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In the earliest days at amazon, we had a customer who had placed an order for several books. One of the books was no longer available, and when we notified the

In the earliest days at amazon, we had a customer who had placed an order for several books. One of the books was no longer available, and when we notified the customer, they wanted to replace it with a different book that cost more than the original. They had paid by check (!) for the original order, but wanted to use a credit card to pay the difference. Myself and the other founding programmer groaned - our system was not designed to have multiple payments via different payment systems for a single order, nor to handle cases of a partial payment that did not correspond to the value of an entire order. Bezos said "this just has to work for the customer, we have to tell them "sure, no problem", today, tomorrow and forever". I'm not proud of what Amazon has done or become, and there is much to criticize or even protest about. But this level of committment to customer service, to whatever extent it has actually survived the last 30 years - that's something that was both eye opening to me and something to be just a tiny bit proud of.

readyman 3y ago
What Amazon has become is not your fault. It's a systemic inevitability. Don't be hard on yourself. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit_to_fall https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_prof...
MuffinFlavored 3y ago
> Bezos said "this just has to work for the customer, we have to tell them "sure, no problem", today, tomorrow and forever". What is interesting to me is Jeff Bezos has $200b or whatever and made one of the most successful companies of all time, so we have to listen to that and think it is true. But... on the flip side... We know why Amazon makes money. AWS, and world-class logistics/marketplace offering. That has (in my opinion) next to nothing to do with "let's bend over backwards for customer service/edge case customer experience"
- spencerflem 3y ago
  I was shocked at how good AWS customer support was when I had to use it a few years ago, at least compared to what I was expecting (phone support with an hour of holding and menus that can do nothing + "help" forum thats all copy pasted)
- JamesAdir 3y ago
  One of the reasons that AWS makes money is the same level of customer commitment today. Even a small customer is handled with an account manager and can access same level of resources. AWS also proud itself that almost all the new services it launches are born from requests of customers. I truly believe that this is true. I also think that in the first decade of Amazon, the website was also customer obsessed. What happened afterwards is a different story.
xtiansimon 3y ago
> “…this just has to work for the customer…” Obviously this story is about a technical problem, but this attitude (about money) has been alive and well in small businesses forever. It’s called, “take the money” and work out the details later. Haha.

readyman 3y ago

What Amazon has become is not your fault. It's a systemic inevitability. Don't be hard on yourself. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit_to_fall https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_prof...

MuffinFlavored 3y ago

> Bezos said "this just has to work for the customer, we have to tell them "sure, no problem", today, tomorrow and forever". What is interesting to me is Jeff Bezos has $200b or whatever and made one of the most successful companies of all time, so we have to listen to that and think it is true. But... on the flip side... We know why Amazon makes money. AWS, and world-class logistics/marketplace offering. That has (in my opinion) next to nothing to do with "let's bend over backwards for customer service/edge case customer experience"

spencerflem 3y ago
I was shocked at how good AWS customer support was when I had to use it a few years ago, at least compared to what I was expecting (phone support with an hour of holding and menus that can do nothing + "help" forum thats all copy pasted)
JamesAdir 3y ago
One of the reasons that AWS makes money is the same level of customer commitment today. Even a small customer is handled with an account manager and can access same level of resources. AWS also proud itself that almost all the new services it launches are born from requests of customers. I truly believe that this is true. I also think that in the first decade of Amazon, the website was also customer obsessed. What happened afterwards is a different story.

xtiansimon 3y ago

> “…this just has to work for the customer…” Obviously this story is about a technical problem, but this attitude (about money) has been alive and well in small businesses forever. It’s called, “take the money” and work out the details later. Haha.