Amazon (US) has really gone downhill in the past ~5 years.
I signed up for Prime a over decade ago because of the reliable 2 day shipping. It worked pretty much as described. It was great.
Shipping is no longer 2 days on most items - "Prime" shipping can now take 7 days. Amazon advertise same or next day shipping, but it's really only for big ticket, occasional purchase items. Most everyday purchases now take 3-7 days, the same as without prime. They show the prime badge, but if you log out you can see that non-prime members get the same shipping.
This feels really dishonest. Amazon pretend that you get huge shipping benefits from Prime, but it turns out you don't anymore.
For the first time, I've cancelled my prime renewal. What, exactly, am I paying for these days? Walmart offer next-day free shipping on the big ticket items too, without the membership.
Maybe it varies by location because in Chicago it's extremely rare for things to take more than 2 days. In fact they've been stepping up next and same day delivery for a lot of items.
That being said, I'm actually moving in the opposite direction since that creates a lot of waste. Unless I really need the item quickly I use Prime Day delivery so it all comes in one box. If my whole family didn't share the account I wouldn't pay for Prime.
The theft problem doesn’t vary at all in Chicago. I’m in a North (west) Side neighborhood and receive about 83% of Amazon packages, with the rest being stolen or just not delivered. Compare this with a 100% success rate for items delivered by UPS, USPS, or FedEx.
I figure at some point I’ll fall below whatever metrics Amazon has internally, they’ll stop resending/refunding packages, and I’ll have to fight the same battle as in the article. If anything, OP unfortunately/correctly teaches that empathy, common sense, and treating level 1 workers as human have no place with Bezos…you have to assume the worst and treat everything as a cost/blame situation.
I live in a high-rise which has a mail room so maybe I'm insulated from whatever factors lead to that (porch piracy obviously, but something about Amazon specifically). I didn't realize it was that bad, only getting 83% is insane
Edit: though my family in Rogers Park and the suburbs have never complained about this issue so I'm not sure it's that common.
I live in a single-family unit in Uptown and would be surprised if my rate is anywhere below 95%, I'd be shocked and demand a recount. I order several times a week, often several times a day (yeah, a lot of items I need are same-day delivery, most are next-day), and I recall two or three packages missing this year. And those were likely never delivered of to the wrong address, as they had no picture.
I live in Washington, DC. Two or three times a week on the neighborhood listserv there is an email asking whether anyone got the sender's package. Some of the problem is certainly theft, but I doubt all of it is.
No doubt there's some of this given the ridiculous photos I get through the "take a picture" feature that Amazon, DoorDash, and others believe substitutes for actually validating delivery happens.
I just don't give these tech companies any benefit of the doubt for the situation. My home is on a major street next to a door that has the street number displayed very prominently. As mentioned above, FedEx and others have 100% success rate. Amazon's delivery drivers just don't care, because Bezos has created a system where they are incentivized not to care.
You're right, not sure why the doubt in the edit. Different [areas/data points/anecdotes] will no doubt yield different results. The suburbs are very different than the neighborhoods. I used to live the Loop high-rise life, felt the same way you did.
Though Amazon usually is no help in the last mile delivery there. Encountered numerous stories of high rise package rooms that have just been overwhelmed by Amazon/since COVID. If anything, most improvement/success stories I've heard have been from a startup in the space, Luxer.
I don't know - I lived <20 miles from an Amazon warehouse, but saw shipping suddenly become 7-day on Prime most of the time back in 2021. I'd already tried to disentangle myself from Amazon's ecosystem, but it was definitely the nail in the coffin for my Prime subscription.
I literally never experience this issue. Except for a couple of actually lost packages, my prime has had EVERY package come in 2 days or less except holidays. I live in a 250k town tho, so I am not sure if there is some level of size that plays into it. Perhaps I am the perfect size to have enough infrastructure to get reliable deliveries, but small enough that I don't have to worry about all that comes with a massive city.
Curious about where you live. How far are you from a major Amazon shipping hub? Here in the broader LA area, it is mostly all next day, and even same day shipping. It's all Amazon's in house delivery service too.
The shipping ETA problem seems to be very hit-or-miss. I've spent more time than I'd like to admit sifting through pages of "prime" results trying to find something that can arrive sooner than 3-7 days out.
And then sometimes every search result shows same/next day--but you absolutely can't rely on it because the packages have a ~50% chance of "running late" and get assigned a new ETA of what the non-prime shipping would have been. For order after order.
We cancelled prime this year. I was surprised that shipping cost and timeframes haven’t changed. In fact, on many items it seems like it’s faster to not use prime.
If you're getting FBA, it's just an optimization of throughput. If there's enough folks in your area with Prime, trucks are going around your neighborhood daily anyway, so it's better to send a full truck, even if it means things get there early, then to send a partially empty truck twice.
Amazon likely does not have separate Prime and Non-Prime lanes in their warehouses. It would be a redundancy and add additional complexity that would increase costs/reduce profits. Since customers never see the warehouse there really wouldn't be any benefit to doing this.
Are we in the game where an event happens randomly, and we’re trying to guess whether any of our actions, if not worshipping Bezos directly, might have an effect on delivery times?
There's a lot of existence that really feels like we just live in a hash code now. And its all malevolent for some reason. It feels like there's "supposed" to be something you did wrong, yet it's all malevolent hash randomness. Maybe all the focus on cryto money?
That, or we're being experimented on. "What will the mice do if we poke them this way? The ants really hate it when we shake them this way."
What’s dishonest is that they say the 2-day applies only after they ship the item, but they don’t count their “internal logistics” shipping in this time.
How do I know that? Amazin charges your card only when they actually pack and ship the item. But the tracking on UPS will not appear until 3-4 days later
Another annoying thing about Amazon is the subscribe and save. They see it as one way contract. Many times I have subscribed to a product only to get a notification when it’s fulfillment time that was saying that the product was out of stock and I should choose a replacement.
That’s not how it is supposed to work Amazon. I take up the obligation to buy a product monthly and you should take the obligation to make sure it’s available.
It ended up being death by a thousand cuts for me and Amazon. I barely use it anymore
It's very location dependent. Where I live most stuff beats the 2 day estimate and it's not unheard of to order something in the afternoon and have it at the front door when I get back from dinner.
Friends in other locations seem to have more of your experiences. I actually dread ordering from anyone but Amazon since the shipping is such a crapshoot for usually the same money.
What I dislike the most is how unreliable "Amazon Day Delivery" is.
Several times I've bought something that I don't need that week, so I chose Amazon Day delivery, which allows all of my packages get delivered during the same day the next week.
I expected those packages to arrive, e.g. buying something for a gathering I'm hosting that weekend, but they are often days late and don't arrive in time.
Amazon was great for a few years, but it looks like something happened. They still claim they are customer obsessed and "Day 1" thinkers, but anyone can see the delusion. I wonder if Jeff Bezos sees that Amazon has gotten worse; it seemed like he truly believed in the company until his departure a few years ago, but maybe it was always just about the money.
I'm not familiar with this, but it certainly does seem like the startup world is completely backwards, and anything VC funded should be considered toxic.
Hmm. My experience with prime shipping is exactly the opposite, but I think I must live near a distribution center.
In fact, just yesterday I ordered some vitamins for overnight delivery and they actually showed up in 3 hours, so sooner than promised.
That has happened on several occasions, and I can't recall every not getting something on time.
That's shipping.
But I do think Amazon has a serious problem with fake, incentivized reviews, and I have heard of, but not yet experienced (to my knowledge) counterfeit products.
I signed up for Prime when it was just shipping, and it was a great deal that made the platform sticky - I always looked there first. When they bundled in all the other Prime functionality and upped the price it left a very bad taste in the mouth.
And yet, here I am, years later, still with a Prime account. I really need to make more of an effort to get off Amazon.
What's more is if you filter for "arrives tomorrow" you'll get a bunch of results, but there's no guarantee they will arrive tomorrow - you have to double and triple check at every step of the order flow.
Not ≈5 years. Three years and 9 months. Amazon's retail division was broken by Covid and will probably never fix itself.
I have no inside knowledge, but I suspect what happened is a bunch of crooks were hired during the massive hiring spree to keep up with Covid demand, and there wasn't capacity to investigate every fraud, theft, and scam. Internal fraud went from zero to prolific almost overnight. Prime also stopped being able to deliver in two days, and never recovered.
It's been three years, and it seems a permanent culture change at this point. The only CEOs I've seen recover a business from this sort of shitshow were Steve Jobs and Satya Nadella. Most businesses can't recover from this. I hope Amazon can, but realistically, I'm very sceptical.
On the upside, there's a huge opening for a competitor, if anyone wants to do a startup :)
I was despairing that those big internet companies were settled for 80 years, but I see that there might be movement.
However, it takes 25 years and unprecedented investment to build Amazon, warehouses, delivery schemes… Unless Amazon sells some of them with the automation, it’s extremely hard to enter the field.
(1) We are in an era of massive investments, much more so than when Amazon started. The billion dollar plus fundraising round is increasingly common over time.
(2) An entrant does not need to operate the same as Amazon. The sharing economy provides a lot of alternative models. To give a fictitious example, connecting with existing rideshare vendors for delivery and a network of local stores for fulfilment could give a lot of the same product without the same investment. Ditto for existing logistics players like FedEx (who do a lot more than delivery).
(3) It's possible to start in different markets, and especially foreign markets. A company which could do this play easily might be something like Aliexpress which already has a leg in.
There are many more models possible too, but the point is that building Amazon today does not need to the same as building Amazon in the nineties. Even building the same Amazon would be cheaper today, since we can learn the lessons of the existing Amazon.
I live in rural new mexico. When we moved here 5 years ago, even the most available item shipped using Prime would take 3-5 days to arrive (and more typically 5). Over the last year, that has shifted to the point where some items arrive next day and nothing takes more than 2 days.
I would not generalize from my experience. I would suggest that you do not generalize from yours.
> On the day, I was full of righteous indignation and ideally wanted the driver to be nailed to the nearest wall
The guy keeps on making this out to be the driver's fault, when only circumstantial evidence points to that. Everytime he was mentioning reasons to think it was the driver I, as a person who has worked in shipping and delivery as a hoi polloi, thought of reasonable reasons why the driver would act that way.
- The driver probably isn't even there when his van is loaded, so easy for a package handler to swap things out.
- A package with mandatory code instructions may have been in another part of the van, and could have been missed the first go-around by a busy driver. (edit: assuming it wasn't loaded into another van entirely.)
- Online tracking being off happens all of the time.
The author is a case study in sloppy thinking. Sure, they were wronged; they are certainly a victim here. But property was stolen and the retailer is negligently complicit in the theft. When this happens, you call the police, and your insurance company.
I agree in general, but I think he's right in claiming that this isn't a criminal matter on his end, as the console was technically stolen from Amazon prior to delivery, not from him after delivery. What he's doing with Amazon customer service and Amex are the pertinent things from his end.
Still a civil matter instead of a criminal matter. Amazon has the lawful right to both protect their interests and perform their process of refund (whatever errors and pauses they may make during this process). As such the state of mind necessary for criminal complicity has yet to be shown.
So what? You're not personally responsible for prosecuting Amazon. For that matter, neither are the cops. This tunnel-vision mode of thinking is how people talk themselves out of calling the police and the insurance company. The claims unit will want a police report number to start their process, and the fact both are now involved will exert direct pressure. So do it. The point is to be maximally assertive of any rights you have or may have, not playing legal billiards and negotiating against yourself in your head.
You're just asking to waste your own time, and theirs, with that approach.
The police department will ask whether it was stolen from your porch. No? It was stolen from Amazon? Not a crime against you.
The insurance company will ask when it was switched. Switched before delivery? Not on us. We don't insure for that, only for what happens on your premises.
This is still the bizarre but all-too-common line of thinking in which someone talks themselves out of marshalling available resources. It’s negotiating against yourself, and a recipe for failing at life.
Since I have over the decades made several insurance claims that were paid out, I feel qualified to say that is a sack of lies, and the OP has exacerbated their aggravation and annoyance by failing to contact the police and their insurance company.
Instead of asserting their rights, they’ve allowed themselves to be subordinate to Amazon and Amex corporate internal processes. I struggle not to label that as vassal thinking.
> they’ve allowed themselves to be subordinate to Amazon and Amex corporate internal processes
No, he's told Amex that he will take legal action against them under section 75 if they do not fulfill their obligations.
> Since I have over the decades made several insurance claims that were paid out
By which kind of insurance and for what? It's important to note that for this transaction Amex is the primary insurance company (providing purchase insurance for things bought with it). Why would homeowners insurance provide coverage?
Figured I'd reply once, at the current bottom of the thread.
> Since I have over the decades made several insurance claims that were paid out
I assume that either wasn't for this situation, or you are not in the UK.
House insurance *might* cover a package that was stolen after being left on the front doorstep, but it certainly doesn't cover items that never actually arrived at the insured property.
When purchasing with a credit (rather than debit) card, the "insurance" we have is provided by Section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act. For purchases over £100, the card provider (Amex in my case) effectively indemnifies the purchaser against anything that the retailer would be liable for under the Sale of Goods Act.
That's not a "provider being nice" thing either, s75 means that the contract for purchase of goods is with them.
> they’ve allowed themselves to be subordinate to Amazon and Amex corporate internal processes. I struggle not to label that as vassal thinking.
Or, perhaps, you know, understood how the law works where I am.
> When this happens, you call the police
Here, I'm definitely assuming that you're not in the UK. If you were, you'd be well aware of just how stretched and underfunded the Police currently are. They're not turning up for this.
I laid out in the post why I don't believe it's me who needs to, but as we're here lets take it one step further.
If I were to report it to the Police, Amazon may well try to use that as an argument that it's my problem to solve, not theirs. They would, almost certainly, pull "we can't do anything whilst there's an ongoing investigation".
That, by the way, isn't something I've pulled out of the air. Since publishing the post, I've been contacted by a lot of people - a lot of them have been told by Amazon that they "must" get a crime number: if they can't get the crime number, Amazon refuse to proceed. Those that did get a number... their cases are still stalled.
Reporting it to the Police not only wastes Police resources, it gives Amazon a means to try and drag this out further.
The correct procedure is:
- Raise it with Amazon
- If Amazon do not/can not resolve, invoke section 75
I've no idea how the Police in your area would handle it, but here we'd be lucky if we were given a crime number.
> thought of reasonable reasons why the driver would act that way.
I completely agree, it could equally have been someone in the warehouse. That doesn't change my gut feel that it was the driver though and, really, it doesn't matter what my gut says: ultimately it's for Amazon to investigate and root the problem out.
I cannot think of a _single_ low-margin global corporation that can get away with it that hasn’t made the trade-off where they accept some of their customers will be treated horribly in order to save _a lot_ of money.
I’ve currently got a DHL package in limbo that’s worth about the same and the main function of their customer service department seems to be to indicate that trying to consume customer service resources is not going to help you. Employees will give you completely contradictory and verifiably incorrect information.
I don't think this saves Amazon money. They have a huge problem with internal, for lack of a better word, corruptions.
* Packing people who don't care if high-value items are broken
* Delivery people who fake deliveries and steal
* Co-mingling of fake items with sellers
... and so on.
Because the delivery person wasn't investigated, they'll steal again and again, and that will spread to others in Amazon culture. Good companies do investigate issues like this one, and keep the business clean. Once a culture of theft creeps in, it's a lot harder to fix, and it oozes $$$ at a crazy rate.
This costs them a massive amount of money. My guess is there is no one in the corporate hierarchy who cares enough about their employer to fix it (everyone I've met who works for Amazon is a disgruntled employee).
There is a slight bit of short-term savings, but around two years back, I stopped ordering anything from Amazon which might be subject to fraud or safety issues (e.g. high-cost items, food, medicine, SD cards, SSDs, brand-name clothing items, etc.). This year, I cancelled Prime. There's just too much fraud going on.
I can't imagine Amazon is saving money when XBoxes and similar items get stolen, and I can't imagine long-term success if they're bleeding customers and brand value.
If AWS wasn't tied to the retail division, I'd be shorting Amazon retail right now.
You posted the same theory above, except there you included the important disclaimer that you have no inside information — is this just a hunch that you have? Because it seems like a Hanlon’s razor type of situation to me. Without some sort of evidence of the fraud you speak of, it seems far more likely to be them simply struggling with challenges of scale. Every business deals with bad employees but the majority of people with jobs tend to want to keep their job. It’s hard for me to imagine that fraud is the dominating cause here.
Amazon systematically underpays all their employees. They do this by encouraging employee churn, like to the point where warehouses occasionally realize "shit, we're running out of new people to hire in the entire metro area". This means they have a high tolerance for a lot of things that would be considered disqualifying. For example, in a lot of workplaces, random drug testing is mandated by insurance, which means people who smoke weed are unemployable. Amazon will hire them anyway[0].
That's not to say Amazon has no limits - they do background-check for felony convictions, and having one would make it harder to get hired by an Amazon warehouse. However, they've still built a hiring system that optimizes for hiring the precariat[1] and underpaying them so they stay precarious. They've built all the economic incentives for them to be stolen from. We don't necessarily need to prove specific allegations of theft in the same way we don't need to prove that specific cracks in the road are caused by water getting in and freezing.
[0] For the record, this is a good thing, but Amazon is doing it for incredibly terrible reasons.
[1] The class of people in permanent precarity - i.e. people who you can get to do anything, including run a marathon across a poorly-organized warehouse filling boxes for eight hours for little pay.
No, I posted a much more specific theory above with a disclaimer.
Here, none was necessary, since I wasn't going out on a limb. I also do know enough people who work at Amazon to know that many of their SWEs despise their employer. Reporting (in newspapers) about warehouses is horrific. That strongly supports that Amazon is not tending towards the happy end of the "employees acting in employer best interest" curve. My own experience, my friends, and anecdotally on posts like this, has been very negative about the honesty and customer service from Amazon starting around 2020.
Now:
Corporate corruption is complex.
To give an extreme example, if one is at an Enron, one keeps their job by keeping their mouths shut and participating in the fraud. It's the likely whistleblowers who get fired.
This is not at all uncommon in organizations. It's a stereotype that working too hard at some union shops is not good for one's long-term job prospects.
One step down from that is employees who don't care about their employer. They want to keep their job, have decent salary, future options, work-life balance, and enjoy work as much as possible. If an employer doesn't fire people who don't work, no one works. If an employer has no means to check if items are correctly packed, very quickly no items are correctly packed. This is not uncommon at the CEO level either (at least for external CEOs), who mostly want to pump up short-term profits to get bonuses and prepare for their next gig.
Acting in corporate interest is only occasionally correlated with keeping ones job. In general, you need to keep your stakeholders happy (probably your boss), and the extent to which that correlates with business success is... mixed.
This impacts a majority of large businesses.
At scale of over ≈20-1000 people, organizations are dominated by incentive structures and dynamics you can model with game theory (ref: Bruce Bueno de Mesquita). The hypothetical business where everyone is aligned is, well, almost hypothetical beyond some scale.
It's not uncommon that in a large organization, zero people care about that organization. If there's a problem, no one fixes it. It survives in the free market simply because their competitors are no better (and how well large businesses manage this largely determines their success).
This isn't just an Amazon problem. I requested a refund from Expedia because their search listed a hotel from another state with a city by the same name when I made a specific city & state search. Their search functionality clearly had a bug and we reserved a hotel in the wrong city. Upon realizing this an hour later we phoned Expedia who told us to phone the hotel; when we talked to the hotel the person that answered said only a manager could refund my purchase and to call in the morning. When I called in the morning the manager told me they held the room for me so I had to pay for it anyway. I realized that I had been gaslit, willingly, but the people who worked there. I talked to Expedia who offered me a partial refund, which I refused. I called my credit card company and they filed a dispute, eventually citing that I'd had several successful bookings with Expedia before (totally unrelated to my case).
To me, the issue is that credit card companies no longer exist to protect and defend consumers the way they used to. They're deep in the pockets of vendors, massaging their backs for a kick of the churn. There's room here for a very heavy handed, national agency in each country that makes these companies lives hell when they lie or drag their feet.
The problem is chargeback fraud has become rampant since COVID, at least from friends stories in the payments and retail spaces.
The word got out you can just call your bank and they will back you very few questions asked. This was abused by many, and now it's no longer a sure thing. Anything outside of outright fraud is very much a coin flip likely depending on how profitable you are to the issuing bank.
I'm sympathetic having worked in anti-fraud adjacent fields before, but this extreme pendulum swing - if that's what this indeed is - is at least inappropriate and at worst nefarious. All of my transactions go through this card; they owe me to represent me well when I'm a customer like that. When they fail to, someone needs to deliver some ire with sticking power. Same way that there's ire that can be felt by a consumer facing charges of fraud.
> they owe me to represent me well when I'm a customer like that
Perhaps I'm over-tired and missing your rationale, but: Why? Why do you think they're going to do that? Because the corporation will feel bad? Because you'll go elsewhere (like a different bank that issues cards that are either Mastercard or Visa on the backend)? Because "it's just as secure as debit, but they give me a free 30-day loan every month"? Have you ever tried to get money back from an authorized transaction through your bank where goods weren't satisfactory? They don't have your back at all - why the hell do you expect Mastercard to?
I use a credit card as a proxy against my bank account. That is the only reason I use it, because debit cards make it hard to appeal fraudulent transactions. If that capability is no longer there then my credit card is absolutely useless.
Fwiw...this reminded me I had a package ($90) not show up this week. I used their completely automated system and got refunded in 5 minutes. Message even says "if you find the package you can keep it."
I think you need a lot of examples to draw any conclusions and self-reporting is going to be almost entirely negative experiences.
I'll share my anecdote: a few weeks ago I ordered hooks for hanging up lights ($25). The package was marked as delivered, but nowhere to be seen. I don't have a problem with package theft, so my guess is that it was delivered to the wrong address or something.
I went to Amazon's site and tried to report the issue, but, at least for that item, there was no automated way to report a package as "not delivered".
Good point. There was a very non-obvious "Get Help" button which led to a non-obvious "Get More Help" link which led to a "Call me" button. But they called instantly once I got there
It’s there they just trick you. Don’t go looking for the option starting from your order details. Instead start from the general support chat and say the automated response didn’t help you and you need more help.
They have some real upsides, the Amazon return policy being one of them. They also have a huge problem with counterfeits, abusive resellers, rigged voting and so on.
The existence of their best point doesn't obviate the existence of the sort of behavior that should lead to sanction, regulation, and reform.
This is a result of their lax quality (flooded with ad hoc businesses selling garbage, counterfeits, inaccurate listings, etc). When you go that route and you're the size of Amazon, it actually makes more sense to completely side-step having to deal with the flood of customers unhappy with all these problems. Just give them their money back. Don't even bother trying to get the product back if it's missing. As a bonus, you get an image boost. It's more efficient than having a process to case-by-case deal with the results of their completely abandoning quality/trust at the point of sale.
I have had some amazing experiences with Amazon CS, but mostly meh ones. Usually I have to spend 10-20 mins sorting out an issue that was not my fault (package never arrived, return never arrived at their warehouse after I dropped it at UPS), and at most they give a $5 credit for the trouble.
But then there was one time where I literally got hundreds of dollars in refunds for a screw up on their end. I didn’t even ask for it — their guy volunteered it and I couldn’t believe he was serious. But he was: he refunded me for a dozen or so purchases to make up for one (expensive) item that was delayed past a birthday that it was supposed to be for. I got the item for free, and then some.
This reads more like a rant unfortunately. While I agree with the closing statements, I think you realized it too late. You already made Amazon an almost undestroyable behemoth with the previous 83 purchases of yours (sure, you didn't do it alone. But your patronage was essential while it lasted). You can't really make that not-happened, it's late for that.
On a different note, it is not Amazon's interest to scam you. But unfortunately it is one rando's word (yours) against another rando's word (the driver, or whoever), without a lot of proof that could be sent to the police.
> and have even contested credit card charge-backs.
Personally, I'd never do a CC chargeback against certain companies. Too much risk of being cut off from a crucial vendor by a "customers who do chargebacks aren't worth the trouble" automation/SOP.
(For household consumer issues... if customer service was exhausted, I'd escalate to the CEO's office "?" email address, and if even that didn't work, but I really needed it solved, I'd consult a lawyer about whether they could negotiate a solution with a letter or phone call.)
They don't just blacklist the credit card number you used, but also your name, address, email, and phone number. And it wouldn't surprise me if they also had some heuristic involving IPs, cookies, and device fingerprinting.
Amazon code that renders tracking seems obviously broken in places. They shipped a thing to me (MT) from NY, and the post office mistakenly routed it to Puerto Rico. At some point in this saga the Amazon order tracking page went from "it's running late and if it isn't there tomorrow you can get a refund" to "likely it was delivered on or around Dec 1 and you can't get a refund". Meanwhile the tracking (number copied from that same page) shows it meandering around FL on its way back from its Carribean vacation.
You can probably still get a refund if you open the support chat, experience of the blog writer not withstanding. They always have more options than the shipping page will give you.
I don't dare buy technology from Amazon, the commingling of products from random sources means the risk of counterfeits is just too high. Micro Center or Best Buy would have to be actively malicious for something like that to happen, while Amazon can just be passively malicious and say "system working as designed, wontfix".
Were they the shipper or seller? I can understand them saying they can’t cancel the order midstream, but once it’s been over a week from the order time, they can’t exactly stand by that default rule. You can’t take someone’s money and leave them with nothing for a month.
Amazon and Apple have had an agreement since ~2018 that limits third party sellers of Apple products on the platform in return for Amazon having access to new devices on the market. It's very likely that the seller was Apple directly and the device already in the warehouse.
You pay less. I did the math on other sellers versus Amazon, factoring in cost of dealing with fraud@Amazon. Paying a little bit more sticker is much cheaper than getting cheated once in a while.
Always film yourself opening high value packages. For the author, it really boils down to circumstantial evidence. A photo of a box not containing the item isn’t proof of anything.
I’d even go further and make sure there’s uninterrupted video evidence showing delivery and opening of the package. Open them on your front porch in view of your doorbell camera.
If you’re a victim of a fraud like this, first make a police report of the theft. Then contact the merchant. If you aren’t given a refund or replacement within the same time period of the original delivery, start the dispute process with your bank. If that fails, take the matter to small claims court against the original merchant. This is where you can take your evidence to someone who is local and who doesn’t work for the merchant. They don’t care about whatever terms of service, procedures of the company and operate under the law.
Most of the time the company won’t even show up and if they do it likely will be one of their juniors from their legal staff.
As long as you have evidence and a police report, you’ll get a judgement in your favor. Once you get the judgement, if still within 90 days of the purchase, send it to your bank to have the chargeback redone.
If not within 90 days, you will need to collect from the merchant themselves. Send a copy of the judgement and a demand letter certified mail to the merchant. You need to check your local laws on how long they have to pay it.
If they don’t pay, you’ll need to go back to the judge in most cases and follow the process of civil seizure. Normally this involves the sheriff or local law enforcement. One of the easiest ways to collect is to show up to a local branch of a bank where the merchant has money and have the bank execute the seize money from their account.
If you can’t find their bank, or they have no money, you can show up with the judgement and law enforcement (call them when you get there or follow the process outlined by the judge, sometimes this involves the local sheriff). You can then seize any property that might be at the location.
Three years ago, a friend of a friend told me that he knows people inside UPS/Fedex/etc who steal expensive items, and sell them to fencers. Now it is time to pick up your expensive stuff from local stores, even if you place orders online.
I had something stolen out of the USPS system. I don't know whether it was the mailing center or the USPS itself but it disappeared in a way that logically couldn't have been a mistake.
USPS is considered safer, because of federal charges. Some wise people suggested to use priority/express mail, along with insurance, if one wants it more secure in the USPS system.
I have had 3 watches stolen out of my secure neighborhood parcel locker. Each time the package was scanned to show delivered, and each time it was not there. It’s just watches (which are marked as such on the customs form), and despite numerous complaints, USPS refuses to do anything about it. I’ll believe Federal charges when I see them.
I agree with you here. One time, I didn't receive a check for $8k for two months for work I did. I complained to the sender, who sent me the image of the cashed check. So, I filed a complaint with USPS about stolen mail, and that too was supposed to be delivered to a PO Box. No response whatsoever from USPS postal inspectors, who are busy with priorities of their political masters. So, it took another three months to sort out this mess through alternative means. At least, USPS should have contacted me about my complaint; no, they didn't care.
I have relevant industry experience, and I would advise anyone to never, ever use Priority or Express Mail for a high-value item, under any circumstances. Even with third-party insurance.
Theft is much more likely than with UPS/FedEx overnight services, and it's nearly impossible to arrange the delivery so that the parcel is on camera for its entire journey, something easily accomplished with some other carriers. And if the package lost, prosecution is almost an impossibility, as is therefore recovery.
In the event of a loss, Postal Inspectors are typically useless for pursuing package theft committed by USPS employees, even with very high value because they live in perpetual fear of the APWU (their explanation, not mine). They also hilariously attempt to pass the investigative buck to local authorities, who rightly note that it was a Federal crime committed by a Federal employee on Federal property.
The Postal Inspectors recently had a high-visibility thread on another site that very much overstated their value, and ever since that thread went up that's been the narrative. It's wholly unjustified.
Registered Mail is the only USPS service worth considering for such items, and it's actually incredibly good, and tightly controlled. It's arguably the most secure service of the major carriers, and probably where that recommendation comes from. As bad as the USPS is at delivering everything else securely, they're excellent at getting Registered Mail items where they belong. Insurance up to $50K can be purchased (and sometimes over that amount).
For someone with no experience doing a one-off, high-value shipment, that is what I would strongly recommend. The insurance also comes without the endless hidden caveats one finds with UPS that requires a complex decision tree to validate, or the BTW-it's-not-actually-insurance aspect of FedEx's declarations (for which they'll happily charge).
Third-party insurance services are worth their (very reasonable) cost, but can be difficult for the average person to secure. Services like Brink's enter the picture when you start talking about moving items above that level.
But Priority/Express is the absolute wild west in terms of secure package delivery. Temporary employees working with no oversight, with a union that will reflexively and aggressively defend people even when it's fully aware it's defending criminals (sound familiar?), and unmotivated inspectors. It's a recipe for high rates of package loss, which is exactly what it has.
Thanks for sharing your experience. USPS says 'Registered Mail is kept highly secured and is processed manually, which naturally slows the speed at which it travels.Registered Mail is not recommended if speed of delivery is important.'
A relative had mail stolen from an outgoing mailbox. She filed a complaint and was contacted months later when they caught the guy. They found her checks (to charity) in his house. She was shocked to hear back so much later. Apparently they were on the case the whole time, since it was affecting a lot of people.
I don't doubt they solve cases of serial theft by ordinary citizens.
They are, however, habitually unwilling to investigate Postal employees in all but the most exceptional cases (and the value of the thefts is not sufficient to be exceptional).
Only when they want to investigate your case. Most of the time, postal investigators don't care. Maybe, they care if the package is insured/priority/express mail.
I worked as a FedEx package handler for a bit. One item that was shipped was rolled up mattresses, another item that was shipped was cell phones. These arrived on trucks in large quantities. The shipping labels didn't stick well to the mattress packaging, and occasionally came off of the cell phone boxes as well. Sometimes it was obvious which packages the labels had come off of, other times not.
Buying stealable big ticket stuff like this on Amazon is something I just realized I have never done. I haven't had issues with Amazon drivers stealing my packages, but I sure as hell have gone through issues with my fucking neighbors stealing my packages. Apartment living is hell. /rant
Game consoles and guitars I generally buy in person. Sure, there's corner cases, like buying used (generally retro) consoles on eBay, but these won't be clearly marked as a game console.
The Amazon delivery driver doesn't know it's a game console either, as it was in a regular brown box. The driver just knew it required a special code prior to delivery. The only Amazon people who know it's a console are those responsible for packing it.
'Knowing it required a special code priority to delivery' itself is a signal for stealing, and replacing it with junk. Drivers can do it; even people at distribution centers do it [1]
Wow, I read this whole article and it’s amazing how similar of an experience I had.
I ordered a fairly fancy mechanical keyboard and instead got a used motorcycle cover. I did a proper return through Amazon, they even said via live chat that they were processing the refund. But the refund never came.
After two months of back and forth with I filed the dispute with AMEX. Amazon disputed the charge back. I had to dispute the Amazon dispute. finally, Amex did end up refunding the money even though Amazon did not.
Six years ago, I had my computer compromised by a remote access trojan. The hacker accessed my machine while I was asleep, used Chrome password manager extraction tools to get my Facebook password, then credential-stuffed it into Amazon[0] to buy as many PSN cards as they could before Chase's fraud detection tripped and started texting me for verification, which woke me up.
You would think that fixing this would be simple: revoke the PSN cards and reverse the credit card transactions. Turns out, they don't do that. At all. Amazon insisted that they wouldn't do shit without a bank chargeback. I of course had already started that process with Chase. About a month later, I get a call from Chase saying they need to "move the transactions to the new account"[1], which sounds like a stupid technical thing, so sure, whatever. A few weeks later I get a letter in the mail saying the dispute was closed because "it was a dispute with the merchant" - no explanation what that means. They give a phone number to call that goes to voicemail - I called at least five times and never got a call back, and all $400 worth of fraudulent transactions were right back on my statement.
I gave up trying to fight shit because I don't want to sue my bank, nor do I want to fight Dread Pirate Bezos. I'm not suicidal[2]. However, it did teach me two things that have stuck with me:
- Amazon has a blanket opt-out with the credit card companies and issuing banks. I don't know how, it could be as simple as "don't waste time investigating likely false accusations of fraud", but they are able to win[3] chargebacks with credit card companies using explanations that look like someone just picked the first option on the form that denies the dispute.
- PlayStation Network cards are apparently as immutable and uncensorable as Bitcoin[4]. If you want to do crimes, do them with PlayStation.
[0] Yes, I was reusing passwords. Yes, I did change every password I had over the next few days. Yes, I completely wiped the machine and reinstalled everything. No, I don't think I should have been liable for fraud because of any of this.
[1] They had sent me a new card and card number at this point.
[2] I'm pretty sure the "slow and horrible" option in the suicide booths involves burying yourself in legal fees.
[3] Keep in mind that not-monopolistic merchants almost never win chargebacks or disputes.
[4] For an extra layer of irony, a few days prior, I'd written a long screed at a Bitcoin fanatic on Reddit about how credit card chargebacks are a feature, not a bug, and that immutable transactions are a design defect.
Dang I'm no fan of amazon's ethics but it seems bad ethics is the norm among corporates, governments not the exception. Corruption, abuses of power... occurring with such regularity and at worst a slap on the wrist or forced to retire with a huge payout.
I tried to return a couple of things within 30 days last month, they offered me less than purchase price plus ridiculously expensive shipping. Total refund would have been around 70% of purchase price.
Not what I expected when I signed up as a Prime customer.
> Never buy anything of any meaningful value (if anything at all) from Amazon ever again
Honestly, a single chargeback will cause Amazon to cancel your account and block you from the platform forever. It's the cost of getting your money back :(
I've found my use of Amazon declining over time. Temu has basically replaced lots of consistent small-value buys that I'd go to Amazon for: cables, plastic things, simple tools, kitchen stuff, etc.
High ticket items I usually shop around a lot to get the best deal and that's rarely on Amazon.
And I've found myself buying more and more from independent shops.
Anyone else notice similar trends in their habits?
I had an Amazon driver steal a phone I'd ordered. I did get a refund, but they were not in the slightest bit interested in the evidence I had that the driver had stolen the phone. It seems they just write that part off.
I don't think the conclusions presented are true. It seems to be a pretty "standard" case of theft that, unfortunately, yes these things often take time to resolve. And all of the "analysis" is just speculation.
Does it suck that it took extra messages for the return to be acknowledged, and extra weeks for the refund to finally get approved and go through? For sure. Does this mean "Amazon has an honesty issue"? No. Dealing with a package where the expensive contents were swapped out for other content is probably going to take weeks to resolve with any major retailer.
Trying to shortcut the process by filing a chargeback isn't going to help anything. You only do that if Amazon ultimately denies the return.
Of course it sucks it ties up that money. But they can also just leave the balance on the credit card for an extra month and pay, what, $8 in interest? Everything about:
> remain in a state of financial limbo for the better part of 2 months, spending Christmas wondering whether we'd ever see our money again.
feels overly dramatic. Anyone who can put a $600+ Xbox bundle on a credit card isn't going to be left in "financial limbo". In the end, they can rest assured that a chargeback with Amex will work even if it didn't on their first attempt.
Yes this is all annoying. But it's not some conspiracy. These cases are hard for companies to deal with, because for every delivery person who's a thief, there's a customer who lies and gets a free Xbox out of it. So they do take time and effort to resolve.
Recently I had them fail to deliver a 10$ item, flag it in their system as a delivery failure notify me that the failure occurred and then still not give me a refund and tell me that they are doing me a favor by refund it. The service quality really Turing to poop. In December they basically done guarantee delivers either anymore so between that and the sea of counterfeits I only make 5-10$ item orders from them where the delivery costs more than the item.
I had a similar experience with a Chinese scam seller on eBay with a $500 GPU. tl;dr neither ebay nor PayPal would accept a claim because they had proof of receipt from DHL. Of course, a simple call to DHL could easily verify it was delivery to a different address but even providing an email from DHL to this effect as evidence didn't change the line. Eventually had to charge back and luckily in my case that did go through after about 3 months of process - the phone call from the card company in the process was nice to verify unlike everyone else it did actually get handled by a real person.
Naturally that was the end of my eBay account, PayPal unfortunately I do need from time to time.
I suppose this is just standard practice in the industry but wonder why it can be so consistently bad even with real evidence.
Cancelled my Prime this month. I will never use Amazon again.
3rd package in a month that has gone missing. Posted in apartment letter box in mail room. Each time it is missing. No sign of any amazon packages. Neighbours reporting the same with their stuff.
On top of the shit show that has been the support situation during Re:Invent I'd rather use any other retailer or cloud provider.
Amazon are a fucking shit show race to the bottom and we should stop giving them money and let them burn.
Huh - I've had Amazon prime 'guaranteed' n-day delivery fail twice in succession for a 90GBP textbook. I'll put this down to incompetence rather than malice, but imagining the disappointment of any potential thief of it served as some compensation.
Well, who is responsible for the theft? Whoever handled this piece stole it. So many hands from shipping to delivery. It is my hunch that either the driver or some folks in the local distribution center stole it. A secret code doesn't solve the problem, unless the receiver opens the box in front of the delivery driver.
I think it’s about high time that Amazon disrupts the “leave it on the porch” method. Too many packages are stolen by thieves.
And I mean, they’ve already started to some extend to deal with it. There are many cities I’ve been to that has Amazon delivery boxes where you can pick up your stuff.
I think that when drones get powerful enough, and regulation allows it, Amazon will adopt drone delivery everywhere. You get a notification on your phone telling you that your package is at the local distribution center. When you get back home, or some other day later where you are not busy, you tell the app to deliver now and within short time a drone drops the package off at your home any time that is convenient to you 24x7/365, even if it’s like 3am on a Sunday.
And for the rest of the journey up to that point, rigorous tracking and auditing to make sure packages don’t go “missing” on the way.
"leave it on the porch" isn't even a thing in the UK, unless you specifically nominate it as your acceptable secure place.
Amazon knock on the door, if you're not in then they'll come back tomorrow, and if you're not in, then they'll try the next day. If you're not in three days in a row they'll hold the package for three days, to give you time to arrange one final delivery attempt to your home, Amazon locker or pick-up point (neighbourhood shop). Eventually they'll just take the package back and refund you automatically.
- Expected delivery on Wednesday, instead "delivered" Tuesday when I'm out by just leaving it in front of the front door, 1m from the street.
- Sitting downstairs eating dinner, my phone pings, Amazon package apparently delivered. But nobody rang the bell or knocked the door. It's just been left outside the front door again.
- Another "delivered" notification but no knock and nothing left outside the house. Check app, status is "handed to resident". Assume it's been nicked, but check with the neighbour just in case - thankfully they got it!
- My parents ordered some glassware, delivery driver dropped the package (marked Fragile) from waist height onto their doorstep, again without even attempting to knock/ring the bell. Footage captured on security cam. Obviously glassware didn't survive.
An Xbox was ordered that's classed as a "high value" item so requires a OTP being given to the driver to release the package.
The package was hand delivered to the customer when the customer provided the OTP, but it turns out the contents of the package were swapped out with junk.
They have no idea how to disrupt last mile delivery without corruption and theft. They’ve tried. My apartment building’s doorbox has Amazon Key, such that drivers have the ability to let themselves in and drop off packages in a secure area. I’ve confirmed with one of the better Amazon delivery drivers that it works like a charm.
The vast majority of them don’t (think/care to) use it. At this point I’m actually glad, lest they let themselves into the secure area and steal other packages.
Not sure about that. One of the screenshots mentions AMZNMKTPLACE AMAZON CO UK. If it was indeed an Amazon Marketplace vendor, then it's not entirely unheard of that it was a scam from the start.
Yep, I spotted the same thing. Third party seller.
I'll still occasionally buy stuff from Amazon that's actually sold by Amazon, but I'd pick almost any other retailer over an "Amazon Marketplace" seller. Scam city.
(I'll search for stuff directly on camelcamelcamel these days, as the "sold by amazon" filter is gone from Amazon's own website.)
Amazon is a private enterprise and its profit is soaring, which means this is simply a non-issue. I thought HN knew how free markets worked but I guess not.
Amazon's market cap soared when profits were negative. Amazon was building up reputation, logistics, and customer relations. As far as I can tell, they've been torching all of that long-term value for about the past three years.
When were profits negative? AFAIK Amazon.com may lose money but AWS more than makes up for it. Amazon.com is a long game to monopolize retail logistics, which they are just now starting to offer as a service to other retailers, meaning Amazon.com is of less importance.
Amazon was losing money for nearly the first decade of its existence. It was a bit of a laughing stock among the traditional business community: "Lose money on every sale, but make it up in volume!" The loses were considered astronomical at the time; in 2000, it lost over a billion dollars.
The strategy was the right one, though. To put all of that in perspective, in 2018, it earned over 10 billion, and many businesses have since followed the Amazon model.
It's sort of a classic case study in business schools now.
I signed up for Prime a over decade ago because of the reliable 2 day shipping. It worked pretty much as described. It was great.
Shipping is no longer 2 days on most items - "Prime" shipping can now take 7 days. Amazon advertise same or next day shipping, but it's really only for big ticket, occasional purchase items. Most everyday purchases now take 3-7 days, the same as without prime. They show the prime badge, but if you log out you can see that non-prime members get the same shipping.
This feels really dishonest. Amazon pretend that you get huge shipping benefits from Prime, but it turns out you don't anymore.
For the first time, I've cancelled my prime renewal. What, exactly, am I paying for these days? Walmart offer next-day free shipping on the big ticket items too, without the membership.