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.
I got struts for a car instead of a hammer. I made the mistake on their site to say I was returning the hammer (which was struts) but the text chats told me not to. After two more separate text chats they finally straightened it out. They sent me a hammer and did not charge for a return. It was hard because there was not an option to say wrong thing delivered. Overall they have been quite accurate.
Because we live rural I am happy Amazon has leveled the shopping field.
We were at an airshow a few years ago and there was a big cargo FED EX plane you could look in. I leaned into the storage compartment and said “Oh! There’s my package!” The attendant lost it.
I will never order a book from Amazon. They have the most unethical behavior in the book selling space. They actively try to hurt independent bookstores, who are just trying to manage their own businesses and provide great customer service.
Sadly there are some things that I can only seem to get on Amazon these days . . .so I still do shop there, much to my own dismay.
Asking seriously - what are they doing that’s unethical?
I understand they are not good for small, local businesses and many fold due to them - they win on selection, price, and delivery - but what is the unethical part?
Undercutting the publishers and trying to put them out of business. Underpaying the authors. There was a huge ad in NYT several years ago taken out by some of those affected.
Also their low prices put small bookstores out of business and hurt chains like B & N. Then once the other bookstores closed, Amazon open their own! ( I was happy that was not a success).
Except we as a society once chose to follow laws restricting monopolies. I thought it was for this very reason, so that no one company can become so powerful as to kill all the competition.
AI summary:
The main law in the United States that prevents companies from becoming a monopoly is the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, which makes it illegal to monopolize or attempt to monopolize a market, and prohibits other anti-competitive practices like price-fixing and exclusive agreements that restrict trade. This law, along with subsequent antitrust legislation like the Clayton Act and the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act, forms the bedrock of U.S. antitrust law, aiming to promote fair competition, protect consumers, and ensure economic fairness.
Well I see various independent book stores and we have a B&N. They aren’t a monopoly but as I noted, they are ruthless.
Of course, they started with books - but then went beyond and books is a tiny thing today. In fact, their internet storage business seems to be their driver.
That argument makes no sense. Not shopping at Walmart does not mean you stop shopping altogether. If everyone stopped shopping at Walmart, other retailers would quickly fill the void.
Yes, but I was referencing employees - saying if he took his shopping from Wal Mart, that job would be lost.
Another store’s revenue gain doesn’t necessarily mean an employment gain.
If Target is fully staffed, adding incremental shoppers doesn’t necessarily mean adding employees.
In the end, none of it matters. People don’t like Amazon - we’ve read some posters on here - and yet they say - but I still shop there (for whatever the reason)..
In essence, I suppose they are acknowledging their dependence, even if grudgingly so.
I don’t understand this. My aunt is an author. She’s paid by the publisher (underpaid, sure) when her books sell. The only time she’d be paid by a bookstore is if she does a book signing with a presentation, but that’s rare and would never happen with Amazon.
It’s not the revenue gain that would determine the need for Target to hire the Walmart employees….it’s the physical bodies of the ex Walmart shoppers in the store. The demand for goods would still exist. Where I live, the Target and Costco parking lots are ALWAYS packed. They would have to build more stores to accommodate the added parking, crowd, stock and checkout pressure. Even Amazon would probably have to add more warehouse staff. It may not be a one for one swap but it would be close and the number workers eligible for welfare would be significantly reduced as well.
The point is that the suggestion that millions of wm employees would be out of work because folks decided to shop at Target instead of wm makes zero sense.
