And what of the time, money, and environmental resources used by the customer who must spend more time estimating the reliability of irrelevant reviews and have to make time to schedule and execute a return? Doesn't that also take from "growing food, producing shoes, building homes, providing accounting services," and consuming more products -- and with much less efficiency and predictability?
Yes, it certainly does. That's my point. Everything takes effort. One way the market might sort this out is that Amazon hires a bunch of people to do this on your behalf, freeing you up to spend more time on activities more productive than performing due diligence on your online products yourself. They would raise prices a bit, but then you'd also have a bit more income. Perhaps this would be a net win overall.
But that's not the holistic conversation and consideration I see coming through. All I'm seeing is a one-sided focus on what Amazon can (should) do about it.
