The crux of the problem seems to be "when merchants set up shop on Amazon, they waive their right to a day in court by agreeing to binding arbitration to resolve any disputes".
Is this even legal?
Amazon destroys $1.5m of sellers inventory – now homeless
241–250 of 363 posts
Re: Amazon destroys $1.5m of sellers inventory – now homeless
#242Yeah, you know, when people keep saying "You aren't as far from being homeless as you imagine you are" this is what they mean. Just because your life has not come unraveled overnight doesn't mean it can't for reasons beyond your control having nothing to do with personal virtues or lack thereof. We really need to get universal health care in the US, among other things, to limit how far people can fall when something…
Not just health care, but income as well.
Now, I live in a third world country, and have had cancer scares and other medical checkups that only cost me a few hundred US dollars vs. the tens of thousands that _would_ have cost me if I had lived in the US.
I'm probably never going back, partially because of this. I make a good living. Better than I would be back in the States.
Re: Amazon destroys $1.5m of sellers inventory – now homeless
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm really curious what sort of support the retro video game business needs. My (clearly naive) assumption is that it would be as simple as sending them the cartridge and telling them to have a great day, but if you're meeting so many seemingly unpleasant people it seems to be a lot more than that. Could you share more about the sort of issues you face?
So sometimes discs won't load or cartridges won't read in their console, or they're unhappy with condition - sometimes this is as simple as apologising and accepting a return, sometimes people aren't happy with that and just want to kick up a stink. More often than not, the people kicking up a stink return a perfectly working product, and they just wanted to make sure we'd accept it by them being as foul as possible.…
Ha I get you I’m trying to sell a PlayStation on offer up right now and “buyers” are toxic even for one item. Idk why you do this to yourself I’d go nuts
Re: Amazon destroys $1.5m of sellers inventory – now homeless
#244I don't understand why the journalist didn't contact the manufacturers to confirm that the products were authentic.
Re: Amazon destroys $1.5m of sellers inventory – now homeless
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
Got a link for the USB oscilloscope?
Not going to pass up an opportunity to shill the business. :P https://espotek.com/labrador/
This is a little off-topic, but since we're already on this: I just wanted to say "great job" on the Labrador. I don't even need one (I have benchtop scope, power supply, signal generator, logic analyzer, etc. already, and a couple of Bus Pirates) but couldn't resist ordering one just to acknowledge the awesomeness of your work.
Re: Amazon destroys $1.5m of sellers inventory – now homeless
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are looking at the healthcare coverage problem and you think it’s the only issue. Coverage is a big problem for some but not the biggest problem. The biggest issue is arguably billing and pricing. You have no idea how much something will cost until it’s done. Medicade is paying over 80% more for prescription drugs than the EU. > In 2016 the U.S. spent 18% of its GDP on healthcare, whereas the next highest country…
Au contraire, I think my proposed solution solves pricing as well. As I wrote, it aligns interests between consumers (patients) and producers (doctors), and removes one step between them - patients will be much more directly impacted by their choice of insurer (now this is handled by their companies, consumers have no real choice), so they'll be shopping around for the optimal price/performance provider. The alternat…
We already have the ACA system and state marketplaces. Someone can search for health insurance if their company doesn't provide it. The plans are expensive for most people and the deductibles are much higher than most employer plans.
The cost of supplies and services are not going to go down overnight if we decouple employers sponsored insurance.
Personally I don't think universal healthcare is the correct option or a viable one in the US. The existing government plans should be expanded to lower incomes (way above poverty line), self employed, and allow unemployed people to float until their next job. Also add a percentage of your salary structure similar to what wikipedia says about Swiss healthcare.
It would be nice to have the option to buy in to government plans if your employer doesn't offer anything or you are retired. Everyone already pays into theses plan and a small increase combined with a % of salary structured buy in isn't going to bankrupt people.
Swiss healthcare costs are more similar to the US than other countries. The private system is also similar to the US. I still think the expenses need to an overhaul. It's way past time for the government to step in.
Re: Amazon destroys $1.5m of sellers inventory – now homeless
#247The merchants must navigate a largely automated, guilty-until-proven-innocent process in which Amazon serves as judge and jury. Their emails and calls can go unanswered, or Amazon's replies are incomprehensible, making sellers suspect they're at the mercy of algorithms with little human oversight. This is something our modern society was and is not ready for. Bureaucracy and the bureaucrats that administered it is a…
> But this is fully automated bureaucracy. Except instead of having well known rules or human bureaucrats we can confront
Reminds me of a novel that was written over 100 years ago:
> The Trial (German: Der Process,[1] later Der Proceß, Der Prozeß and Der Prozess) is a novel written by Franz Kafka between 1914 and 1915 and published posthumously in 1925. One of his best-known works, it tells the story of Josef K., a man arrested and prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible authority, with the nature of his crime revealed neither to him nor to the reader.
Re: Amazon destroys $1.5m of sellers inventory – now homeless
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quite the attack vector for competitors, though.
If you're not shady its pretty easy to prove your legit. Real offline bussinesses have to keep records too, and the same attack can happen in the real world since selling counterfeit goods is a crime (harder to get away with false report though in the physical world)
Records though can be messy across businesses (retailer, wholesaler, manufacturer). A simple example would be if the purchase order id could be entered in different formats like if one vendor has dashes (like [customer]-[order number]) and then that PO id is entered without dashes at another system.
If you do a simple search or table join you aren't going to get a match, and if the person who was asked to provide the records doesn't go the extra step to do the search again you suddenly have a lot of issues.
Re: Amazon destroys $1.5m of sellers inventory – now homeless
#249The merchants must navigate a largely automated, guilty-until-proven-innocent process in which Amazon serves as judge and jury. Their emails and calls can go unanswered, or Amazon's replies are incomprehensible, making sellers suspect they're at the mercy of algorithms with little human oversight. This is something our modern society was and is not ready for. Bureaucracy and the bureaucrats that administered it is a…
Definitely watch the movie Brazil.
Re: Amazon destroys $1.5m of sellers inventory – now homeless
#250The merchants must navigate a largely automated, guilty-until-proven-innocent process in which Amazon serves as judge and jury. Their emails and calls can go unanswered, or Amazon's replies are incomprehensible, making sellers suspect they're at the mercy of algorithms with little human oversight. This is something our modern society was and is not ready for. Bureaucracy and the bureaucrats that administered it is a…
Just to give another perspective, I run a couple of small businesses with my wife and we handle support ourselves. This is an absolute pleasure for our USB oscilloscope business - intelligent, reasonable customers ask for help with a problem they have, we help them solve it and both parties move on with our lives. Our other business - dealing in retro video games, is an absolute nightmare. Almost all support question…
> "provide good, human support to everyone" - it creates as many problems as it solves.
Agreed with all your points except they really should have some `if (claim > minForHumanAgent){ bypassAutomatedHandling(); }` logic for millions of dollars.