• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

Fuck Amazon, their quality went to shit.

Thaedolus

Gold Member
Dropped Prime over a year ago and we don’t really miss it at all. Target tends to have stuff at better prices.

I did cave when no local grocer has had sriracha for months when I’ve checked, so I bought two bottles this week…
 

Brazen

Member
I do local distribution to the post offices in my area so I can weight in here a bit for you guys.

Amazon also does their own local freight distributions from their warehouses to your local post offices. This bypasses the USPS bulk processing, the company I work for does this exact thing just on a much smaller scale. The amount of freight Amazon drops off to your local post office is staggering compared to USPS mail, in terms of weight/space it makes up sizeable portion of all mail now. City where I work is approximately 100k and the freight coming off an Amazon truck is anywhere from 4-8+ pallets and these pallets are always stacked up to 8-10 feet high with product. So, the reason for your crushed box/dented items in bubble mailers is due to the logistics of sheer volume and this cost/time saving practices/policy they follow.

Really go overboard with the freight and each early morning when I deliver my company's product to the local post offices I encounter the Amazon driver, good people, who are usually RE-stacking one or maybe three of these pallets due to the pallet wrap unravelling or the freight leaning too far over against the trailer wall or whatever the case. All from over stacking these pallets and going through their transit. Again, this is a just about every morning thing and I feel sorry for those drivers.

Anyway, that's all I got on this.
 

Lasha

Member
Amazon Singapore is super useful. We get free local delivery with prime and most of the other benefits for 36SGD per year. Groceries are the real winner since everything is expensive as fuck anyways and Amazon offers free 2 hour delivery. Free international shipping is also a boon since the price difference between US and local is massive even when eating the occasion customs duty.
 

Northeastmonk

Gold Member
Their customer service has been great for me. I get an Amazon box everyday just because my wife uses it religiously. I do have a complaint about the way they package their video games. Every time I order a game it comes in a bubble envelope and the disc is rattling inside. It’s every single time. TLoU Part 1 and Valkyrie Elysium came loose. I don’t understand it or I’m just unlucky.
 
Amazon recently became available in Sweden and I gotta say, their app is horrendous. It works if you know EXACTLY what you're shopping for but doing any kind of browsing is just impossible.
 

Xyphie

Member
Yeah Amazon Sweden is pretty terrible as a shopping experience still full of machine-translated shit even after 2 years, but it kinda fills the void for cheap China crap after AliExpress packages started having to pay customs fees a few years ago.
 
Last edited:

Cyberpunkd

Member
You're not kidding. Just awful
Sorry, let me reiterate. Amazon's website is designed to make you use a search bar, which gives Amazon a lot of information and allows to show you what they want (a lot of thinking goes into it). Standard search usage on a website is 15%+, I'm sure on Amazon it's 90%+.
 

HoodWinked

Member
It's probably a bunch of factors. They were pretty generous when it came to customer service. They gained that reputation and it started to become widely known. This likely lead to tons of return fraud. Now they have to cut costs and that means adding friction to any customer service requests.

But also I think there is a hidden score per customer which they use to determine if someone who is a profitable customer or someone that abuses thier policies or returns lots of things.
 

Cyberpunkd

Member
But also I think there is a hidden score per customer which they use to determine if someone who is a profitable customer or someone that abuses thier policies or returns lots of things.
There is, return fraud is non-existence due to that. You return too much you get your account locked.

I have prime and use it extensively, not in à ‘I have an emergency way’ but as buying in 5 seconds, then forgetting about it till it arrives.
I would like the third party sellers to be better, with more selection (Abebooks is an Amazon-owned company but their stock doesn’t sync with Amazon).
 
Last edited:

Winter John

Gold Member
It's probably a bunch of factors. They were pretty generous when it came to customer service. They gained that reputation and it started to become widely known. This likely lead to tons of return fraud. Now they have to cut costs and that means adding friction to any customer service requests.

But also I think there is a hidden score per customer which they use to determine if someone who is a profitable customer or someone that abuses thier policies or returns lots of things.

I don't know about scoring customers. It's possible that happens now. When I did my stint in fraud the accounts that had a lot of lost or returned orders were flagged by the system. What happened then was they got transferred straight to us instead of customer service every time they called up. Most of my time was spent explaining to indignant Karens that it looked suspicious when 7 out of their last 10 orders had mysteriously vanished.
 
The only reason we keep it is because I password share with my parents and, being boomers, they are hooked on TV shows 16 hours a day.

The way that Amazon autoplays that atrocious looking Lord of the Rings thing after everything I watch would be enough to make me cancel. Talk about trying it on.
 
Amazon recently became available in Sweden and I gotta say, their app is horrendous. It works if you know EXACTLY what you're shopping for but doing any kind of browsing is just impossible.

Apparently staff at Amazon used to bring this up all the time but Bezos is adamant that the messy layout is one of the reasons its successful. Hard to argue with his track record...
 
But also I think there is a hidden score per customer which they use to determine if someone who is a profitable customer or someone that abuses thier policies or returns lots of things.
they definitely keep track of how many returns/refunds you get. i got a message from amazon years ago warning me if i kept returning stuff my account was at risk of being banned and they wanted an explaination. i told them i felt that the items simply weren't acceptable quality, were faulty, or i had changed my mind on them. i'm allowed to return things for those reasons and i was being genuine in saying that. never heard back from them. back then i admit i was probably more fussy on the quality of stuff i bought. i mean why shouldnt i? i'm spending hundreds of pounds if not £1,000+ on stuff so you're damn right i'm gonna return shit if it's not good quality for the price i'm paying. i still return stuff to them but probably not as much as i used to. never heard anything from them since that one time.

so yeah they keep track of accounts that might be returning too much stuff. they could be returns for genuine reasons or they could be people trying to rip Amazon off. if Amazon feel you're gonna make them lose money then they will give you a warning and then disable your account. i've had my account for 15 years now and i do like 99% of my online shopping through them so i'd hate if my account got banned lol.
 

tygertrip

Member
You have to tip parcel delivery drivers now? America has become absolutely retarded.
"Merkins so stoopid and backwaards! Not sofistikated n smart like us!". Seriously though, I was just joking. This is the first I've heard of tipping them, and I'm sure as hell not going to start now.
 
Top Bottom