7 ms·

> This was despite the fact that when boxed the Sony a1 weighs 3.22 lb (1.46 kg), and the Chiles’ package was listed by UPS as weighing only 2 lb (900 g). Not

> This was despite the fact that when boxed the Sony a1 weighs 3.22 lb (1.46 kg), and the Chiles’ package was listed by UPS as weighing only 2 lb (900 g). Not sure why Amazon was still arguing at this point. If UPS confirms the package was basically empty, then Amazon has no reason to believe the customer was lying.

sneak 5y ago
They're just following the script.
robk 5y ago
This is not trustworthy. They dont really confirm at all. I've had them be off with label weight by multiple pounds before.
matsemann 5y ago
Probably like in "The Rainmaker". Automatically deny every claim above $X. If there's a complaint on the denial, automatically approve or deny based on a new number $Y. Most people give up before you finally get a real human to actually check the case.
- suifbwish 5y ago
  If I was a god I would never send anyone to hell to burn forever in fiery torment. For this situation I would be very very tempted to make an exception. Anyone who sets up an automated system designed specifically to hassle people for seeking recourse for being wronged, deserves every form of torture they get.
  - dalbasal 5y ago
    Hell would be full before you got very far. Intentionally or unintentionally, this is how most such systems work... even ostensibly noncommercial ones... at least to some extent. Business systems are a chain of events. Every event has x% chance of happening and leading to the next one. If the next event makes money, it's optimized up. If it costs money, it's optimised down. Efforts to pay unclaimed rebates are never as enthusiastic as efforts to claim unpaid receivables. Thus is life.
    - Shacklz 5y ago
      > Thus is life. No, such is full-blown neoliberal capitalism, where the only thing that is considered worth optimizing for is profit. Once you accept that there are other variables that deserve consideration and cannot just be abstracted by price and profit alone (most prominently customer and workforce satisfaction), other optimizations will come into play, which will reduce the amount of crap people have to deal with, and will ultimately lead for a better experience for everyone involved - except for the very few at the top, which are currently reaping all the profits.
      - dalbasal 5y ago
        I really wish the term capitalism hadn't been invented. Maybe it was useful in the 1840s, but in my lifetime it always seems to yield a thin hand wavy way of looking at things... whether your pro or con. The mental equivalent of shouting to win an argument. Whatever your definition of capitalism, I'm sure you can find examples outside of it. There are an infinite number of variables besides profit. Profit isn't the only possible motive for such systems, and it only takes one. A system of people is a system of people, whether it is a church, company, municipality, whatever.
        einpoklum 5y ago
        > A system of people is a system of people, whether it is a church, company, municipality, whatever. Different systems of people behave very differently with different kinds of motivations, stimuli and sanctions, on the individual and collective level. And while there are many variables besides profit, it is money (and capital in particular) which enables most activities of a commercial corporation - not voluntary willingness to work or serve for some purpose; and it is Amazon's profit which the organization is designed to promote and maximize, over anything and everything else.
        dalbasal 5y ago
        True, though I don't see the contradiction. There are similarities and differences, also within such categories. In almost all cases though, they're not going to be as motivated to pay as they are to receive payment. Take subscription antipatterns for example. Charities do this too. They both also create similar self deceptions to justify the more onerous examples. It's not even just about money, convenience is a pretty big motivator. Again, I'm not saying that everything is the same, or being reductive. Quite the opposite. I'm saying that reducing everything to "capitalism," "greed" or whatever is meaningless. It's just normally the case, that people and groups are more cognizant of their own goals and wants than they are of others'. Altruism exists, but it's not uniformly distributed across everything an altruist does.
  - Fargren 5y ago
    I understand this is hyperbole, but people do a lot worse things than automated fraud, if we are looking for reason to send someone to hell...
    - mikro2nd 5y ago
      Agree that "burn in fiery torment" might be going a bit too far. Instead I'd suggest "listen to their own on-hold muzak for the rest of eternity" as a more appropriate punishment.
      - suifbwish 5y ago
        I agree. All the rent a car companies in particular.
- yoz-y 5y ago
  Seems to me that this would be true mostly the other way. $7k is a gigantic amount of money, most people would not let that slide.
- plank_time 5y ago
  This is what Tesla is doing with their solar roof product. They raised prices by 50% even though people already had signed contracts. All their communication is incredibly insidious, telling people that they need to sign the new contract, when in fact that’s false, in hopes of convincing customers to cancel their order. I can’t wait until a class action lawsuit rips them a new asshole at this point.
  - judge2020 5y ago
    Contracts require consideration - as long as they didn’t charge you they don’t have to fulfill their end of the contract.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - gruez 5y ago
      No? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract#Consideration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract#Consideration >Anything of value promised by one party to the other when making a contract can be treated as "consideration": for example, if A signs a contract to buy a car from B for $5,000, A's consideration is the $5,000, and B's consideration is the car.
    - CPLX 5y ago
      That’s wildly incorrect. A failure of a contract for lack of consideration would be if there’s no exchange of value contemplated, ever. For example if I made a promise to provide you a valuable service for nothing in return. In this situation both sides agreed to exchange something of value so there’s obviously consideration. They could make an argument that no damages have occurred and claim you have no credible allegation of being harmed, but that’s a different thing and far from automatic.
      - judge2020 5y ago
        I realize I phrased that incorrectly, I meant that a contract is only worth something if you can sue over it, and with $0 in damages (maybe not given the homeowner might be able to be comp’d for time or for money spent getting the permits) it wouldn’t make sense to sue Tesla over it.
- KyleJune 5y ago
  I once ordered a DSLR camera kit from Amazon for around $750. It had a bunch of lenses but the lens adapter it was suppose to come with was missing. The adapter cost about $15 so I reported it was missing the adapter and asked if they could either send me one or refund me $15 so I could buy one off Amazon. They gave me 2 choices instead of reading my request, return it or accept a partial refund of 30%. I accepted the partial refund because I didn't want to return/re-order the camera kit and hope that it doesn't happen again. I felt kind of bad accepting such a large refund for a small problem.
thedufer 5y ago
That doesn't seem to prove anything at all? It's a 1.6 lb camera. Weighing in at 1.2 lbs short is either a bad scale or a lot of accessories missing, but it definitely does not corroborate a missing camera.
- kube-system 5y ago
  Scales used for commercial purposes in the US are required to meet accuracy standards and to be calibrated by law. While it’s not impossible for them to break, they’re a heck of a lot more rigorous in design and regulation than Amazon’s notoriously problematic inventory management.
  - thedufer 5y ago
    Your comparison to Amazon's inventory implies that this is a weights vs Amazon issue, but what I'm trying to point out is that there are three sides, and none of them agree. If the weights are accurate, that means that the customer lied about getting an empty box (a 2-pound empty box? c'mon) despite actually not getting what they ordered, which is just really weird and hard to explain.
    - kube-system 5y ago
      > (a 2-pound empty box? c'mon) Yes, 2 lbs of packaging. It’s a $7000 camera. It’s well packaged. Even my $300 Canon was double boxed. (As are the customer’s photos of the packaging in the article) The spec sheet of the a1 lists it as weighing 1.6 lbs. it lists the boxed weight as 3.22 lbs. This means the Sony packaging is 1.62 lbs. The remaining 0.38 lbs is the packaging that Amazon put the Sony box in. The math checks out.

sneak 5y ago

They're just following the script.

robk 5y ago

This is not trustworthy. They dont really confirm at all. I've had them be off with label weight by multiple pounds before.

matsemann 5y ago

Probably like in "The Rainmaker". Automatically deny every claim above $X. If there's a complaint on the denial, automatically approve or deny based on a new number $Y. Most people give up before you finally get a real human to actually check the case.

suifbwish 5y ago
If I was a god I would never send anyone to hell to burn forever in fiery torment. For this situation I would be very very tempted to make an exception. Anyone who sets up an automated system designed specifically to hassle people for seeking recourse for being wronged, deserves every form of torture they get.
- dalbasal 5y ago
  Hell would be full before you got very far. Intentionally or unintentionally, this is how most such systems work... even ostensibly noncommercial ones... at least to some extent. Business systems are a chain of events. Every event has x% chance of happening and leading to the next one. If the next event makes money, it's optimized up. If it costs money, it's optimised down. Efforts to pay unclaimed rebates are never as enthusiastic as efforts to claim unpaid receivables. Thus is life.
  - Shacklz 5y ago
    > Thus is life. No, such is full-blown neoliberal capitalism, where the only thing that is considered worth optimizing for is profit. Once you accept that there are other variables that deserve consideration and cannot just be abstracted by price and profit alone (most prominently customer and workforce satisfaction), other optimizations will come into play, which will reduce the amount of crap people have to deal with, and will ultimately lead for a better experience for everyone involved - except for the very few at the top, which are currently reaping all the profits.
    - dalbasal 5y ago
      I really wish the term capitalism hadn't been invented. Maybe it was useful in the 1840s, but in my lifetime it always seems to yield a thin hand wavy way of looking at things... whether your pro or con. The mental equivalent of shouting to win an argument. Whatever your definition of capitalism, I'm sure you can find examples outside of it. There are an infinite number of variables besides profit. Profit isn't the only possible motive for such systems, and it only takes one. A system of people is a system of people, whether it is a church, company, municipality, whatever.
      - einpoklum 5y ago
        > A system of people is a system of people, whether it is a church, company, municipality, whatever. Different systems of people behave very differently with different kinds of motivations, stimuli and sanctions, on the individual and collective level. And while there are many variables besides profit, it is money (and capital in particular) which enables most activities of a commercial corporation - not voluntary willingness to work or serve for some purpose; and it is Amazon's profit which the organization is designed to promote and maximize, over anything and everything else.
        dalbasal 5y ago
        True, though I don't see the contradiction. There are similarities and differences, also within such categories. In almost all cases though, they're not going to be as motivated to pay as they are to receive payment. Take subscription antipatterns for example. Charities do this too. They both also create similar self deceptions to justify the more onerous examples. It's not even just about money, convenience is a pretty big motivator. Again, I'm not saying that everything is the same, or being reductive. Quite the opposite. I'm saying that reducing everything to "capitalism," "greed" or whatever is meaningless. It's just normally the case, that people and groups are more cognizant of their own goals and wants than they are of others'. Altruism exists, but it's not uniformly distributed across everything an altruist does.
- Fargren 5y ago
  I understand this is hyperbole, but people do a lot worse things than automated fraud, if we are looking for reason to send someone to hell...
  - mikro2nd 5y ago
    Agree that "burn in fiery torment" might be going a bit too far. Instead I'd suggest "listen to their own on-hold muzak for the rest of eternity" as a more appropriate punishment.
    - suifbwish 5y ago
      I agree. All the rent a car companies in particular.
yoz-y 5y ago
Seems to me that this would be true mostly the other way. $7k is a gigantic amount of money, most people would not let that slide.
plank_time 5y ago
This is what Tesla is doing with their solar roof product. They raised prices by 50% even though people already had signed contracts. All their communication is incredibly insidious, telling people that they need to sign the new contract, when in fact that’s false, in hopes of convincing customers to cancel their order. I can’t wait until a class action lawsuit rips them a new asshole at this point.
- judge2020 5y ago
  Contracts require consideration - as long as they didn’t charge you they don’t have to fulfill their end of the contract.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - gruez 5y ago
    No? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract#Consideration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract#Consideration >Anything of value promised by one party to the other when making a contract can be treated as "consideration": for example, if A signs a contract to buy a car from B for $5,000, A's consideration is the $5,000, and B's consideration is the car.
  - CPLX 5y ago
    That’s wildly incorrect. A failure of a contract for lack of consideration would be if there’s no exchange of value contemplated, ever. For example if I made a promise to provide you a valuable service for nothing in return. In this situation both sides agreed to exchange something of value so there’s obviously consideration. They could make an argument that no damages have occurred and claim you have no credible allegation of being harmed, but that’s a different thing and far from automatic.
    - judge2020 5y ago
      I realize I phrased that incorrectly, I meant that a contract is only worth something if you can sue over it, and with $0 in damages (maybe not given the homeowner might be able to be comp’d for time or for money spent getting the permits) it wouldn’t make sense to sue Tesla over it.
KyleJune 5y ago
I once ordered a DSLR camera kit from Amazon for around $750. It had a bunch of lenses but the lens adapter it was suppose to come with was missing. The adapter cost about $15 so I reported it was missing the adapter and asked if they could either send me one or refund me $15 so I could buy one off Amazon. They gave me 2 choices instead of reading my request, return it or accept a partial refund of 30%. I accepted the partial refund because I didn't want to return/re-order the camera kit and hope that it doesn't happen again. I felt kind of bad accepting such a large refund for a small problem.

thedufer 5y ago

That doesn't seem to prove anything at all? It's a 1.6 lb camera. Weighing in at 1.2 lbs short is either a bad scale or a lot of accessories missing, but it definitely does not corroborate a missing camera.

kube-system 5y ago
Scales used for commercial purposes in the US are required to meet accuracy standards and to be calibrated by law. While it’s not impossible for them to break, they’re a heck of a lot more rigorous in design and regulation than Amazon’s notoriously problematic inventory management.
- thedufer 5y ago
  Your comparison to Amazon's inventory implies that this is a weights vs Amazon issue, but what I'm trying to point out is that there are three sides, and none of them agree. If the weights are accurate, that means that the customer lied about getting an empty box (a 2-pound empty box? c'mon) despite actually not getting what they ordered, which is just really weird and hard to explain.
  - kube-system 5y ago
    > (a 2-pound empty box? c'mon) Yes, 2 lbs of packaging. It’s a $7000 camera. It’s well packaged. Even my $300 Canon was double boxed. (As are the customer’s photos of the packaging in the article) The spec sheet of the a1 lists it as weighing 1.6 lbs. it lists the boxed weight as 3.22 lbs. This means the Sony packaging is 1.62 lbs. The remaining 0.38 lbs is the packaging that Amazon put the Sony box in. The math checks out.