It's this kind of garbage bs that makes it hard for me to get a refund for a legitimate problem I'm having with a product. I want to be all "Yeah! Stick it to em!" but the general population suffers because of this too. Amazon used to be great about refunds, letting you keep cheap things because they weren't worth sending back. Now they want me to send back even the smallest most insignificant things.
It’s not because of scammers like these. The loss for them is minuscule compared to their revenue. It goes much deeper.
Amazon is being less generous with customers because they’re an aging company built around a technology solution (automated listing, searching, and service) that couldn’t actually satisfy global scale in the face of automated listing spam; because they’ve largely won as many customers as they ever will and have few radical growth avenues; and because now they’re facing these challenges in a world where money is much more expensive and needs to be more carefully allocated.
Amazon’s giving you grief with your refunds because their whole 2000’s-era style of online retail is past it’s peak and is starting to crumble beneath its titans, just like search is for Google and graph-centered social media did Facebook.
While we can hope exciting new retail approaches take hold, the experience with Amazon is only going to get worse, regardless of little scams like this.
I'm guessing it's because they have UPS stores consolidating returns into bigger boxes, which reduces the return cost per item. Then the returns get packed into pallets which are sold.
They sent me the wrong item, and now I not only don't have the item I ordered, but have to take a trip to the UPS store to send this thing back. Extremely frustrating!
I also received an item that was shattered in transit and had to send it back. I felt bad for the UPS store employee dealing with the broken glass.
Be extremely careful and document everything - this happened to me with Amazon when I ordered a high end graphics card, and got an empty box. They said to send it back, but when they got it, forgot all about the part where I said the item was missing and claimed I didn’t complete the return.
Then they claimed to my credit card company I never requested a return.
Then they told the state AG that they had accepted my return when I filed a complaint (perjury!)
