16 ms·

The merchants must navigate a largely automated, guilty-until-proven-innocent process in which Amazon serves as judge and jury. Their emails and calls can

The 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 nightmare that society has known about and dealt with for a long time. But this is fully automated bureaucracy. Except instead of having well known rules or human bureaucrats we can confront.. we're now effectively at the mercy of a dice roll in the worst case. And no one can even confirm if the dice are even fair dice. In the best case you get to deal with a robot that can't even understand what you're saying.

grishka 6y ago
Being an Android developer is a similar experience. If your app gets removed from Google Play, even if it's clearly by mistake, good luck having it reinstated. Unless you know a googler or two. Then it's a breeze. Going through official channels you'll be hitting a wall.
- Google234 6y ago
  Doubt that is true. Every company has internal policies to stop favoritism like that.
  - chabad360 6y ago
    It's not that it's favoritism, it's just a way to trigger a manual review...
  - _-___________-_ 6y ago
    I've had many interactions with Google where the automated system was clearly wrong but after multiple attempts at human escalation, literally the only way to solve the problem was to ask the right friends who happen to work there, after which the problem was solved almost immediately.
  - jodrellblank 6y ago
    Actual Googler looking into a complaint personally happening on HN - 9 years ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2795465 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2795465 "[Googler], can you suggest a strategy for dealing with Google support issues that doesn't involve "get Matt Cutt's attention on Hacker News"? - 9 years ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2797972 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2797972 "Guess we won't be able to get Google support from Matt on HN this month. :)" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3709520 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3709520 "You'll notice over time that Hacker News is the only way to contact google support without spending thousands of dollars on adwords." - 7 years ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6932516 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6932516 "That happened a few weeks ago, and thanks to some inside people at Google, the mailing-list reappeared" - 7 years ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5523992 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5523992 "From my friend at Google: "It looks like he used the wrong account to update his credit card..." - 7 years ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6837411 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6837411 "I have seen people have to post on HN to get things resolved by google employees reading HN threads! While it seems like a personal touch, people are resorting to it (and I assume googlers are helping) because there is not another avenue that works for MOST products that google has." - 7 years ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5716357 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5716357 "You can post a problem on google support forums, and pray and hope for an answer from their developers." - 9 years ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2922073 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2922073 "Google also has a history of disabling accounts and providing no communication, support or other mechanisms to get it restored. Usually kicking up an almighty fuss in public if you have a prominent twitter/blog works" - 9 years ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3885588 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3885588 "Google itself is well known for being impossible to deal with unless you know someone on the inside." - 7 years ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7018354 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7018354 "Disclaimer: I work for Google Google's support is a complete joke. The only way to get things fixed in a timely manner (if at all) is to ask someone who works for Google to escalate internally. Then you stand a chance. Otherwise you're SOL. [...] I would recommend the OP to contact a Googler friend if they have one." - 7 years ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6006534 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6006534 "Google support is abysmal, [but] they respond if you know the appropriate channels" - 6 years ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8098842 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8098842 "and there's just no way to contact Google's support unless you know someone at Google" - 4 years ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12442802 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12442802 "Particularly if you don't have a friend inside google or the ability to hit the front page of HN to get customer service." - 4 years ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12975195 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12975195 "She only managed to get this cleared up via a tech support friend who has contacts at Google." - 3 years ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15992090 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15992090 "far far too often do I see folks who have to reach out to a dev on Twitter or their friend at Google to get a simple billing error resolved correctly. Its a problem with most cloud providers, but Google seems to be notorious for it." - 2 years ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17669161 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17669161 "this contradicts basically every other google support story I've ever read on HN. Similar to what the few other comments are saying at the time of me writing this, it seems like this guy made a fuss somewhere that caught the attention of someone who didn't want the bad PR." - 2 years ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17707473 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17707473 "I ended up getting help by going into the google slack and kicking up a fuss. Never heard back from the "official" support channels." - 2 years ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17564220 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17564220 "Two effective strategies I have seen are: (1) Contact a friend who works at Google[...]" - 2 years ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17106803 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17106803 "even though a friend at Google submitted an internal request to get me the account back" - 2 years ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19367972 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19367972 "monetize on their content for a while (or a long time if they don't have a friend at Google who can escalate the issue)." - 1 year ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19953722 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19953722 "Gotta post on Hacker News if you want some Google support!" - 1 year ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20711833 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20711833 "It seems like the most reliable support system with Google is to have a SWE friend who works there who will document and enter tickets for you" - 1 year ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21334183 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21334183 "if you're lucky and you have a friend that knows someone who works there he can expedite your ticket." - 10 months ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21971932 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21971932 "large tech companies like google and amazon for this, where kicking up a fuss on social media is literally the only way you can hope to have a human at the company look into it." - 2 months ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24168390 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24168390 "Google support .... That’s the joke." - 1 month ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24572759 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24572759
- damian2000 6y ago
  Which is a shame because the platform as a developer is awesome. I've developed for both iOS and Android and will always favour Android. But Apple seem to have more consistent and possibly better customer service compared to Google, especially when it comes to the ability to get a knowledgeable answer after failing an app review.
njharman 6y ago
The movie “Brazil” comes to mind.
- teraflop 6y ago
  For an even earlier cautionary tale about computerized bureaucracies, check out "Computers Don't Argue" (1965) by Gordon Dickson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computers_Don%27t_Argue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computers_Don%27t_Argue
  - andi999 6y ago
    Computer says 'no'.
  - martyvis 6y ago
    Great story! You can borrow it from archive.org here https://archive.org/details/bestofcreativeco00ahld/page/134/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/bestofcreativeco00ahld/page/134/...
p1necone 6y ago
I've had a similar experience with Uber customer support. Their navigation thinks there's access to my house from a road that isn't actually connected, so delivery drivers consistently go the wrong way. But emailing customer support just got me seemingly automated responses saying "we're sorry the location pin was not in the right place" which isn't even the problem that I'm having.
- asdff 6y ago
  That's just how customer support is these days it seems. Getting a hold of an actual human capable of doing the most mundane request other than linking to 'help' articles you've already read 10 times is impossible. What happened to emailing support and getting a reply prepared to move heaven and earth to satisfy you as a customer?
  - KronisLV 6y ago
    Perhaps it's because customer support nowadays works in tiers, much like Technical support does ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_support#Multi-tiered_technical_support https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_support#Multi-tiered... )? The people that link you to those help articles are doing so because they simply can't do anything else but to escalate - they simply don't know about the inner workings of the system and don't have the permissions to change the data in it. Whereas the developers/maintainers who could do it would be overcome with thousands of such mundane requests to fix the data in some geospatial database, that they can't be bothered to do. Perhaps Uber doesn't even maintain the dataset for addresses themselves either, and is using a service from someone else, like Google. This kind of makes you think that in this complexity of distributed, scalable systems with microservices, message queues and other systems, eventually the complexity will be too much to actually understand and maintain - be it because of a low bus factor and people leaving due to churn rate, or extremely high effort needed for maintenance.
  - kbenson 6y ago
    There exist companies that distinguish themselves on providing good support, and use it as a differentiator. They generally aren't number one in a market though, so don't look the the leader to usually be them (occasionally they are, when they have an equivalent or better product and also better support and servicing).
friendlybus 6y ago
It looks inevitable that the law will have to get involved for western users of the big platforms. I don't know if that will fly in the US. Tolerating life & death on the complete lack of structure in tech decision making has to come to an end eventually, at least on particular financial outcomes.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
gulfie 6y ago
This is _exactly_ the situation that this society came up with a new agreement to avoid. E.g. Presumption of innocence, and Habeas corpus to mention two.
- ethanwillis 6y ago
  I completely agree. I think the only difference is that we were under the assumption we would be dealing with 1. Governments 2. People
m463 6y ago
A friend of mine worked for a company whose operators answered late night tv infomercials. They had humans answering the phone, but everything about it was scripted and highly optimized. Purchasing the thing was very very easy, but after that there was an upsell gauntlet to get through before hanging up. "This is rediculous, I don't want to hear about this" "But sir, people call back after they've missed these offers etc..." The ONLY method to escape it was to say "I will cancel my order". Additionally the call center employees would be fired if they deviated from the script. Given that, it's quite easy to see why it's hard to find a customer service phone number or any other option except the one they want you to find. Personally the one that annoyed me was amazon customer service to find "Package says delivered but not received". Searching for this finds lots of variants in the quick-search bar, and a "helpful" faq that says something like "ask a neighbor" or "look under the porch", but no way to contact customer service about it despite forms for hundreds of other meaningless interactions.
- birdsbirdsbirds 6y ago
  Does Jeff Bezos know, or is he shielded from bad customer experience like Mao, who saw a country full of rice fields along the rail tracks when he travelled the country? [1] [1] https://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/02/world/the-tyrant-mao-as-told-by-his-doctor.html https://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/02/world/the-tyrant-mao-as-t...
  - aspaceman 6y ago
    That book is quite widely criticized. Not trying to defend Mao or the Great Famine, but with anecdotes like that I find this quote apt: "With a person as divisive as Mao, both because of his complex history and because of what he represents to different groups, if becomes an almost impossible task to sift through the contradictions of supposed first hand accounts." https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/d3s00b/did_mao_zedong_lead_a_lavish_opulent_and_sexually/f05zk77/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/d3s00b/did_m...
    - kortilla 6y ago
Areading314 6y ago
The problem is not the automation, the problem is that a single authority has a complete monopoly on certain aspects of the e-commerce market. Full credit to Bezos and Amazon for their incredible execution in achieving this. However, monopolies are an example of market failure, and in this case, also an example of an authority able to act as judge + jury where the affected parties have no realistic recourse, while being accountable to no-one. This is why we need government to intervene and ensure competition is restored on both the buyer + seller sides in e-commerce.
- bgorman 6y ago
  How is Amazon a monopoly when customers can easily purchase an item from eBay, Walmart, Target, Aliexpress, and many others. Amazon is often the most expensive option for me.
  - Areading314 6y ago
    Its not a monopoly over all ecommerce. However there are certain markets where the sellers, for example book publishers, are totally at the mercy of amazon because they have become the only de facto distribution channel for certain products like e-books (there are others as well). So its great for customers but it still has severe negative consequences for authors and publishers. Technically this is known as a "monopsony" but it's bad just in the same way a monopoly is.
    - nickpp 6y ago
      So I guess any company becomes a "monopoly" if you reduce enough the definition of its field?!
      - BlueTemplar 6y ago
        Indeed.
      - fennecfoxen 6y ago
        The key thing economists look to, to define a monopoly, is that the company has the power to set prices. This is in the economic sense: that there isn’t some give-and-take supply-and-demand setting prices for them, and they just happen to record that. When Office Depot was considering a Staples merger a while back, the Feds looked at the price of corporate office supply services in markets where there was only one of each firm, and found them higher than in markets where both competed. This despite the fact they didn’t have a monopoly on, say, copy paper.
bsder 6y ago
This is simply Kafka's "The Trial" at scale. This will continue until these companies start losing large monetary value cases in court.
- bleepblorp 6y ago
  Large businesses in America, including Amazon, require their customers and suppliers to waive their right to sue. Amazon et el cannot be held accountable through the legal system. These abuses will continue unless there is enough of a sea change in Washington that protecting free markets becomes more of a priority than protecting the freedom of large businesses to exploit people. That will happen no sooner than the day Amazon receives an order for ice skates from the hotter half of the Christian afterlife.
- nicbou 6y ago
  This is unlikely. They save a lot of money this way, and they own a sufficiently large part of the market. Unless the problem gets outrageously bad, the cost won't be measurable.
rossjudson 6y ago
Because the end of the path here for Amazon is destruction of the inventory in question, I guess we'll never really know what's real or not. There's nothing to be inspected...which seems rather problematic, right? In criminal cases people don't run around destroying evidence. That's viewed rather negatively by judges. So here we have Amazon destroying the inventory in question. No way to have even a partial sample of that inventory still available for checking? No laws that regulate how and when Amazon can destroy inventory, particularly in the presence of mandatory arbitration? No checks and balances on that process at all?
- xondono 6y ago
  In any case it could be very hard to prove that the items are fake by inspection, it’s mostly a fight about distribution and the supply channel.
  - fredophile 6y ago
    If you can't tell they're fake by inspection how did the complaining customers identify them as fake?
    - ethanwillis 6y ago
      There's a few assumptions here. I'd say the assumptions are that 1. Amazon knows the fakes, if they exist, came specifically from this seller. I doubt this because of their comingling problems. 2. That the threshold of complaints required to initiate this type of action is a reasonable one. And furthermore that the complaints are valid. It could be a matter of a few 3rd party competitors, it could be the original wholesaler trying to throw a wrench into Amazon's systems, it could be customers who are angling for credits, free products etc. As well all of this plays with assumption #1 and comingling.
      - fredophile 6y ago
        I think you accidentally replied to the wrong comment.
stjohnswarts 6y ago
Amazon could fix this. This isn't an all or nothing "digital bad" "bureaucrats bad" situation. It's Amazon and one complaint. This guy should find a good lawyer and take them to court. He had proof that his stuff was not counterfit. Adding some arbitrary "you have to have a receipt no more than 365 days old" is ridiculous. Amazon just doesn't care. Even for a 1.5 million dollars worth of stock. What are the chances that they give a hoot about the average guy on the street? It seems to me like they could do something sensible like "we have 4 complaints out of 10000 orders, chances are these are just peeved customers, tell him make them whole". That seems like just basic logic to me.
- ethanwillis 6y ago
  Amazon just doesn't care. This is exactly it. They don't have to care, and they've outsourced all of their caring to a robotic bureaucrat. Without a human in the loop, like yourself, to realize the absurdity in edge cases you get the worst possible version of bureaucracy. And I wouldn't say it's an all or nothing situation either that "digital bad" or "bureaucracy bad". Bureaucracy can be good, it helps streamline certain processes "at scale." Digital can also obviously be good. The PROBLEM is when you marry these things together without proper controls in place by society. We haven't completely thought through the ramifications.
- pjc50 6y ago
  According to the article he _is_ suing them. It's just that takes years to resolve cases.
AussieWog93 6y ago
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 questions we field come from people who have no intention of solving a problem. Most are just anxious people who need a little bit of reassurance, but plenty expect us to do pointless busywork, want to vent emotionally at someone who can't fight back, or just generally want to smear shit all over the walls because they can. Either way, because they don't want to solve a problem, they just keep up eating up your support time and emotional energy in an extended loop for no gain - we're talking upwards of 80% of your support resources if you let these people have their way. Having to deal regularly with the type of person that the average HN reader would never come across in their lifetime, I can understand why organisations like Amazon would set up these bureaucratic support "walls" and/or outsource all support to a Filipino call centre staffed by people that don't even know what Amazon is. The systems are designed to make getting support hard, because most people contacting consumer support literally don't even have a problem that good support staff could solve. In this instance, they've clearly made an error in requiring the user to navigate an automated system when the dollar value is in the _millions_, and I understand why the average HN user would be pissed off by a system like this, but I don't think the solution to the problem is as simple as "provide good, human support to everyone" - it creates as many problems as it solves.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Narkov 6y ago
  Got a link for the USB oscilloscope?
  - AussieWog93 6y ago
    Not going to pass up an opportunity to shill the business. :P https://espotek.com/labrador/ https://espotek.com/labrador/
ashtonkem 6y ago
In many ways, YouTube content creators were the canary in the coal mine here with how the algorithm treated them, and Amazon sellers seem to be next. The worst case future of automation isn’t terminator, it’s just having the worst possible boss.
pydry 6y ago
Sounds like the movie Brazil.
brobdingnagians 6y ago
Kafka and Orwell were right. They might have understated their cases. I don't think people understood how tech could exaggerate and accentuate some of the worst in humanity and create massive centralisation which can create more and more stifling bureaucracy. At least before, you could be ignored by a bureaucrat, now it is a faceless, nameless, heartless system
derbOac 6y ago
It's not bureaucracy, it's monopoly (or something so close to it to be functionally the same).
dakna 6y ago
> 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.
- InitialLastName 6y ago
  There's a reason they call getting stuck in this sort of bureocracy "Kafkaesque"
- jpcooper 6y ago
  Orson Welles did a brilliant film adaptation of The Trial. Worth checking out.
mensetmanusman 6y ago
Definitely watch the movie Brazil.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
DenisM 6y ago
Kind of like Brazil “dot com” then. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film)
disown 6y ago
> 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. Only if you are the "little guy". You can be sure that amazon responds to big companies. If someone from Apple, Samsung, etc contacted amazon about something, do you really think they'll be tossed into the trashbin of the algorithm?

grishka 6y ago

Being an Android developer is a similar experience. If your app gets removed from Google Play, even if it's clearly by mistake, good luck having it reinstated. Unless you know a googler or two. Then it's a breeze. Going through official channels you'll be hitting a wall.

Google234 6y ago
Doubt that is true. Every company has internal policies to stop favoritism like that.
- chabad360 6y ago
  It's not that it's favoritism, it's just a way to trigger a manual review...
- _-___________-_ 6y ago
  I've had many interactions with Google where the automated system was clearly wrong but after multiple attempts at human escalation, literally the only way to solve the problem was to ask the right friends who happen to work there, after which the problem was solved almost immediately.
- jodrellblank 6y ago
  Actual Googler looking into a complaint personally happening on HN - 9 years ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2795465 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2795465 "[Googler], can you suggest a strategy for dealing with Google support issues that doesn't involve "get Matt Cutt's attention on Hacker News"? - 9 years ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2797972 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2797972 "Guess we won't be able to get Google support from Matt on HN this month. :)" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3709520 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3709520 "You'll notice over time that Hacker News is the only way to contact google support without spending thousands of dollars on adwords." - 7 years ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6932516 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6932516 "That happened a few weeks ago, and thanks to some inside people at Google, the mailing-list reappeared" - 7 years ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5523992 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5523992 "From my friend at Google: "It looks like he used the wrong account to update his credit card..." - 7 years ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6837411 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6837411 "I have seen people have to post on HN to get things resolved by google employees reading HN threads! While it seems like a personal touch, people are resorting to it (and I assume googlers are helping) because there is not another avenue that works for MOST products that google has." - 7 years ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5716357 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5716357 "You can post a problem on google support forums, and pray and hope for an answer from their developers." - 9 years ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2922073 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2922073 "Google also has a history of disabling accounts and providing no communication, support or other mechanisms to get it restored. Usually kicking up an almighty fuss in public if you have a prominent twitter/blog works" - 9 years ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3885588 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3885588 "Google itself is well known for being impossible to deal with unless you know someone on the inside." - 7 years ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7018354 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7018354 "Disclaimer: I work for Google Google's support is a complete joke. The only way to get things fixed in a timely manner (if at all) is to ask someone who works for Google to escalate internally. Then you stand a chance. Otherwise you're SOL. [...] I would recommend the OP to contact a Googler friend if they have one." - 7 years ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6006534 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6006534 "Google support is abysmal, [but] they respond if you know the appropriate channels" - 6 years ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8098842 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8098842 "and there's just no way to contact Google's support unless you know someone at Google" - 4 years ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12442802 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12442802 "Particularly if you don't have a friend inside google or the ability to hit the front page of HN to get customer service." - 4 years ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12975195 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12975195 "She only managed to get this cleared up via a tech support friend who has contacts at Google." - 3 years ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15992090 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15992090 "far far too often do I see folks who have to reach out to a dev on Twitter or their friend at Google to get a simple billing error resolved correctly. Its a problem with most cloud providers, but Google seems to be notorious for it." - 2 years ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17669161 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17669161 "this contradicts basically every other google support story I've ever read on HN. Similar to what the few other comments are saying at the time of me writing this, it seems like this guy made a fuss somewhere that caught the attention of someone who didn't want the bad PR." - 2 years ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17707473 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17707473 "I ended up getting help by going into the google slack and kicking up a fuss. Never heard back from the "official" support channels." - 2 years ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17564220 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17564220 "Two effective strategies I have seen are: (1) Contact a friend who works at Google[...]" - 2 years ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17106803 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17106803 "even though a friend at Google submitted an internal request to get me the account back" - 2 years ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19367972 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19367972 "monetize on their content for a while (or a long time if they don't have a friend at Google who can escalate the issue)." - 1 year ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19953722 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19953722 "Gotta post on Hacker News if you want some Google support!" - 1 year ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20711833 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20711833 "It seems like the most reliable support system with Google is to have a SWE friend who works there who will document and enter tickets for you" - 1 year ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21334183 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21334183 "if you're lucky and you have a friend that knows someone who works there he can expedite your ticket." - 10 months ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21971932 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21971932 "large tech companies like google and amazon for this, where kicking up a fuss on social media is literally the only way you can hope to have a human at the company look into it." - 2 months ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24168390 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24168390 "Google support .... That’s the joke." - 1 month ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24572759 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24572759
damian2000 6y ago
Which is a shame because the platform as a developer is awesome. I've developed for both iOS and Android and will always favour Android. But Apple seem to have more consistent and possibly better customer service compared to Google, especially when it comes to the ability to get a knowledgeable answer after failing an app review.

njharman 6y ago

The movie “Brazil” comes to mind.

teraflop 6y ago
For an even earlier cautionary tale about computerized bureaucracies, check out "Computers Don't Argue" (1965) by Gordon Dickson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computers_Don%27t_Argue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computers_Don%27t_Argue
- andi999 6y ago
  Computer says 'no'.
- martyvis 6y ago
  Great story! You can borrow it from archive.org here https://archive.org/details/bestofcreativeco00ahld/page/134/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/bestofcreativeco00ahld/page/134/...

p1necone 6y ago

I've had a similar experience with Uber customer support. Their navigation thinks there's access to my house from a road that isn't actually connected, so delivery drivers consistently go the wrong way. But emailing customer support just got me seemingly automated responses saying "we're sorry the location pin was not in the right place" which isn't even the problem that I'm having.

asdff 6y ago
That's just how customer support is these days it seems. Getting a hold of an actual human capable of doing the most mundane request other than linking to 'help' articles you've already read 10 times is impossible. What happened to emailing support and getting a reply prepared to move heaven and earth to satisfy you as a customer?
- KronisLV 6y ago
  Perhaps it's because customer support nowadays works in tiers, much like Technical support does ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_support#Multi-tiered_technical_support https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_support#Multi-tiered... )? The people that link you to those help articles are doing so because they simply can't do anything else but to escalate - they simply don't know about the inner workings of the system and don't have the permissions to change the data in it. Whereas the developers/maintainers who could do it would be overcome with thousands of such mundane requests to fix the data in some geospatial database, that they can't be bothered to do. Perhaps Uber doesn't even maintain the dataset for addresses themselves either, and is using a service from someone else, like Google. This kind of makes you think that in this complexity of distributed, scalable systems with microservices, message queues and other systems, eventually the complexity will be too much to actually understand and maintain - be it because of a low bus factor and people leaving due to churn rate, or extremely high effort needed for maintenance.
- kbenson 6y ago
  There exist companies that distinguish themselves on providing good support, and use it as a differentiator. They generally aren't number one in a market though, so don't look the the leader to usually be them (occasionally they are, when they have an equivalent or better product and also better support and servicing).

friendlybus 6y ago

It looks inevitable that the law will have to get involved for western users of the big platforms. I don't know if that will fly in the US. Tolerating life & death on the complete lack of structure in tech decision making has to come to an end eventually, at least on particular financial outcomes.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

gulfie 6y ago

This is _exactly_ the situation that this society came up with a new agreement to avoid. E.g. Presumption of innocence, and Habeas corpus to mention two.

ethanwillis 6y ago
I completely agree. I think the only difference is that we were under the assumption we would be dealing with 1. Governments 2. People

m463 6y ago

A friend of mine worked for a company whose operators answered late night tv infomercials. They had humans answering the phone, but everything about it was scripted and highly optimized. Purchasing the thing was very very easy, but after that there was an upsell gauntlet to get through before hanging up. "This is rediculous, I don't want to hear about this" "But sir, people call back after they've missed these offers etc..." The ONLY method to escape it was to say "I will cancel my order". Additionally the call center employees would be fired if they deviated from the script. Given that, it's quite easy to see why it's hard to find a customer service phone number or any other option except the one they want you to find. Personally the one that annoyed me was amazon customer service to find "Package says delivered but not received". Searching for this finds lots of variants in the quick-search bar, and a "helpful" faq that says something like "ask a neighbor" or "look under the porch", but no way to contact customer service about it despite forms for hundreds of other meaningless interactions.

birdsbirdsbirds 6y ago
Does Jeff Bezos know, or is he shielded from bad customer experience like Mao, who saw a country full of rice fields along the rail tracks when he travelled the country? [1] [1] https://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/02/world/the-tyrant-mao-as-told-by-his-doctor.html https://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/02/world/the-tyrant-mao-as-t...
- aspaceman 6y ago
  That book is quite widely criticized. Not trying to defend Mao or the Great Famine, but with anecdotes like that I find this quote apt: "With a person as divisive as Mao, both because of his complex history and because of what he represents to different groups, if becomes an almost impossible task to sift through the contradictions of supposed first hand accounts." https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/d3s00b/did_mao_zedong_lead_a_lavish_opulent_and_sexually/f05zk77/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/d3s00b/did_m...
  - kortilla 6y ago

Areading314 6y ago

The problem is not the automation, the problem is that a single authority has a complete monopoly on certain aspects of the e-commerce market. Full credit to Bezos and Amazon for their incredible execution in achieving this. However, monopolies are an example of market failure, and in this case, also an example of an authority able to act as judge + jury where the affected parties have no realistic recourse, while being accountable to no-one. This is why we need government to intervene and ensure competition is restored on both the buyer + seller sides in e-commerce.

bgorman 6y ago
How is Amazon a monopoly when customers can easily purchase an item from eBay, Walmart, Target, Aliexpress, and many others. Amazon is often the most expensive option for me.
- Areading314 6y ago
  Its not a monopoly over all ecommerce. However there are certain markets where the sellers, for example book publishers, are totally at the mercy of amazon because they have become the only de facto distribution channel for certain products like e-books (there are others as well). So its great for customers but it still has severe negative consequences for authors and publishers. Technically this is known as a "monopsony" but it's bad just in the same way a monopoly is.
  - nickpp 6y ago
    So I guess any company becomes a "monopoly" if you reduce enough the definition of its field?!
    - BlueTemplar 6y ago
      Indeed.
    - fennecfoxen 6y ago
      The key thing economists look to, to define a monopoly, is that the company has the power to set prices. This is in the economic sense: that there isn’t some give-and-take supply-and-demand setting prices for them, and they just happen to record that. When Office Depot was considering a Staples merger a while back, the Feds looked at the price of corporate office supply services in markets where there was only one of each firm, and found them higher than in markets where both competed. This despite the fact they didn’t have a monopoly on, say, copy paper.

bsder 6y ago

This is simply Kafka's "The Trial" at scale. This will continue until these companies start losing large monetary value cases in court.

bleepblorp 6y ago
Large businesses in America, including Amazon, require their customers and suppliers to waive their right to sue. Amazon et el cannot be held accountable through the legal system. These abuses will continue unless there is enough of a sea change in Washington that protecting free markets becomes more of a priority than protecting the freedom of large businesses to exploit people. That will happen no sooner than the day Amazon receives an order for ice skates from the hotter half of the Christian afterlife.
nicbou 6y ago
This is unlikely. They save a lot of money this way, and they own a sufficiently large part of the market. Unless the problem gets outrageously bad, the cost won't be measurable.

rossjudson 6y ago

Because the end of the path here for Amazon is destruction of the inventory in question, I guess we'll never really know what's real or not. There's nothing to be inspected...which seems rather problematic, right? In criminal cases people don't run around destroying evidence. That's viewed rather negatively by judges. So here we have Amazon destroying the inventory in question. No way to have even a partial sample of that inventory still available for checking? No laws that regulate how and when Amazon can destroy inventory, particularly in the presence of mandatory arbitration? No checks and balances on that process at all?

xondono 6y ago
In any case it could be very hard to prove that the items are fake by inspection, it’s mostly a fight about distribution and the supply channel.
- fredophile 6y ago
  If you can't tell they're fake by inspection how did the complaining customers identify them as fake?
  - ethanwillis 6y ago
    There's a few assumptions here. I'd say the assumptions are that 1. Amazon knows the fakes, if they exist, came specifically from this seller. I doubt this because of their comingling problems. 2. That the threshold of complaints required to initiate this type of action is a reasonable one. And furthermore that the complaints are valid. It could be a matter of a few 3rd party competitors, it could be the original wholesaler trying to throw a wrench into Amazon's systems, it could be customers who are angling for credits, free products etc. As well all of this plays with assumption #1 and comingling.
    - fredophile 6y ago
      I think you accidentally replied to the wrong comment.

stjohnswarts 6y ago

Amazon could fix this. This isn't an all or nothing "digital bad" "bureaucrats bad" situation. It's Amazon and one complaint. This guy should find a good lawyer and take them to court. He had proof that his stuff was not counterfit. Adding some arbitrary "you have to have a receipt no more than 365 days old" is ridiculous. Amazon just doesn't care. Even for a 1.5 million dollars worth of stock. What are the chances that they give a hoot about the average guy on the street? It seems to me like they could do something sensible like "we have 4 complaints out of 10000 orders, chances are these are just peeved customers, tell him make them whole". That seems like just basic logic to me.

ethanwillis 6y ago
Amazon just doesn't care. This is exactly it. They don't have to care, and they've outsourced all of their caring to a robotic bureaucrat. Without a human in the loop, like yourself, to realize the absurdity in edge cases you get the worst possible version of bureaucracy. And I wouldn't say it's an all or nothing situation either that "digital bad" or "bureaucracy bad". Bureaucracy can be good, it helps streamline certain processes "at scale." Digital can also obviously be good. The PROBLEM is when you marry these things together without proper controls in place by society. We haven't completely thought through the ramifications.
pjc50 6y ago
According to the article he _is_ suing them. It's just that takes years to resolve cases.

AussieWog93 6y ago

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 questions we field come from people who have no intention of solving a problem. Most are just anxious people who need a little bit of reassurance, but plenty expect us to do pointless busywork, want to vent emotionally at someone who can't fight back, or just generally want to smear shit all over the walls because they can. Either way, because they don't want to solve a problem, they just keep up eating up your support time and emotional energy in an extended loop for no gain - we're talking upwards of 80% of your support resources if you let these people have their way. Having to deal regularly with the type of person that the average HN reader would never come across in their lifetime, I can understand why organisations like Amazon would set up these bureaucratic support "walls" and/or outsource all support to a Filipino call centre staffed by people that don't even know what Amazon is. The systems are designed to make getting support hard, because most people contacting consumer support literally don't even have a problem that good support staff could solve. In this instance, they've clearly made an error in requiring the user to navigate an automated system when the dollar value is in the _millions_, and I understand why the average HN user would be pissed off by a system like this, but I don't think the solution to the problem is as simple as "provide good, human support to everyone" - it creates as many problems as it solves.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Narkov 6y ago
Got a link for the USB oscilloscope?
- AussieWog93 6y ago
  Not going to pass up an opportunity to shill the business. :P https://espotek.com/labrador/ https://espotek.com/labrador/

ashtonkem 6y ago

In many ways, YouTube content creators were the canary in the coal mine here with how the algorithm treated them, and Amazon sellers seem to be next. The worst case future of automation isn’t terminator, it’s just having the worst possible boss.

pydry 6y ago

Sounds like the movie Brazil.

brobdingnagians 6y ago

Kafka and Orwell were right. They might have understated their cases. I don't think people understood how tech could exaggerate and accentuate some of the worst in humanity and create massive centralisation which can create more and more stifling bureaucracy. At least before, you could be ignored by a bureaucrat, now it is a faceless, nameless, heartless system

derbOac 6y ago

It's not bureaucracy, it's monopoly (or something so close to it to be functionally the same).

dakna 6y ago

> 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.

InitialLastName 6y ago
There's a reason they call getting stuck in this sort of bureocracy "Kafkaesque"
jpcooper 6y ago
Orson Welles did a brilliant film adaptation of The Trial. Worth checking out.

mensetmanusman 6y ago

Definitely watch the movie Brazil.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

DenisM 6y ago

Kind of like Brazil “dot com” then. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film)

disown 6y ago

> 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. Only if you are the "little guy". You can be sure that amazon responds to big companies. If someone from Apple, Samsung, etc contacted amazon about something, do you really think they'll be tossed into the trashbin of the algorithm?