. It survives in the free market simply because their competitors are no better (and how well large businesses manage this largely determines their success).

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