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Another fun “this decision is final” happened for me with Amazon recently. We ordered two pairs of Beats. One was ordered by me, the other by my spouse. We’d d
by nixgeek 4y ago
Another fun “this decision is final” happened for me with Amazon recently.
We ordered two pairs of Beats. One was ordered by me, the other by my spouse. We’d discussed the purchase but we weren’t clear on who was actually going to order. Received both via Prime.
I setup a return. We return the item which was received on her Order ID against my return.
Amazon tells us we’ve returned a fraudulent item because the Serial # do not match. Multiple emails (5+) back and forth with Customer Service to explain fall on deaf ears. We give them both Order IDs. We ask for ANY option to solve this mess. We’re told repeatedly that this is their policy, their decision is final, go away.
Amazon won’t even send us the headphones back so we can send the correct ones — those have been destroyed.
“To protect our employees and customers, we have disposed the incorrect item that we received as per our policy.”
In a nutshell Amazon stole $250 from us, and is apparently creating tons of e-waste by destroying brand new, unused and perfectly good returns like ours.
- justinclift 4y agoIs there something like a "small claims" court you could turn to?
- nixgeek 4y agoPossibly? We’re in Washington State, but honestly unless it’s literally point-click-done and without a need to drive and appear in a courthouse, it’s just not worth it for $250 (to me). I expect this has been considered when creating policy at the largest companies — what’s the ease of obtaining recourse for unhappy customers? What’s additionally interesting is I thought Amazon CS had a degree of goodwill factored into policies based on LTV or some other calculation. We saw zero goodwill here despite having spent >$100k on Amazon.com in the last 5 years. Both this and the YouTube example seem like bad business; you’re disincentivizing your most ardent users from continuing to tolerate your services. They hadn’t looked at shopping on Walmart or B&H with every purchase previously and now will. They hadn’t considered Twitch or other places to serve video and now will.
- db48x 4y ago> it’s just not worth it for $250 (to me). Then they’ll just keep doing it.
- tothrowaway 4y agoFiling a complaint with the Washington AG has worked wonders for me: https://fortress.wa.gov/atg/formhandler/ago/ComplaintForm.aspx https://fortress.wa.gov/atg/formhandler/ago/ComplaintForm.as... Logitech, Kaiser and Capital One all suddenly changed their tune when the AG simply forwarded my complaint.
- NoZebra120vClip 4y agoThat reminds me, contact your local [channel] On Your Side investigator, and go on TV with your story.
- Fatnino 4y agoTwitch is owned by amazon
- chris_wot 4y agoYou need a country with strong consumer protection laws, such as Australia. In NSW, I’d go straight to the Department of Fair Trading, and they’d fix the issue.
- dan_wood 4y agoYou don’t even need to go that far in most cases just mentioning it would get you on the right track.
- buildbot 4y agoMeanwhile, they’ll happily ship you an GPU that is actually someones old return…then also refuse to refund you. Criminal.
- nixgeek 4y agoHa; I’d forgotten my experience with LIFX bulbs and Amazon Warehouse Deals back in 2017 when we originally moved to USA, this exact situation happened across 50+ bulbs. They’d sold a LIFX to Customer A who bought a $0.69 BR30 from Home Depot, substituted into the LIFX packaging and then returned to Amazon, who refunded them, and listed the item on Warehouse Deals. On that one Amazon CS was also somewhat useless but they did at least refund us. When it eventually came to a senior leaders attention, Amazon got it sorted out properly. They ended up auditing all their stock in Warehouse Deals for this type of item and discovered widespread fraud. Sounds like they fixed smart bulbs but haven’t fixed GPUs though!
- silisili 4y agoI feel for you, but just banish Amazon everything from your life, and convince others to do the same. We lived fine without Amazon before they existed, and we'll live fine without them once they're gone. I'm on the verge of getting banned as they've warned me I'm returning too much, and have had enough negative interactions with their support that I'm in a similar boat. It's been somewhat freeing giving them up. There's plenty of D2C out there we've been neglecting due to AMZs marketplace...
- lynx23 4y ago[flagged]
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- tfourb 4y agoWhy the fck shouldn't I fight for the rights of my disabled son/grandparents/friend? Just because something does not impact me personally (yet), it's ok to just ignore it? What you are really saying is that you don't want to be bothered by all those pesky plebs out there and that they should be happy with what the status quo deigns to give to them.
- lynx23 4y agoBecause only roughly 5% understand what it is all about. The rest, roughly 95%, use opportunities like that to show what great justice warriors they are, but failing totally to represent the wishes of the disabled correctly. I am sure you feel differently regarding your son. But as a person with a disability, I can tell you that this never worked in my family. My mother might be motivated to do all sorts of things, but most of them are not helpful or even subtly counterproductive. To sum it up: If you speak for someone, you are likely patronizing them.
- tfourb 4y agoI'm conscious of that. But my son literally can't speak for himself so if I (or my partner) don't speak in his interest, who will? And while other people with disabilities can speak for themselves better than I could ever hope to, there is a difference between amplifying / supporting their concerns and being patronizing. The sad reality is that the mainstream does not want to think about the challenges facing disabled people and they are all too happy to simply ignore the (perceived) minority which is directly impacted by them. All these absolute assholes who park on parking spaces for the disabled come to mind. Those people will only ever be convinced if they are not confronted by a broad section of society. It is simply not something that a minority can ever hope to achieve without the explicit support of at least some part of the majority.
- throwaway2990 4y agoPeople buy beats??? But they are expensive for such poor audio quality… I don’t understand Amazons destruction policy. I ordered some stuff a few years ago and it never arrived. Amazon replaced the order for me which arrived in 4 days. About 5 months later the original package showed up… I tried to contact Amazon about it and they just said keep it… Yet when my kindle stopped working after a month they sent a replacement and asked for the old one to be destroyed…
- nixgeek 4y agoBeats Fit Pro are decent exercise headphones for me. They’re largely immune to sweat and behave like any Apple earphones — easy pairing. They’re also less prone to falling out for my ears than the AirPods Pro. https://www.beatsbydre.com/earbuds/beats-fit-pro https://www.beatsbydre.com/earbuds/beats-fit-pro
- throwaway2037 4y agoIs a credit card chargeback not possible? You case sounds very strong. If not possible, definitely try small claims court. It will make for a great blog post or Twitter thread.
- ddtaylor 4y agoThat is how you get your Amazon account terminated.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- yellowapple 4y agoAnd nothing of value would be lost.
- throwaway2037 4y agoNo kidding. Catch-22, right? Damned if you do, damned if you don't. And if you don't, then Amazon just stole 250 USD from you. Where hell are the regulators on issues like this?
- dredmorbius 4y agoDepends on how bought-in to the ecosystem you are. Ebook / audiobook and other licensed-not-bought content may no longer be accessible. (I avoid this problem by not shopping Amazon full stop.)
- Teever 4y agoThere absolutely needs to be some sort of law preventing companies of a certain size from being able to do this if customers decide to file a charge back.
- quikoa 4y agoWhat about a small claims court? Companies hate this because they have to send someone to defend themselves and can't automate that away.
- lynx23 4y ago[flagged]
- WirelessGigabit 4y agoThey sent back the wrong box. It's an accident. And if Amazon would've read the email instead of feeding it through ChatGPT they would've been able to rectify it.
- flangola7 4y agoI think ChatGPT would have actually performed better here
- imoverclocked 4y agoYeah, presumably OP could have convinced it to do whatever they wanted. /s, sorta
- devsda 4y agoLet's say they integrate chatgpt like AI and are able to resolve most cases to customer satisfaction. But, because of their scale and the number of fake items on the platform I think their number of returns will also increase along with their costs. I'm sure some executive will then try to minimize costs by "fixing" or retiring the AI. I'll not be surprised if this has already happened in one way or another.
- addandsubtract 4y agoChatGPT would've responded with, "I apologize for my previous mistake, I see now that you sent back the wrong pair of headphones..." On the other hand, a scammer would send a brick back and ChatGPT would apologize in the same fashion.
- ddtaylor 4y agoI'm sure there are plenty of problems at Amazon caused by badly used models, but this problem is probably a lot more to do with hiring X number of drone workers to do Y amount of support work and providing incentives all around to cut corners and solve the most basic 95% of problems as fast and cheap as possible while more-or-less just writing off the failures of the remaining 5% as "the cost of doing business at scale".
- onlypositive 4y agoDid you email jeff@amazon.com? That's what I do when I want bugs fixed.
- 2-718-281-828 4y agoI once had a very annoying problem with a DHL parcel station (in Germany). at some point I was so fed up that I looked up the names of the C-level management, guessed their email addresses and sent all of them a message. didn't really help much in the end but I got a response and it was internally escalated apparently.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- 20after4 4y agoI did similar when I was planning to move. The new place was just a block away from my old address and my ISP told me my new address does not exist. After more than a month of arguing with their customer service people and being told there is nothing they can do, and with time running out for my move date, I got lucky. I somehow found the email address of a vice president at the company. After one thoughtfully crafted and well targeted email, 45 minutes later I had a supervisor and a technician at my house to do a site survey.
- 2-718-281-828 4y ago> those have been destroyed. didn't amazon pledge to stop destroying functioning products or was that just in the EU?