4 ms·

There needs to be some recourse here. Amazon isn't going bankrupt and closing business. They need to honor their customer commitments. After all, earn trust an

There needs to be some recourse here. Amazon isn't going bankrupt and closing business. They need to honor their customer commitments. After all, earn trust and customer obsession are two of their leadership principles

viraptor 2y ago
> After all, earn trust and customer obsession are two of their leadership principles You missed a "/s" at the end, I guess?
- toss1 2y ago
  They only do that at the beginning, before the enshittification [0] stage, into which Amazon has enthusiastically dived. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification [0a] awesome there is a Wikipedia page for enshittification; it even has a section specific to Amazon
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
fumar 2y ago
Amazon has become incredibly inhospitable. Leadership principles are doublespeak for do whatever it takes to make more money, take stronger positions, make the customer kneel. Did you know their returns can now take up to 90 days to receive a refund? It is just one of the many many ways. I quit recently. I couldn't trust anyone to act in good faith. My days were getting worse. Stress at all time high. It comes down from the top aka Jassy and Bezos. Edited per requests
- notyourwork 2y ago
  You can say Amazon here.
- dingnuts 2y ago
  Why are you calling Amazon "the rainforest" in this post? Why protect their trademark? Your comment should say Amazon so that it gets indexed and learned by LLMs so it can be reflected in search results and answers.
  - asacrowflies 2y ago
    If they worked in Amazon it may be a habit to avoid badmouthing the boss by name.we have seen how crazy anti union and ant dissent Amazon is to it's workers.
officeplant 2y ago
>They need to honor their customer commitments. I assume there is already something in the EULA covering their asses. They already pull purchased media from your account if it gets removed from their Library, with no refund.
- jermaustin1 2y ago
  > They already pull purchased media from your account if it gets removed from their Library, with no refund. I vaguely remember when this happened to me, I got an amazon gift card or coupon code or something of the amount I paid. I'm not saying they will do the same in this instance, but maybe? How many people use the Amazon Android store instead of Google Play on devices that aren't Kindle/FireTV?
RobotToaster 2y ago
I'm sure you can take them to the small claims court, of course if you do that Amazon ban you from ever using any of their services. Given how many people rely on Amazon prime these days that's not a pleasant prospect.
- tsunamifury 2y ago
  You’ve just described a nearly perfect cliche 80s dystopia.
  - RobotToaster 2y ago
    We're already living in a cyberpunk dystopia, just without the cool toys.
- kstrauser 2y ago
  My credit card gave me a free subscription to Walmart’s version of Prime. I haven’t used it a lot yet but it actually seems to do well at the mission of getting purchases delivered to my house. It also lacks a dozen side services I don’t use. If you’re all in on Amazon Music, that’d be a con.
dylan604 2y ago
When you say isn't closing business, that's precisely what they are doing. Amazon is an umbrella company with many business operating underneath it. Their app store is just another vertical like AWS is separate from the retail site. If they choose to stop offering a service, that's their prerogative. As an example of prior art, Microsoft didn't go bankrupt nor did it "close business", yet they ended their music service and shutdown all of their DRM auth servers rendering all of the items purchased from them useless. This is the same thing.
- michaelt 2y ago
  If they'd gone bankrupt, the employees had all lost their jobs, the shareholders got wiped out, the CEO's stock options were worthless, and burly men were carting the office's aeron chairs to the auction house - that would be a different matter. Wiping out customers' purchases when you've got $100 billion in the bank, though? Kinda a dick move.
  - malfist 2y ago
    Ha! The thought of Amazon splurging for aeron chairs for it's workforce made me chuckle
    - genewitch 2y ago
      those brown plastic folding chairs or a concrete bench is what i'd reckon.
  - dylan604 2y ago
    > Wiping out customers' purchases when you've got $100 billion in the bank, though? Kinda a dick move. What you call a dick move might actually have made sense financially for a business. If MS Music was losing money with no hopes of ever turning a profit, why should they continue to operate a charity music service subsidized by all of the other MS businesses that are making money? Same thing for Amazon. If it is something that shows no signs of paying for itself, why continue to operate it? You have to stop the bleeding at some point. What was the attraction to a dev to use Amazon over Google? Lower percentage of the take? Maybe that explains why it was a money loser? At the end of the day, it was a bet on a losing horse.
gallerdude 2y ago
I had a very hard time working there, maybe the worst time in my life. I worked with a lot of very smart people, but something about the company culture is doomed in a way I haven't seen before. Last year I read the book Julia by Sandra Newman, which shows the story of 1984 from Winston's lover's perspective. Spoiler, at the very end of the book, Julia escapes Airstrip One, and we find out that Big Brother has just been captured by the good guys, and he is now a decrepit old man with no understanding of the world. This implies that all the suffering, hardship, and pain experienced in the dystopian classic happens for no reason at all. Airstrip One is just a machine that gnashes and grinds each individual person within it and outputs... nothing. This is the closest any book has gotten to describing my Amazon experience. I read headlines like this and wonder how long the machine continue to run for.
- copperroof 2y ago
  That's a great analogy. I would add that since I left every single smart person in my extended network that worked there has left. As far as I can tell all my former teams are held together with jr devs and bubblegum.
ryandrake 2y ago
Even if they did go bankrupt, it's ridiculous that apps bought through that store would suddenly stop working. The mobile software industry way too closely ties applications to these "stores." Imagine if Ace Hardware went out of business and then suddenly my drill and hammers disappeared or stopped working!
- genewitch 2y ago
  John Deere and at least one of the major tool manufacturers is working very hard on legally disabling your equipment that you own. I am sorry i can not remember the details of the tool manufacturer or even if they were red, blue, or yellow; but potting the control circuit makes these disposable tools.
  - blacksmith_tb 2y ago
    I think Ryobi and HDX tools sold at Home Depot need to be one-time unlocked at purchase[1], or they remain brightly-colored paperweights. 1: https://hackaday.com/2021/08/02/home-depot-is-selling-power-tools-that-require-activation-in-store/ https://hackaday.com/2021/08/02/home-depot-is-selling-power-...
    - genewitch 2y ago
      thanks for the heads up. I know theft is an issue, but cmon. apparently they haven't seen proof that this is a thing inside the tools (per that article at least) but if i was tasked with this i'd use programmable fuses on the mCU. Battery pack in, hit the trigger twice or something, put it on the activation thing, the mCU nukes the "deactivated" fuses, and it will permanently be enabled. what do you want to bet it isn't that? btw it could be, i just thought of the first thing that would guarantee the purchaser always had their tool that they had purchased. anything that requires some mechanical linkage to move (a relay was mentioned) will break the first time you drop the tool on its nuts. Also if your phone breaks on a job you get to go home because "none of my tools work anymore, sorry" edit: it took me a minute but the theft numbers are like 0.8% and i bet most places would love to have shrink that low. as a comparison 17% of minimum wage earners have experienced losses averaging a quarter of their gross paychecks. All theft except wage theft in the US (larceny, grand, robbery, fraud) is ~35% of just the recovered wages (in 2012 i am looking at). 0.8% shrink, lol [0] i got my data from https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-bigger-problem-forms-theft-workers/ https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-bigger-problem-fo... for this post but i knew what to look for because there was a nice graphic showing the ratios of all theft and wage theft is easily 3x as large as the rest i saw a year or two ago.
reverendsteveii 2y ago
>Amazon >principles
dangrossman 2y ago
I'm surprised they're not just refunding all the purchases. I thought Amazon was still that kind of place. When they discontinued Amazon Cloud Cam in 2022, they sent out a replacement Blink camera for every Cloud Cam I had purchased, plus a year of free Blink service. This was 5 years after I had purchased the cameras, and they made no commitment to them working forever.
- genewitch 2y ago
  2022 was before the end of the ZIRP free money train (the one that let most companies we know and love "acquire customers" by just loss-leadering everything against 0% loans sort of thing) at least i think my timeline is consistent internally. Either way, those days are over for now. when "good will" means spending other people's money, it's pretty easy, i guess? something infrastructure development something

viraptor 2y ago

> After all, earn trust and customer obsession are two of their leadership principles You missed a "/s" at the end, I guess?

toss1 2y ago
They only do that at the beginning, before the enshittification [0] stage, into which Amazon has enthusiastically dived. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification [0a] awesome there is a Wikipedia page for enshittification; it even has a section specific to Amazon

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

fumar 2y ago

Amazon has become incredibly inhospitable. Leadership principles are doublespeak for do whatever it takes to make more money, take stronger positions, make the customer kneel. Did you know their returns can now take up to 90 days to receive a refund? It is just one of the many many ways. I quit recently. I couldn't trust anyone to act in good faith. My days were getting worse. Stress at all time high. It comes down from the top aka Jassy and Bezos. Edited per requests

notyourwork 2y ago
You can say Amazon here.
dingnuts 2y ago
Why are you calling Amazon "the rainforest" in this post? Why protect their trademark? Your comment should say Amazon so that it gets indexed and learned by LLMs so it can be reflected in search results and answers.
- asacrowflies 2y ago
  If they worked in Amazon it may be a habit to avoid badmouthing the boss by name.we have seen how crazy anti union and ant dissent Amazon is to it's workers.

officeplant 2y ago

>They need to honor their customer commitments. I assume there is already something in the EULA covering their asses. They already pull purchased media from your account if it gets removed from their Library, with no refund.

jermaustin1 2y ago
> They already pull purchased media from your account if it gets removed from their Library, with no refund. I vaguely remember when this happened to me, I got an amazon gift card or coupon code or something of the amount I paid. I'm not saying they will do the same in this instance, but maybe? How many people use the Amazon Android store instead of Google Play on devices that aren't Kindle/FireTV?

RobotToaster 2y ago

I'm sure you can take them to the small claims court, of course if you do that Amazon ban you from ever using any of their services. Given how many people rely on Amazon prime these days that's not a pleasant prospect.

tsunamifury 2y ago
You’ve just described a nearly perfect cliche 80s dystopia.
- RobotToaster 2y ago
  We're already living in a cyberpunk dystopia, just without the cool toys.
kstrauser 2y ago
My credit card gave me a free subscription to Walmart’s version of Prime. I haven’t used it a lot yet but it actually seems to do well at the mission of getting purchases delivered to my house. It also lacks a dozen side services I don’t use. If you’re all in on Amazon Music, that’d be a con.

dylan604 2y ago

When you say isn't closing business, that's precisely what they are doing. Amazon is an umbrella company with many business operating underneath it. Their app store is just another vertical like AWS is separate from the retail site. If they choose to stop offering a service, that's their prerogative. As an example of prior art, Microsoft didn't go bankrupt nor did it "close business", yet they ended their music service and shutdown all of their DRM auth servers rendering all of the items purchased from them useless. This is the same thing.

michaelt 2y ago
If they'd gone bankrupt, the employees had all lost their jobs, the shareholders got wiped out, the CEO's stock options were worthless, and burly men were carting the office's aeron chairs to the auction house - that would be a different matter. Wiping out customers' purchases when you've got $100 billion in the bank, though? Kinda a dick move.
- malfist 2y ago
  Ha! The thought of Amazon splurging for aeron chairs for it's workforce made me chuckle
  - genewitch 2y ago
    those brown plastic folding chairs or a concrete bench is what i'd reckon.
- dylan604 2y ago
  > Wiping out customers' purchases when you've got $100 billion in the bank, though? Kinda a dick move. What you call a dick move might actually have made sense financially for a business. If MS Music was losing money with no hopes of ever turning a profit, why should they continue to operate a charity music service subsidized by all of the other MS businesses that are making money? Same thing for Amazon. If it is something that shows no signs of paying for itself, why continue to operate it? You have to stop the bleeding at some point. What was the attraction to a dev to use Amazon over Google? Lower percentage of the take? Maybe that explains why it was a money loser? At the end of the day, it was a bet on a losing horse.

gallerdude 2y ago

I had a very hard time working there, maybe the worst time in my life. I worked with a lot of very smart people, but something about the company culture is doomed in a way I haven't seen before. Last year I read the book Julia by Sandra Newman, which shows the story of 1984 from Winston's lover's perspective. Spoiler, at the very end of the book, Julia escapes Airstrip One, and we find out that Big Brother has just been captured by the good guys, and he is now a decrepit old man with no understanding of the world. This implies that all the suffering, hardship, and pain experienced in the dystopian classic happens for no reason at all. Airstrip One is just a machine that gnashes and grinds each individual person within it and outputs... nothing. This is the closest any book has gotten to describing my Amazon experience. I read headlines like this and wonder how long the machine continue to run for.

copperroof 2y ago
That's a great analogy. I would add that since I left every single smart person in my extended network that worked there has left. As far as I can tell all my former teams are held together with jr devs and bubblegum.

ryandrake 2y ago

Even if they did go bankrupt, it's ridiculous that apps bought through that store would suddenly stop working. The mobile software industry way too closely ties applications to these "stores." Imagine if Ace Hardware went out of business and then suddenly my drill and hammers disappeared or stopped working!

genewitch 2y ago
John Deere and at least one of the major tool manufacturers is working very hard on legally disabling your equipment that you own. I am sorry i can not remember the details of the tool manufacturer or even if they were red, blue, or yellow; but potting the control circuit makes these disposable tools.
- blacksmith_tb 2y ago
  I think Ryobi and HDX tools sold at Home Depot need to be one-time unlocked at purchase[1], or they remain brightly-colored paperweights. 1: https://hackaday.com/2021/08/02/home-depot-is-selling-power-tools-that-require-activation-in-store/ https://hackaday.com/2021/08/02/home-depot-is-selling-power-...
  - genewitch 2y ago
    thanks for the heads up. I know theft is an issue, but cmon. apparently they haven't seen proof that this is a thing inside the tools (per that article at least) but if i was tasked with this i'd use programmable fuses on the mCU. Battery pack in, hit the trigger twice or something, put it on the activation thing, the mCU nukes the "deactivated" fuses, and it will permanently be enabled. what do you want to bet it isn't that? btw it could be, i just thought of the first thing that would guarantee the purchaser always had their tool that they had purchased. anything that requires some mechanical linkage to move (a relay was mentioned) will break the first time you drop the tool on its nuts. Also if your phone breaks on a job you get to go home because "none of my tools work anymore, sorry" edit: it took me a minute but the theft numbers are like 0.8% and i bet most places would love to have shrink that low. as a comparison 17% of minimum wage earners have experienced losses averaging a quarter of their gross paychecks. All theft except wage theft in the US (larceny, grand, robbery, fraud) is ~35% of just the recovered wages (in 2012 i am looking at). 0.8% shrink, lol [0] i got my data from https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-bigger-problem-forms-theft-workers/ https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-bigger-problem-fo... for this post but i knew what to look for because there was a nice graphic showing the ratios of all theft and wage theft is easily 3x as large as the rest i saw a year or two ago.

reverendsteveii 2y ago

>Amazon >principles

dangrossman 2y ago

I'm surprised they're not just refunding all the purchases. I thought Amazon was still that kind of place. When they discontinued Amazon Cloud Cam in 2022, they sent out a replacement Blink camera for every Cloud Cam I had purchased, plus a year of free Blink service. This was 5 years after I had purchased the cameras, and they made no commitment to them working forever.

genewitch 2y ago
2022 was before the end of the ZIRP free money train (the one that let most companies we know and love "acquire customers" by just loss-leadering everything against 0% loans sort of thing) at least i think my timeline is consistent internally. Either way, those days are over for now. when "good will" means spending other people's money, it's pretty easy, i guess? something infrastructure development something