Bump and fixed my post
A similar thing happened to me on Amazon, except the scammer shipped right away. It was roughly a $100 item. According to the tracking info, it arrived at some address that wasn’t even in the same state as mine. But Amazon refunded my money as soon as I contacted them. Score one for Amazon.
Later, though, I saw that the same seller was still on Amazon with a terrible rating and almost all the reviews describing the same thing that happened to me. Why Amazon lets them continue to be on their platform, idk.
On eBay I try to avoid new sellers if I can.
That’s the only thing that confuses me: seller is not new and has a 98% rating or something. But all/most of the negative reviews describe what happened to me. Seems so strange that they’d sell a ton of stuff and just fuck over a small percentage of buyers, doesn’t seem like it would be worth it. My guess is that this is not actually one seller, but more of a collective operating under one name.
Got my hat light via another source. But they also used Blueair Express! Came in an Amazon box. Really going to focus on using local retailers whenever possible.
I’ve only been scammed as a seller (only a few times but still) The one that pissed me off the most was that I could prove that the item they claimed was defective wasn’t the item I sent them but they dgaf and refunded them. Ebay is just meh at best about filtering out scammers but luckily most people actually do not cheat relentlessly on that stuff. I pretty much no longer allow returns now as a result. It sucks but I’m not a business that can just write it off or whatever they do.
Ebay/Amazon are a necessary evil for me, I live in a small town so some things aren’t available for quite a distance if at all.
wait, take that back, I was scammed as a buyer once, got shipped a fake coin once and no, I didn’t buy it from china where I basically expect all of them from there are. Luckily it was a cheap one, everything else has been legit for me though. knock on wood That’s at most .0001% or something.
I’ve never heard of the shipping service you mentioned either, so maybe that’s part of it, they can’t use them heh.
At an Amazon fulfillment center in Pennsylvania when it was over 100 degrees inside managers wouldn’t open the loading bay doors for fear of theft. So, they hired paramedics to wait outside in ambulances, ready to extract heat-stricken workers.
I guess they could have hired guards to watch the loading bays but that would make too much sense.
Yeah but you know they’re gonna move all the dead people out and hire a reasonably attractive ghoul to play the manager.
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Amazon will pay no taxes on their income for the second year in a row. This years tax free haul, 11.2 billion dollars. Thanks avwaal.
Hey everyone, stop buying stuff from Amazon. They don’t sell anything you can’t get somewhere else and maybe pay 5% more. If I’m buying something online and I see it on Amazon, I just find it somewhere else - often directly from the manufacturer - and it’s about the same price, sometimes even less. Such an easy boycott.
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Finding stuff somewhere else is easy. Finding stuff somewhere else that’s run more ethically than Amazon is very difficult. I’ll give you a real world example.
I recently bought a couple thousand dollars’ worth of Schluter products for a bathroom remodel. My options were:
a) Amazon. The cheapest and easiest, and half the order wasn’t even fulfilled by them. I also get 5% back on my Amazon branded credit card, making it even cheaper.
b) Big box retailer. Almost as cheap as Amazon, but no cash back and the enormous assache of special order through them.
c) Local supply house. Easily 10-15% more expensive, and I know for a fact that all of the local places I could have bought from are owned by right wing assholes who treat their employees even worse than Amazon.
What’s my ethical play?
Local supply house
Why should I pay a premium to keep worker exploitation local? The only person who benefits is the supply house owner, and there’s added resource usage from a more inefficient distribution network. Plus, with Amazon every worker who brought packages to my front porch was in a union. And the likelihood that Amazon warehouse workers might be unionized one day >>>>>>>>>> the likelihood my local lumber yard will be.
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5% off everything at Target if you use their store card. Plus they employ incredibly handsome software developers.
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Target doesn’t sell tile uncoupling, waterproofing and radiant heating systems.
Late stage capitalism. Amazon is doing that. Until we actually have some path for the future other than robots doing everything while 99.9% of people teeter on the edge doing just well enough to consume enough to make the system operate and living in the gutter and eating out of the garbage, inefficiency is better. One union employee at Amazon is going to replace 10 employees and moms and pops at local businesses.
We call it late stage capitalism but it might turn out to be early/middle stage, or late/middle stage because we have no idea yet how bad this could get and how long it could last.
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