We once bought an expensive item (~$600, IIRC) as a birthday gift. For some reason it was delayed by several days and was going to arrive after the (milestone)

We once bought an expensive item (~$600, IIRC) as a birthday gift. For some reason it was delayed by several days and was going to arrive after the (milestone) birthday. Amazon offered to refund it and said we could just keep it. This seemed too good to be true, and it wouldn't have solved the timing problem regardless. We asked if they could expedite the item so it would arrive on time, and they said it wasn't possible. In the confusion, they accidentally re-routed the item as a return, which meant that it was no longer headed to our house at all. Once they realized this, Amazon offered that we could go to a physical store (Tumi, in this case), buy the item, send them the receipt, and they'd reimburse it. They did the reimbursement by refunding a bunch of prior purchases. This was crazy — I'd never heard of such a thing. At the end of the day, we ended up with the backpack from the Tumi store (fully reimbursed by Amazon), and some extra reimbursements related to the Amazon purchase. It did take a while on the phone (and an hour round-trip to the Tumi store), but we got the gift in time for the birthday. Amazon doesn't always do a great job at customer service. But sometimes they knock it out of the park!