Amazon Failure

I have never worked for Amazon (and don't imagine that I ever would based on their reputation for how they treat employees, both warehouse workers and programmers alike), this post is commentary on why I have ditched them almost all together as a customer. And I used to buy a LOT of stuff off of Amazon...

Through 2016 Amazon was holding their seller's feet to the fire and forcing them to give you full refunds if something was wrong with the product as a standard practice. This practice disappeared some time in 2017. The only thing I recommend Amazon for now are things you can't easily get elsewhere because they are relatively rare.

The 4 things that happened that led me to using Amazon-only-for-purchases-that-include-Amazon-gift-card-money:

1. Just for example, I once ordered a bag of 50 earbuds for $50, and half of them were so bad they would fall apart in your ear the first time you used them. I got a full refund. This was standard through 2016, I had to get refunds on about 10% of the stuff I purchased, inconvenient enough to make me think twice about getting stuff on Amazon.
2. n Mid 2017 I purchased $20 blue tooth head phones and went so far at to purchase an additional warranty on them.  When they started crapping out in February 2018 I couldn't find the packaging, so the extra Amazon-endorsed extra warranty should have kicked in (as the manufacturer's warranty required original packaging, which was not much and was easy to throw away on accident). So the extra warranty just kept referring me back to the manufacturer's warranty, even with e-mails with supposedly real people, until it was just no longer worth the $20 to keep trying.
3. In late 2017 I ordered a $40 tablet. When the power button stopped working in January 2017, I tried to contact Amazon and all I got was notices about how items purchased during the Holiday Season of 2017 only had a 30 day warranty. Manufacturer's warranty? Dream on.
4. A $60 tablet was purchased in January 2017 and works great, no problems. But before 2017, 7 inch tablets in the $40 range were easily broken by children, not by failed manufacturing. So good luck on figuring out the sweet-spot for pricing on Amazon. I don't have the time or money for trial and error on $40-$400 purchases on electronics a few times a month. 

As a customer, I am tired of doing free quality control labor for Amazon, and now I am not even getting products as advertised from shopping on their site. I have had similar problems ordering stuff online from Wal*Mart.  Basically, Wal*Mart and Amazon have started to treat their on-line customers as bad as their employees!

Fortunately some of their competition has survived and adapted. I have had really good experiences with electronics from Fred Meyer and Best Buy, and they frequently beat the low price points on Amazon and at Walmart. It is a truly strange future we live in when these giants of industry have failed on this level and stores like Fred Meyer and Best Buy deliver a better customer value.