Amazon is shipping expired food, customers say • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon is shipping expired food, customers say

#201

Post by ikeboy » Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 10:43 PM UTC

adrianmonk wrote: post #110

dspillett wrote: post #34

A key problem with the complaints is that customer reviews don't† take into account the effect of commingling. The expired food might have come from a different seller initially, but you were sent it because of Amazon's supply line optimisations. Amazon will know but when you write your review or read someone else's, you won't. Same problem as counterfeit goods and commingling though iirc there are more control in pl…

Commingling is bad, but does commingling mean they can't trace it back to which seller sent it to them for FBA? If they can, they can penalize that seller, not the other seller (who won the sale). I'm assuming Amazon has a unique id for every individual item in their warehouses. I'm not sure this is the case, but it seems likely given how their warehouses are organized and the location of stuff is very mixed up and o…

No, they are very capable of tracing it back. See https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/external/200141480

This comes up often.

Re: Amazon is shipping expired food, customers say

#202

Post by ikeboy » Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 10:44 PM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #132

adrianmonk wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Commingling is bad, but does commingling mean they can't trace it back to which seller sent it to them for FBA? If they can, they can penalize that seller, not the other seller (who won the sale). I'm assuming Amazon has a unique id for every individual item in their warehouses. I'm not sure this is the case, but it seems likely given how their warehouses are organized and the location of stuff is very mixed up and o…

> but does commingling mean they can't trace it back to which seller sent it to them for FBA? If they can, they can penalize that seller... Correct, they can't trace it, so they can't penalize. > I'm assuming Amazon has a unique id for every individual item in their warehouses. They don't. If they did, there would be some kind of unique bar code on every item you received from Amazon.

This is incorrect. https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/external/200141480 explicitly stated that they track which seller it comes from.

They don't need to label each product, they just need to know which location it came from and store different sellers products in different locations, which they do.

Re: Amazon is shipping expired food, customers say

#203

Post by ikeboy » Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 10:46 PM UTC

bencollier49 wrote: post #75

dspillett wrote: post #34

A key problem with the complaints is that customer reviews don't† take into account the effect of commingling. The expired food might have come from a different seller initially, but you were sent it because of Amazon's supply line optimisations. Amazon will know but when you write your review or read someone else's, you won't. Same problem as counterfeit goods and commingling though iirc there are more control in pl…

Are Amazon comingling foods? Wouldn't that make them responsible for the expiry dates? And a whole lot of other things to boot?

No, anything with an expiration date is ineligible for commingling.

Re: Amazon is shipping expired food, customers say

#204

Post by bartread » Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 10:47 PM UTC

dspillett wrote: post #34

A key problem with the complaints is that customer reviews don't† take into account the effect of commingling. The expired food might have come from a different seller initially, but you were sent it because of Amazon's supply line optimisations. Amazon will know but when you write your review or read someone else's, you won't. Same problem as counterfeit goods and commingling though iirc there are more control in pl…

> A key problem with the complaints is that customer reviews don't† take into account the effect of commingling.

Why should they take comingling into account? Why should I, as a customer, care? I don't want to know the details of your implementation. I don't care. I ordered some stuff. I gave you money: ship me the stuff I ordered.

Don't ship me some other similar stuff that isn't what I ordered, and don't ship me what I did order but in bad shape. Ship me what I ordered and paid for, and ship it in good condition.

All you've told me with your statement is that the implementation sucks, and now you're trying to blame me for it.

No, I'm sorry: Amazon commingling sucks.

I know I sound grumpy, and will readily admit this is a first world problem, but I've just gone through nearly three weeks of arsing around to get an item returned substantially because of what appears to be a comingling issue[1]. Who has the time for this? Comingling sucks. It needs to stop.

[1] Although I obviously can't be entirely sure it isn't the third party sellers fault.

Re: Amazon is shipping expired food, customers say

#205

Post by michaelt » Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 11:05 PM UTC

turtlebits wrote: post #182

michaelt wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because I assume a warehouse doesn't keep a separate shelf spot for each separate delivery of a unique expiration date? Actually, that's pretty much what we do. If the goods arrive from the supplier as a whole pallet of a single product, every item on the pallet will have the same expiry date, and you track each pallet separately. If the goods arrive on a pallet with a variety of products on it, you split it up by…

Unless you check each item, you don't actually know if the expiration date is correct. I don't see much difference in what you are doing vs Amazon, except that Amazon is getting their product from a various sources (which may be less trustworthy than your supplier).

Ah, perhaps I should have specified; as well as being industry convention, our suppliers are obligated by contract to ensure all the items on a pallet have the same expiry date; and they are generally the original manufacturer who packaged the goods and attached the expiry date in the first place.

They can, of course, print any expiry date on it they like. But they're also pretty motivated not to poison their customers, which is widely seen as bad business practice :)

In our case we do carry out random spot checks on inbound goods, but that's mainly checking for things like bruising on fresh fruit and vegetables.

Re: Amazon is shipping expired food, customers say

#206

Post by trianglem » Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 11:10 PM UTC

gwbas1c wrote: post #45

I don't get it: I've been buying Amazon prime for about 8 years now, and I don't encounter nearly the amount of problems that everyone else reports. Yes, I've gotten a few bad items from Amazon. I've also gotten bad items from brick and mortar stores as well. (I recently had a bunch of items go bad from Trader Joe's long before their sell-by date.)

About the same for me. The one time I had an issue with something that wasn't delivered in good condition, they sent out a replacement after a 3 min chat conversation.

Re: Amazon is shipping expired food, customers say

#207

Post by adrianmonk » Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 11:21 PM UTC

FireBeyond wrote: post #174

QuotedForTruth wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Commingling (in this context) doesn't necessarily mean that the products are literally sitting in the same bin as the same product from another seller. Each seller's items could be kept in separate bins if put in the same warehouse. Then when one of that product is ordered, the picker is told to go to a specific bin to get it. Amazon would then still know which seller's product they sold you. The actual advantage of…

That takes up more warehouse space, which is what Amazon is trying to avoid. Much easier to put it all into one big bin, and if you want, they can charge you to have your own bin.

Seems easy enough to work around. Just fill the extra space with completely different products. Put the other seller's products in a different location, also mixed in with other stuff.

The rule would be that you can put two products together if they are either the same seller (in which case you don't need to distinguish) or a different product (in which case you can distinguish visually).

Amazon already mixes different products in the same slot in order to optimize space anyway.

Re: Amazon is shipping expired food, customers say

#208

Post by tracker1 » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 12:02 AM UTC

ebg13 wrote: post #107

brudgers wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Commingling isn't a problem with the complaints. Commingling reflects a deliberate profit motivated decision at the highest level of Amazon's management. Amazon executives have evaluated the health risks of commingling food. The safety risks of commingling electronics. They've calculated it more profitable to lawyer up when bad things happen.

> Commingling isn't a problem with the complaints. I think they mean that commingling necessarily eliminates the viability of merchant malfeasance analysis in reading reviews, not that the complainers did anything wrong. Just that you can't trust the products from even the most trustworthy shop because someone _else_ might be trying to cheat the marketplace. The review system applies to products, but mostly it applie…

Amazon could EASILY handle comingly to seller's products if Amazon added a seller id sticker to packages it receives... go ahead and comingle, when you get the complaints, you can tie the item to the actual seller, seller does too bad, permanent ban. Problem would solve itself out... Amazon absolutely refuses to do this, yet hides behind its' negligence with "we're a market."

Re: Amazon is shipping expired food, customers say

#209

Post by xxxtentachyon » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 12:26 AM UTC

salawat wrote: post #198

brudgers wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Skip the spider. Big table. Borg. "Merchant malfeasance analysis" is simple. Amazon is the merchant. The other view is bullshit. Well promoted bullshit. But bullshit nevertheless.

I'm going to take a stab at this. >Skip the spider. Maybe an exhortation to not think of being a customer of Amazon like being a spider in a web. Spiders know where the next meal is by vibrations in the fabric of the web, which if we imagine the negative comments as vibrations caused the receipt of a skeevy item from a seller in the network as a naieve attempt to track a skeevy supplier, we're not going to get what w…

I read it as:

- the “spider” being metonymic for Amazon’s web, i.e. the big, apparently tangled, globe-covering supply chain that Amazon has built

- the “big table” to be the proverbial “grown-ups’ table” that Amazon is sitting at, in contrast to the suppliers at the kids’ table

- the rest is clear. You can’t blame the assimilated (suppliers); blame the assimilating Borg (Amazon) and so on

Re: Amazon is shipping expired food, customers say

#210

Post by xxxtentachyon » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 12:28 AM UTC

MiroF wrote: post #187

dspillett wrote: post #34

A key problem with the complaints is that customer reviews don't† take into account the effect of commingling. The expired food might have come from a different seller initially, but you were sent it because of Amazon's supply line optimisations. Amazon will know but when you write your review or read someone else's, you won't. Same problem as counterfeit goods and commingling though iirc there are more control in pl…

"Oh hey! Sorry I hit you with this car, what you've got to understand is that I was trying to optimize my way through this red light." You can't "move fast and break things" if those things are basic food and safety regs.

1000%. If the Tylenol tainting scandal happened in 2019, would it have been sold through Amazon’s supply chain?