For me it’s now hate. I order once a year for things you just can’t find anywhere else (a brand of silver polish which has long been discontinued, but Ebay or Amazon will have some small seller in Racine Wisconsin who is selling off the inventory, things like that).
Their customer service is now terrible- it took me weeks to get an erroneous charge reversed, just because every single chatbot is set up to help you with a return, NOT to actually answer your question, and the loop is endless. The drivers park everywhere (crosswalk, blocking the handicapped cutout on the sidewalk) and get irritated if you ask them to move so you can get grandma up over the curb.
First they run all the retailers out of town, and now they’ve circled the drain on the entire buying experience so there are no other options?
@O2BonCC The exact same thing happened to me! It took me a long time to get it supposedly “corrected” and then at the deadline date they charged my credit card. I didn’t even try to call them back about it because of the hassle I had the first time.
All hate from me. I have completely stopped ordering from them and will go way out of my way to get what I need from someone else, preferably a locally owned shop.
Same experience here. Twice. (with the “expected A, but got B”). Either Amazon hoping customers won’t bother to contest because it is a royal PIA to go thru their chat bot hell…or they have scamming workers changing labels. Both times, Amazon relented and did not charge me…but it’s a couple hours of my time that I won’t get back.
I’m not sure what my hassle threshold would be but in this case we’re talking three figures, so I was definitely not letting that one go!
And come to think of it, when I originally ordered the three MOB outfits, I received, separately, two outfits and a kitchen rug! Oddly, there wasn’t a box to check on the return form for “you sent me the wrong dang thing!” They probably have me flagged as a serial returner at this point!
There’s not much I love about Amazon. Chasing all over town for a widget is not environmentally wise either, so we do occasionally succumb to the convenience - but try hard not to, unless we can’t find the product locally.
My biggest gripe is the Amazon corporate model. It has become so large, so ubiquitous, and so lopsided, that I try whenever possible to NOT support it at all. I once tried to find the differential between the average employee and the head (Bezos) compensation. One source summarized Bezos makes 8million per hour (in stock funds). Another suggested he makes 1.2 million times the average worker. A third outlined that the average employee makes $15/hour, and Bezos makes the same in 12 milliseconds.
I highly respected the original compensation philosophy of Ben&Jerry’s (head CEO makes no more than 5x lowest paid employee). That morphed over time to 7x, then 17x by 2000. Creativity and Ingenuity are worth something, but NO ONE is deserving of the differential made by Bezos. Most companies’ success is still built on the backs, time, & lives of other employees .
I ordered a 6 pack of women’s Hanes underwear from Amazon and was sent instead a double pack of pop-tarts. Surprisingly they made me return the pop-tarts. The women at the Amazon counter in Whole Foods who accepted the return gave it a big double take. That was a big warehouse mistake in my opinion.
So far, I haven’t had any switcheroos with Amazon. Had one with Chewy: got a giant package of prescription dry dog food instead of my wet cat food order! It was not a misplaced package as it had my address and name on it! Chewy has the best customer service! A live person picked up right away and told me to donate the dog food - a very expensive bag of dog food! Funny thing, shortly after I received the replacement order, another box with identical cat food order showed up on my doorstep. I was told to just use it.
