91–100 of 272 posts
Growth at any cost is creating a dystopian society. Tax share price increases so companies can focus again in making good products and providing good services. To reward growth above all, and share price instead of profits does that, creates incentives to grow now at the cost of the future of the company and the trust of customers or even society.
Is it just me or is Reader Mode completely broken on this website?
I recently discontinued a Prime membership we'd had for years and it was eye-opening how annoying and persistent the attempts to get us to sign up for it again are. Every time I buy something, I have to find the tiny link instead of the big button. One time the tiny link was broken and I literally could not complete my purchase until I tried a few hours later. On the other hand, it was not difficult to cancel.
I remember when this was first rolled out. You'd go to buy something on Amazon, and the whole page would be a Prime ad, while some tiny little text would say something like "no thanks take me to checkout." This change was when I knew that Amazon had jumped the shark and was certainly no longer "obsessively customer focused." We had actually bought Prime accidentally via this method. Now in my family we make it a spec…
Same. This was scary to me. It means Amazon knows they are kings of online retail and have no problem abusing customers now. Walmart online is sometimes cheaper, but also sometimes more expensive. Makes it really hard to make the switch. I have refused to give money to bad companies, but with the rest of the world being manipulated into giving them money, I realized I never made a dent.
Just used the free trial to get something in time before i left another country, and nicely wasted some $$ because i wasn't aware they will refund you for every remaining month.
This administration selected the current FTC commissioner because of an op-ed attacking Amazon and a glowing profile both published in the New York Times. The FTC lawsuits against Meta and now Amazon are politically motivated and are a misuse of the the system if not outright corruption.
Good. As someone who hasn't been careful enough and been caught by Amazon's deceptive practices myself, I hope they get them as good and hard as the law allows. If they have to put a boot on Bezos's spaceship, that would be an amusing benefit of the whole thing. I don't appreciate being subject to one dark pattern after another just to buy an sd card or a bath towel.
If you have a valuable product, it should stand on its own as valuable. If you have to engage in deceptive practices, you're just accelerating your journey towards enshittification and destroying your brand equity. I guess that's fine for short-term gain/pump-and-dump, but it's unethical.
I'd rather die poor and honest, than rich and full of regret.
I recently discontinued a Prime membership we'd had for years and it was eye-opening how annoying and persistent the attempts to get us to sign up for it again are. Every time I buy something, I have to find the tiny link instead of the big button. One time the tiny link was broken and I literally could not complete my purchase until I tried a few hours later. On the other hand, it was not difficult to cancel.
With that obnoxious behavior, why bother buying from Amazon if you don't have Prime? Amazon is a flea market trafficking in commingled imports from numerous unvetted third parties. The advantage of Prime is that it brings this flea market to your door. Without Prime I don't see much of a value proposition in the flea market. Actually, even with Prime the value is questionable. If my wife didn't like Prime I would shu…
I cancelled Amazon years ago and have enjoyed not wading through the desperate side hustles and scams that Amazon essentially farms for data they can use to enter markets that they can then dominate.
How Doordash/Uber/etc exploit their drivers' lack of sense for depreciation costs / maintenance etc is just how Amazon exploits small business hustlers' lack of understanding of the power of omniscient market data.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Speaking up is a career limiting move in the short term. In the long term you have survivorship bias. The people that speak up tend to not be there for long. Not directly because they're fired, but indirectly because they get frustrated. Even if it's designed correctly initially, the areas has a permanent bull-eyes for someone's promo packet to go and optimize.
> Speaking up is a career limiting move in the short term. What do you mean by "career limiting"? Just at the company in question, perhaps, but speaking up like that should be considered a good thing. If it's not, why would you want to continue working there?
Career limiting means you'll see less career advancements.
> speaking up like that should be considered a good thing.
Agreed. But in practice it's unfortunately not always seen that way.
> If it's not, why would you want to continue working there?
Because I weight several factors when deciding where to work and there are other benefits to working here.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some of the redactions are single words trivially inferred from context; what's with that?
I didn't see any that were that obvious, but it sounds like the redactions are at Amazon's request, so they probably went for anything that could conceivably be construed as private information.