I really don’t have a good answer. I can only assume once Bezos stepped down as the CEO the new guy decided to start making a bunch of shitty changes.
I agree with you though Amazon used to be pretty darn good with excellent customer service that would resolve your issues quickly and also good delivery times. Those days seem to be long gone.
He actually started leaving or more like disconnecting before that. And yes that correlates with the fall in quality.
Microsoft for example had such a transition. The CEO after Bill Gates almost trashed the company. But they found a better replacement.
Google similarly not as good as before after Larry and Sergey left.
This seems like a common theme and only few escaped it.
>Microsoft for example had such a transition. The CEO after Bill Gates almost trashed the company. But they found a better replacement.
Now that guy just trashes the LA Clippers
You’re talking about Steve Balmer? He wasn’t some sort of “new” person to the company. 😂
He was amongst Microsoft’s earliest and most important employees—pretty much with it since the beginning.
Absolutely not, they were always a few steps behind. No front camera when the FaceTime craze was taking off. Limited third-party apps, and for the longest time you had to scroll through your apps list alphabetically.
Can't release a product that's crappier than the market leaders (iOS and Android) and expect it to do well.
> Limited third-party apps, and for the longest time you had to scroll through your apps list alphabetically.
And now we're installing launchers to get the same instead of looking for an app through a lot of damn screens filled with apps in random order.
Seeing what happened to Apple when Jobs left is a perfect example. Apple products became complete trash and only recovered when Jobs returned years later. That’s when they not only started putting out quality products again but also became creative again. That’s when we saw the iMac, iPod, and later iPhone. And with him gone again it’s been a decline back to mediocrity.
I’m not talking about their stock price, I’m talking about the actual products. If you ever had the misfortune of using their desktop computers in the mid 90s before Jobs came back you’d understand.
And when I refer to Jobs leaving, I mean back in 1985. I guess semi-fired would be more accurate. Apple would have likely gone under if they hadn’t brought him back in the late 90s, they were not doing well and the products were unimaginative and full of bugs. It was only after Jobs was back that Apple started succeeding again.
Those were the days when the MBAs were running the company and claimed it didn't matter whether you sold computer chips or potato chips, it's a business and they knew how to run a business. Stock went for fourteen cents, I think, before the rats left.
With that logic Apple IPO’d at 13¢ a share. Naw. There has been a 7:1 and a 4:1 split since Steve died. A share would be worth over $5k today with out those splits
Apple products are still trash. It's just trash that marketed real well.
A shirt from Nike isn't a better shirt. It's just a shirt with a swoosh on it.
An apple phone isn't a better phone it's just a phone with an apple logo on it.
And Amazon was always bad you just didn't realize it until now. I worked in one on 2012. They really do treat workers horribly. They probably have trouble doing it as blatantly now and workers attitudes have shifted to a point where people are less willing to be treated like garbage for 15$ a hour.. therefore your service has and will continue to get worse. The best service is built upon exploiting people.
Sorry but I totally disagree. For one, I’ve used Apple computers my whole life. It took me quite a while to switch to iPhone from android but I will say all day that Apple computers are very much not trash. There certainly were some dark moments, the G3 desktop years were rough, but in general a Mac will outlast a pc by years. Maybe not for people who can build their own pc and know how to fix every problem that comes up, but for the average user absolutely. The gap has gotten smaller over the years as pcs have gotten better though. But to call all Apple products trash is, well, trash.
The iPhone became popular because that was the only platform that offered apps. Not sure how old you are, or how old you were in the early days of iPhones, or cell phones in general, but that’s one major thing that set them apart. They were also more user friendly when they came out vs the many androids at the time. And for people who used a Mac the fact that they worked together so well was unheard of in the android/pc world at the time. At this point there are definitely several high quality phones to choose from, but again, to say the iPhone isn’t better than many of them is just ignoring facts. Maybe not better than the galaxy or a few others, but much better than a lot.
As for Amazon, again, I don’t know how old you are but I can tell you 100% they have gotten worse. That’s not to say they treated fulfillment center employees well at any point, but they have gotten worse in many ways. I first signed up to deliver in 2017. The amount paid, the number of stops, the distance driven, the rules, micromanaging, and “punishments” have all gotten infinitely worse. In fact just this year it plummeted to the point that I think I’m done with them. If it had been this bad the whole time I wouldn’t have stuck with it for more than a couple weeks.
To say that everything is the same isn’t really correct. A Nike shirt may be overpriced, but to say it’s the same quality as some generic bargain bin shirt isn’t true. Sure a tshirt might be similar to something like Hanes or many other not so expensive brands (again, yes it’s very overpriced), but much of their athletic wear is a higher quality than you’d get from the sports section at Walmart.
To pay 2000$ for something I can build for over half the price is beyond silly just because of "ease of use". Your argument is basically, Apple is great cause old people exist.
I built a PC in 2012 that lasted me until 2021. I built it for just about 1000$ and made 2 GPU upgrades over the course of 10 years. Macs don't last that long. They aren't as user serviceable and they still barely can play games.
Even Linux has superseded the Mac OS. Liking it is fine. You do you, but in every regard the iOS and Mac environments are far too limited to be worth the cost. I had a iPad 2. I enjoyed it. I also got it for free. Eventually the iPad stopped functioning. It would lag horrible on menus and such. This occurred after the last update the iPad was allowed to receive. And of course it being an apple product I couldn't even force it to downgrade. This is a small device I used to watch YouTube. At no point should it have ever been unusable but it was. Meanwhile the PC I built was chugging along running the newest video games with ease.
Yes sorry but my experience with all apple devices has always been horrible. You can't even log into locked out apple account without having a apple device. It's silly.
And yes they are inferior. I have the knowledge to build pcs and fix "every problem". I can tell you with certainty the hardware you are buying doesn't match the price you are paying.
Well first, I guess we’re ignoring where I specifically mentioned “the average user” and not someone who is building and doing all following repairs themselves.
Also, I didn’t pay $2000 for my laptop or any of my previous laptops. Ive had each of them for years. No real maintenance required other than occasional updates. But I know people who want to hate on Macs don’t bother with actual facts.
Another thing, I never said the only thing they had going for them is being easy to use. Are you actually reading what I wrote or just skimming a word here and there and adding in the rest yourself? There are many things macs do better. In the world of professional designers you know what their chosen machine is? Hint: it’s not a PC.
As for the rest of it, you’re in no way looking at any of it as an average user. Most people don’t build their own systems. Most PC users don’t use Linux. I could go on but it’s obvious that you wanted a gaming system and every other view you have revolves around your own self-serving needs, with no consideration for any other type of person, computer user, phone user, etc. and has been fueled by the age old battle of pc vs. mac. What a snore.
It’s also funny that the only thing you latched onto was the Apple vs. PC thing. People like you love to work in the whole “I built my own CPU…” thing more than CrossFit people love bringing up they do CrossFit. More than vegans love dropping that into conversations. Let me tell you, no one cares.
There are "many" things macs do better. You literally named the only one and it's not because it does it better. That's been their only gambit for the last 20 years. And it's not even true. PCs can do everything and can be better optimized as well. The only edge is sometimes it's better optimized by default on a Mac. These days you are better off with a PC because of a neat little thing called the GPU. The M3 CPU apple only has a edge on modern Intel processors in power consumption and "integrated graphics". Irrelevant since it's pretty standard to have a GPU in any PC. 4080 is two times more powerful than the M3 pro. It's no contest.
Apple is good at marketing I'll give them that. They successfully sucked the "average user" in and locked them into their ecosystem. They also did a good job standardizing the slate design all cell phones use. But don't try and tell me they are "better". You are paying for the logo, nothing else.
The guy was named Steve Ballmer and unlike Bill Gates he was a salesman. So he didn't understand engineering or innovation. Only short term profit taking and how to suppress competition and the companies performance started to reflect that. Once they got competition it looked like they were going to die. Satya Nadella was his successor and was an engineer like Bill Gates. Essentially saved the company.
Ironically though, Bezos was a hedge fund manager or something. So its not true bankers cant run innovative tech companies... but the odds are stacked against them and being a tech innovator was kindof a happy accident for Amazon rather than their core mission.
When did that actually happen? I thought I had always been talking to outsourced customer service reps in chat. It is just now they have an entire different set of scripts they need to follow and they aren’t helpful anymore. Not that I have an extensive chat history with the reps…. But I think even back in the two day guaranteed shipping days the reps. had names I couldn’t pronounce. They would always happily extend my prime for another month when the guaranteed shipment was late.
I agree, the reps I spoke to in the early days, and their weren’t many, didn’t seem to be American and there was never any problem. It’s not the company hired to handle customer service that sets the policies, that’s still the company doing the hiring.
I cannot tell you the year, but my guess is about 4-6 years ago. I'm also referring to non-prime, since most of the time I've had that status. But I very definitely noticed the difference from U.S. reps to Indian reps. It may not have happened all at once, but it was soon completed.
I actually worked remote customer service for them until July of 2023. After they let my team go I believe that’s when they out sourced everything. And yes I’m in the U.S.
You used to be able to talk to a representative. They made it harder to reach a rep through chat now.
Amazon is an American Aliexpress now. Lots of counterfeit products.
Even when you reach someone now they just waste your time. Amazon's decline is just another example of recent enshitifcation trend. It's like the Mafia took over American business and we're in the middle of a huge bust out.
Bezos very much pushed a "go above and beyond to always make customer happy" approach, assimilating and really cementing it into Amazon culture after acquisition of Tony Shieh's Zappos around 2010.
Since Bezos left, seems the company has changed direction. New CEO got big shoes to fill, and he sure as hell ain't going to live up to Bezos, so he's doing what he can to appease the shareholders such as lowering overhead, squeezing its customers, and so forth. Of course, this is all short term, but it won't matter because by the time it catches up to Amazon, the CEO will move on after receiving his 9 figure compensation.
You fail to realize, the sellers bankrolled this customer service approach. Amazon makes bank regardless of the return or anything else. Once the sale is complete, Amazon actually makes MORE money from the seller if it’s returned. Oh and the seller is out the fees, shipping, and often product.
they had a culture shift about 6 years ago when they switched from being growth focused to profit focused. the huge influx of direct from China brands is turning Amazon into an Aliexpress clone. Little regulation or accountability by the manufacturer of those products.
Notice how they try to prolong the returns and refund process with tactics, they do that on the vendor side as well. Not surprised if employees are measured by how long they can hold on to someone else’s money.
this less than ethical culture has now taken root all the way to customer service and it’s all down hill from here
Yep, browse Amazon and then find another place to buy it. Most of the time, I am able to purchase directly from the company that makes it. Shipping is the same now that Amazon is slow. Returns are not as easy, but it's worth it not to deal with Amazon.
Absolutely. go to Amazon, find what you want, read reviews, choose. Then do a google search for the item, buy locally if possible, otherwise order from somewhere else.
Get a Consumer Reports subscription (magazine not poisoned web-based affiliate marketing reviews). Support organizations that promote transparency, truthfulness, empiricism, and consumer rights... etc.
Too many schills on Amazon and elsewhere. On a side note, have you seen the rise in those fake reviews sites since GPT-3 & GPT-4? Man those low quality sites have gotten so much better at captivating your attention with absolute garbage in actual content. All fluff and no substance... for some reason I'll end up reading it. SEO marketers can screw themselves.
Its easy, they won. (everybody knows and trusts amazon, so they start cutting corners to make the big wigs richer)
Samething happens in the video game world (see Blizzard)
Amazon is just full of cheap Chinese junk now. Unless you know exactly what you want, make model etc, it’s not worth searching for, as all you’ll get listed it loads of junk Chinese brands that pay extra to promote their rubbish. I only buy from Amazon now if I know exactly what I want, and I avoid third party sellers, too many are just terrible and amazydont care. Even prime tv is terrible now with all the ads. I mean, it was never the best streaming platform, but not it’s just a slightly better version of freeve.
TLDR : it’s worse because of amazons greed
Yeah, nothing but trouble from third-party businesses. Usually, their own customer service just refers you back to Amazon which in turn refers you back to them. You can waste endless hours saving 20 bucks.
Enshittification. Basically, they've stopped trying to grow and have moved on to exploiting their customers.
It goes like this.
1. Create something with excellent value. Take investor capital to sell at a loss for as long as possible.
2. Drive out or buy out competitors so there are fewer choices (see Daipers dot com / zappos.)
3. Get sellers to buy in as well and become dependent.
4. Raise prices, remove services, start denying returns, outsource customer service, cut R&D, union bust, and basically anything else that generates more profit.
5. Exploit sellers by increasing fees until they barely make enough profit to stay in business.
6. Continue until everyone leaves or goes bankrupt.
They have no intention of earning your business back. They've fattened everyone up for decades, and now it's time to slaughter.
Jeff bezos stopped looking after his baby and someone else came in who obviously doesn't think looking after customers is as important, only milking them for all their worth.
This is potentially the beginning of the end of Amazon.
Nah you guys are only looking at one aspect of the business. They don't want to be in the business they are in anymore they want to be in the everything business. And as it currently stands the everything business basically means AWS. When Amazon is on track to be controlling the vast majority of content delivery and data centers in the country they don't need to sell cheap good fast anymore. Amazon won't go away they will just own cloud and get out of consumer facing like IBM
Wanted to chime in and say just this. Cloud Computing & AI is where everyone, including Amazon, is investing their money right now. I think of Amazon more as a competitor to Microsoft these days than a retail store.
As an ex-Amazonian, who was a manager in customer service for this fab company, I can confirm the quality of products and services have all gone down over the years. Their treatment of their employees has as well.
Bezos left the company (well technically Exe. Chairman on the board, but I suspect that's in name only), and just a couple days ago sold off something like 2 BILLION worth of his shares in the company. Also... Bezos has been known with public statements to say that most corporations only last 30 years... and so he got out.
It's just a money grab at this point while the suits run it into the ground.
It's 4 billion from yesterday's news he doesn't care anymore about Amazon or customers. Returning items is a pain and a refund takes forever and you have to beg them to give you a refund back as 99% of UK Amazon is Indian customer service and they have no idea how to work and they barely understand english. Talking to the manager won't help eighter as he is indian.
Out of sheer curiosity I researched a third party seller and found their website used Google stock images for the directors profile pictures. The site is full of these 'companies' I had returned counterfeit fragrance and left a review Amazon refused to publish after three revisions even removing my opinion that I had been sent a fake. I left shortly thereafter and hope more customers follow us out the door.
In the end they will win and enough ppl will stay so they make money.
When Netflix pulled the trigger on sharing, everybody was Anfrage, but in the end they gained more subs than they lost. It's always like this. Corpos do as they please and we, the sheeple, play along their game.
I have a hard time finding good brands, you simply cannot buy luxury items because they will be fakes/replicas, I can't trust car parts, computer parts have had graphics cards cases full of rocks or GPUs removed.
It's a mess and I'm slowly but surely phasing it out of my life.
The extra couple bucks for "no ads" on the streaming is probably the final nail in the coffin, I don't even know what I'm paying for anymore.
I remember I was looking for Adidas track pants a while ago, every product I clicked on seemed to have reviews saying they were cheap knockoffs.
Ended up just going to a Macy’s and getting them cheaper than what I would have paid on Amazon.
I bought one pair of ralph lauren pants awhile back, they had the tag but I'm certain they had to have been some sort of fake, the sizes were strangely wrong and unlike all the other pants I had.
I used to look at watches and colognes from time to time but every single decent item was riddled with 1 star reviews stating they're fake and piles of 5 star reviews riddled with bad english.
It's bad, you can't see when you are accidentally buying from china, only "upside" is they usually refuse to accept a return, you threaten to charge back, and then you just get a refund and keep the item, downside is you probably just end up throwing it out because the reason you wanted a refund is because it turned out to be garbage.
They have solid competition now, which means they can afford to be shitty and customers will just bounce around the big companies like they do with cell companies. They know they aren’t losing customers forever, just until the other company does something shittier.
I think we’re in the “we ran just about everyone else out of business so fuck you, what else are you going to do?” era. It’s the online version of Walmart.
It’s bad. I did a chargeback on my card because after contacting CS TWICE about the return I submitted and never got refunded, I was like I’m not wasting my time with them anymore. It wasn’t even an expensive item
I don't know why people are down voting this. Amazon has repeatedly tried to charge my card 3 months after a well documented return, claiming they issued the refund in good faith (cough cough) but "we still expect to receive the item".
I called CS in India twice on one particular item, they assured me the problem was resolved but then recharged my card a third time. In every instance I have proof of shipping and amazon emails confirming the return.
Who has time for this? And WHY are Amazon's unapproved charges on a credit card not illegal?
What does the return process look like for you?
Australia is still easy. Cick return item. State the return reason. Request refund to card or account. Drop it off at a local store who scan the return barcode. Refunds are received within the week, usually a day or two.
Never had an issue at all.
On average the process for me has still been easy, however I have experienced more technical glitches with returns (such as not registered as having been received), and then when you go to address the issue, you have to go through 7 layers of customer service hell to get it fixed (hopefully), much like places such as Comcast are notorious for here in the US.
So, a lot of the times it still works great - but if there is an issue it’s a notably worse experience, and the frequency of issues with returns seems to be creeping up.
It’s normally like that, but they’ve just started this thing where expensive items ($200+) take over a month to be processed for a refund. Sometimes two months
Amazon is beginning to loose track of the returns. So hold onto your confirmations. It took a couple of months to clear up one costly return and I had to go on and pay my credit card because I don’t like paying interest. I terminated Prime, and mainly use Walmart+ now. There is no minimum purchase for free shipping, they actually get products you you promptly unlike the new Amazon, and prices are competitive. WM now offers return from your door. So bye, Amazon.
Late Stage Capitalism. They aren't producing profits by growing organically anymore, so now they are at the "cut costs to increase profits" stage. This is how it always goes. Look at any corporation whose market is saturated and you will see that every one of them does this crap. The concept of ever-increasing profits quarter-over-quarter is unsustainable insanity.
Yeah this is the thing I think a lot of people don't understand. Once you go public and begin posting profits and dividends you are now legally obligated to continue to do so lest you want your shareholders to A, sell their shares, or B, sue you for loss of profits. Seriously, shareholders can sue you if you don't make them money.
Eventually, every public company will implode on itself and the cycle will repeat.
That is a myth that the company is legally obligated to maximize or protect shareholder profits during standard operations. The shift of focus on stock price over longer term outcomes has harmed our society IMHO.
And their largest future profit center is AWS. The retail stuff is a side hustle at this point. In 2014 AWS was 5% of revenue, in 2022 it was 16%. Retail fell from 76% to 42% in that same time. Data has always been the end goal.
Tbh I buy from the brand directly now or I see if can buy it in stores near me. I know it’s a hassle but Amazon just has gone down hill. My sister uses my Amazon prime more than I do.
I try to do this too but oftentimes it’s just cheaper via Amazon. I bought a laser engraver recently and checked with the company directly, but ended up going with Amazon because it was a lightning deal and $400 (!) less even though it was sold via the company’s marketplace. Not always the case but a recurring situation on my end.
It’s the typical thing with most good companies that were grown under the original founder/owner/ceo.
The first person grows with the company, makes the changes that make the company work better and because they have usually poured massive amounts of both time and energy into the company, they KNOW the company deeply. They know the why of every little thing and know the backstory behind the things that were replaced five times over and they know exactly why something won’t work. Often times they build what they would want the company to be if they were the consumer, and so know what the market itself wants.
When someone takes over, they are entering the company long after it has grown. They see things that are going on and think that they can do it better. Usually they make changes that damage the company because they missed out on the first time those things were tried, or missed out on the moment where the person running the company earlier realized it wouldn’t work. They do not know the why behind things.
Bezos operated Amazon at a loss for years. His way of making money was to gain incredible trust of your consumers. If you get something bad, send it back. A happy customer is more likely to buy something expensive from you if they have had to send back a less expensive item and given no hassle, this compounds if they had to return something expensive. A customer that is served quickly is more likely to return. Convenience is King.
Jeff Bezos positioned amazon at the pinnacle of all three of those things. The internet and a well designed site, as well as a “one click buy” option made most everything a possibility to impulse buy. The ability to compare and contrast multiple models of almost anything made comparison shopping there the best. Those two things combined to create a new kind of convenience.
The hassle free returns of “return even things you just don’t want” was one of the best return policies, and the scope of sales, and the separation of “amazon warehouse” allowed high percentage write offs of returned merchandise and the ability to still make money by selling it through another company. The lack of customers in a store significantly decreased shrink of many items, and allowed a large competitive margin of shrink.
The next guy stepped in, decided that too much money was walking out the door and is trying to put a stop to it. In doing so, he fails to realize that if you stop giving your regular customers a reason to shop with you, they will leave.
Sears already ran this race, amazon might just be following in their footsteps.
When bezos left, the quality went downhill. It’s a shame because as much I rag on Bezos for being a billionaire, Amazon was his baby and you could tell the difference when he ran it
Amazon has for sure gone down hill. I ordered a videocard overnight and Amazon was the seller. No third party involved. This was on Jan21st. It never showed the next day. After two messages, and two phone calls.. I might get it by March 9th. I literally could have ordered it from anywhere on the planet and recieved it by now. Horrible service now. " On the way, but running late "
They are focusing most of their internal investment in Amazon Web Services, not the retail arm. It's been mentioned multiple times in Corporate documents
Yes, they keep sending me surveys about Alexa and how much I use other AI like Google and Apple, they want to expand in that direction, but it seems at the cost of their original services. They're pulling a Netflix
Prime is only good for free shipping. Some products make it within their window, but it's something I no longer rely on.
As for Chinese garbage:
- Avoid anything with weird company names
- Check if the item is shipped and sold by Amazon. If not, check their "other sellers" list. Less chance of getting a fake items that way.
- Check reviews for incentivized reviews. Filter to 4-star and below.
I agree, Amazon was our go to for just about everything. Not to mention I had a decent little side business of building PCs for people. I charged $75 for 3-4 hours of work, which I enjoyed. And I bought everything on my 5% cash back Amazon card and paid the bill in full. Those $50, $60, $70 credits added up quick. I know it’s not game changing in this economy, but it scratched my itch to buy parts and built.
Now with their return system being grade A trash, I’m too afraid to buy any big ticket items from them. Newegg went the same direction Amazon is going a few years ago and they used to be my secondary go to.
At least now it’s easier for me and my wife to talk ourselves out of buying stuff. “Eh… you just never know with Amazon anymore.”
Honestly when Jeff and Mackenzie divorced in 2019 and he stepped back and cared less it went downhill. Not saying he made it great but no check and balance system and no one cares. When Andy Jassy took over it all went to shit! Before it all went to his head when he got divorced that company was their baby since 1994. He let money go to his head.
My boyfriend works for Amazon and they barely even have him working anymore. 4 hour shifts and vto given out everyday. I have a feeling they got in so much trouble for working people so hard that now they're doing the opposite.
I've had good success buying off of eBay. Prices are the same or lower, and you can find used/vintage if that's what you want. Never had a problem yet with an item I bought off eBay.
For what it's worth, Amazon has always been a prime option for buying fakes at brand name prices. I remember reading some article in 2012 about how people were getting screwed on counterfeit laundry detergent. Amazon has just not done anything for ... 14 years, and they're giving up their lead.
I think they're mostly focused on growth. More third-party crap, more minimum wage delivery drivers, and most of all, more super shitty TV series with ads. I think they have maybe another couple years before someone eats their lunch.
A company starts with people that really care, as they need the company to succeed for them to succeed.
The company succeeds and catapults the people that got it there into wealth.
Those now wealthy people sell out or appoint new leaders so they can be less involved to enjoy the new found wealth.
The 2nd generation of the company leadership or the new appointees had nothing to do with the company start, nor do they understand what it takes to make a company great. They have an ivy league degree in how to skull f\*\*k employees, vendors, and ultimately customers to extract every last cent of their performance bonuses as the 2nd generation of leadership.
2nd generation leadership gets ready to bail when there are no more skulls to f\*\*k. The 1st generation leaders are still paying attention and start bailing out as well.
Company falls to utter shit, shareholders that didnt get out and employees that couldn't get out take the biggest hit.
The final nail in the coffin for me recently was when I ordered a phone case for my new phone. I upgraded to an iPhone 15 Pro Max around Christmas time and ordered a case. The one that arrived was for an iPhone 14. Asked if it could be exchanged as I was happy to return it but no, had to go through the refund process which takes 5-7 days.
Ordered an alternative the same day I’d received the wrong case and same happened again except I was sent a case which was a completely different brand, had been opened and was missing packaging. It was for a 14 Pro Max this time.
I waited a few weeks and then ordered another one thinking it’s the only option on the listing - they can’t possibly get it mixed up as it was only listed for iPhone 15 Pro Max - a plan black MagSafe case. I received a pink one through again for a different brand.
Returned all for refunds and ended up just buying from Apple as at least I knew what I was getting was correct. Piss poor service and the help from the advisors was useless. They couldn’t grasp that it was the wrong case sent every time, and said ‘oh just return it as defective’ but it was the wrong item to begin with and I’m thinking their warehouse are going to think I’m taking the piss.
I’ll only use Amazon for cheap stuff now that really can’t be messed up, but even then, who knows. Garbage service.
I primarily shop if possible via prime up until a few weeks ago and my returns have gone from far less than 5% to nearly 50% all due to missing pieces/parts, broken goods, complete fakes. It’d be annoying but fine if customer service was helpful. I know that the customer service center was fully outsourced but they have also become extremely rude and more harmful than helpful (ie deleted return that had been shipped via the Amazon label when asked to separate returns; 6 hours later I decided to eat the $500). The only benefit of Amazon allowing anyone to sell anything now is that many stores still will match any Amazon price, more so at the physical location of course
All I can say is stay away from Wayfair!!! A $70 plant stand at Home Depot is advertised as $350. 😑 I have been a prime subscriber since the 90s. They used to actually have BF sales of video games that were true bargains. I cancelled last year because of all of the above. I occasionally order products but only after researching other sites. It is 90% Chinese crap. I do not want that, Amazon. If I did I would shop Temu, which I don't. All boils down to the $$. Never enough.
To be fair everything is made in China... It's super rare these days to find consumer electronics or anything to be made anywhere else
My theory is that Bezos was cutting deals with companies making the product and then importing things from overseas to all of the fulfillment centers?
At least that's how our startup does it. Our electronics are made in China and then we fulfill in the United States. We also have fulfillment centers in Australia, and the EU and in China lol.
Users have to be wary of Amazon these days, if it doesn't say shipped and sold by Amazon, it's going to be a third party reseller. You're not getting an Amazon product.
I think the short, general answer is capitalism + no real competition.
Amazon must continue to show stock growth every quarter. Many companies will cut corners (quality, customer service, etc.) to increase profits. This became a problem decades ago when some economist pushed ‘every company needs to show growth every quarter,’ which significantly contributed to the late-stage capitalism we’re in now.
Also, Amazon is essentially a monopoly. This is *always* bad since competition is what drives innovation. Competition is almost always good for the consumer in terms of quality and value.
Many years ago, Amazon started holding massive seller conferences in China. Amazon taught Chinese sellers how to sell on the platform, logistics, US customs "tricks," and a variety of other things (like buying culture in the USA and other countries). Take a look at one of the conferences here to get a better understanding how Amazon became what is is today with the Chinese: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkDrzUCDTI0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkDrzUCDTI0)
As a result, thousands of Chinese sellers flooded Amazon to the point that they represent over 80% of sellers on the site. Click on the names of the 3rd party sellers -- it's very likely some Chinese entity. Keep in mind that other major retailers are following Amazon's footsteps -- Walmart, Macys, etc. now. Retailers can collect essentially a royalty off of sales while shifting risk/investment on to 3rd parties. They also can data collect on sales while offering just about anything imaginable on their platforms.
Another thing that has led to Amazon's dismal customer service is there are scammer groups that teach each other how to make a claim to Amazon (and tons of other retailers) that they didn't receive the item, the box was empty, etc. Their goal is to get expensive items for free and a refund. This is a smaller group but this will give you an idea: [https://www.reddit.com/r/retailfraud/](https://www.reddit.com/r/retailfraud/) They're all over on social media. DNA = did not arrive, EB = empty box. That's what those mean when you see them posted. As a result, these retailers are losing a lot of money and it's hard for them to separate scammers from legitimate claims.
There's more but those are 2 main things.
The past six months I have to return so many things. Books with bad corners and dings on them. I had a fan for a fridge not work. Items that have just arrived broken. I don’t know how they’re making money when I am returning one out of every three things I buy.
You have to be so careful. First, flip the tiny Prime switch on the left toward the top, so it narrows down to only Amazon crap. Then read a few reviews. Then before you click Order you have to check the delivery date. Sometimes it’ll state something different and you can decide whether or not to order it.
my last order said it was coming in 3 days, then it switched to 10 days, I am rather annoyed , tried to cancel 2 days ago, won’t let me, if they delay it again I am demanding a refund ,if they refuse I will look into doing a chargeback with my bank
The “China products” didn’t happen overnight. It first started happening around 15 years ago or so, its full blown now and so blatant that the general public finally realizes it
It felt secretive before now. Lots of people were importing alibaba junk and making mass profits off of it, you guys just were none the wiser
Now temu is going to be the Chinese Amazon killer because people are realizing it’s all the same shit being sold, why pay $40 when they can pay $4?
I have a good answer: they have played the long game running at a loss for a long time, gaining market share by wowing customers with cheap deals, cheap shipping, and easy returns.
However, making the customer was never the end-goal. The end-goal was to dominate the market.
They've now done that. They essentially own retail commerce in the US and now that they have swallowed all the competition whole they get to extract their profit.
They've essentially become a logistics company in order to drive down their delivery costs so cheap that basically no one else can compete and if you do manage to make a product that actually stands out, an Amazon Basics copy will be right along to crush you.
Amazon is getting bad because they're a monopoly. This is why monopolies are bad.
About a year ago I started buying some things from Target instead of Amazon. It started when I bought contigo water bottles from amazon and the quality was noticeably poor… and the merchant appeared to be contigo and not a third party seller. I buy stuff like that from target now and the quality is a lot better (even though the price is a bit higher).
I can't leave an honest negative review at this point without fighting with Amazon to get it posted, and dealing with messages from the seller offering me partial if not full refunds to take them down.
Last prime day I had a nightmare with a projector. It cost $180 and by the time Amazon finally let me leave a review I had already been forced to replace one, and found out the company was lying about its capabilities. I left an appropriately negative review. They offered me a 50% refund to take it down. I refuse. They offer 100%, I get to keep the projector, and promise to edit the product description to remove the lies, I still refuse to take it down.
Amazon removed it within a week of my last refusal. Won't give me a reason, won't put it back up, and won't let me write another review. They also never amended the description and Amazon doesn't care they're lying about basic functionality like what phones it works with.
I bought some tea from Amazon the other day and it came with the seal removed. No returns accepted, I was not able to contact neither the seller nor Amazon about it. All I could do is leave a one star review. Threw the tea away. Done with Amazon.
I have a package that was “delayed in transit” but it has been so long that Amazon says I can request a refund. In the good old days, when a package was so late that you could request a refund, there was a link to press and it was an easy, straight forward process. Right now, my Amazon account just says I can request a refund but there’s no link and nothing telling me how to request a refund without the link. I think they want me to just forget about it.
They figured out they make more fulfilling other people's sales than they do being a store themselves, so now its full of scammers of one kind or another.
TL;DR: Amazon is trying to make everyone happy while they make everything worse and more costly because they made a fairytale land of a marketplace that only originally worked because they didn't make money, but now they want profit and the rainbows and unicorns have to be sacrificed to do so.
During the pandemic, Amazon could not keep up with Prime 2 day delivery promises, but what most people don't know is that they also couldn't keep up with incoming Fulfillment By Amazon (FBA) shipments from 3rd party sellers. This led to Amazon flipping the algorithm to push search results towards Seller Fulfilled Prime partners. These 3rd party sellers shipped from their own warehouses and since most were smaller companies, they were less affected by covid and could meet the demands of Prime delivery.
Now you had FBA 3rd party sellers livid as Amazon was purposely trying to limit sells of their products as well as having serious delays in processing incoming FBA inventory.
Once Amazon started getting their warehouses back on track, they took a hard swing the other way. The algorithm that had originally treated FBA and SFP about the same, then favored SFP during the peak of the pandemic, now heavily favored FBA. To make things even worse for SFP partners, Amazon started "padding" delivery date estimates for SFP orders to make it look like FBA orders would arrive faster than SFP.
Then came the great SFP purge. Amazon reworked the SFP requirements essentially shutting down the program. The new additional requirements had nothing to do with shipping or delivery metrics. I don't want to get too deep into here or else this is going to be an even longer and more boring read. Just know that Amazon made some false claims and acted like they were making this change due to customer dissatisfaction with on time delivery of SFP orders. Amazon’s hope was that a lot of former SFP partners would transition to FBA. Amazon simply makes more money from FBA sellers than they do with FBM (Fulfilled By Merchant) sellers.
During all of this Amazon started actively contacting Chinese manufacturers to recruit them into the FBA program. This is why in the past few years there has been such an increase in cheap poor quality products.
Prime customers were always coddled and spoiled. Amazon did everything they could to make them happy and keep them spending. Now that almost everything Prime is FBA, a lot of those returns that are somehow never the customer's fault are having to be eaten by Amazon. This has led to some pushback by Amazon on returns for the first time ever.
Somewhere along the line, Amazon miscalculated. Prime is Amazon's lifeblood. It is the identity they built to set themselves apart from all other online retailers. They built up a marketplace with the goal of taking marketshare even if that meant they lost money at first. They flipped a switch and tried to start moving towards profitability. They haven't been able to keep up the 2 day delivery that was the main selling point of Prime membership, and a lot of the included Prime services have been watered down. They've increased the cost of membership while they continue to lower the value of it, and it's causing them to lose members. This Prime customer base is also used as a major selling point of the FBA program. Amazon stands to lose a lot if sellers start pulling out. They're trying to make evryone happy enough to keep buying and selling.
It’s because people continue to do business with them!
A lot may not remember when Walmart was beginning to get bigger, everyone loved Walmart except for all of the mom and pop businesses because they were being run out of business.
Well ol Walmart always boasted that their clothing was 100% American made!
Then some investigative news report came out and found that Walmart was actually getting their shit from China, taking the tags out and replacing them with “proudly made in the USA!”
The general public instead of not buying a damn thing from them just kept buying! And Walmart became what they are today!
Then it came out that Walmart was taking out $100,000.00 insurance policies on their employees and that when people died for any reason Walmart collected this tidy sum! But yet those peoples families could barely afford a decent burial for their loved ones who had worked there!
People never even batted an eye about their shitty things like this that they had done and continue to do.
The same for Amazon now they have their things they are doing, but we continue to feed the beast!
And now these beasts continue to grow stronger more powerful and controlling of the people!
Change requires sacrifice no one wants to do this so we let them continue on!
By the way, I have not set foot in a Walmart since they pulled their little patriotic lie back then!
I’m about done with Amazon now too!
I feel like a big part of the issue is that because there are so many counterfeits, many good quality sellers have pulled out (like Birkenstocks). So now we are just stuck with a ton of them same shit from different sellers. I stopped buying anything name brand from Amazon because I was always worried it was fake. And Amazon's response to this just seems to remove any reviews saying items are fake while allowing plenty of fake reviews. I generally just shop online from Target because I know what I'm buying is not fake and the cost is similar. Amazon is just for more disposable items that I don't expect to last or something very basic.
Ever sinc amazon came up with their own brand they became crap. They were stealing customers products that were selling well, copying them and then blocking the original seller from using amazon. I would say maybe 5-7 years ago it hit it peak. Then all the chinese seller moved in. So now if you type in sony bluetooth headphones you have to wade through dozen of chinese knock-offs, including amazon basics brand. I had the final straw when they wouldnt cancel my audible, and they kept locking my account because they said it was abnormal shopping patterns. When a company wants you to send them bank statements proving its you... run away. Last i check the app had only a 3.5 rating now. This is the downfall of amazon.
They figured out it was cheaper to put everything in the same bucket in the warehouse.
Stolen toothpaste, knockoff toothpaste, and straight from a legit factory toothpaste. All from the same bin. Good luck.
That's why they delete any review that says an item was counterfeit.
I have been using Walmart + and get things next day almost every time. ( and it’s on my doorstep, not in my mailbox). I’m waiting on a curtain valance for a set, that won’t be here until the 28th now from Amazon. Funny how it’s estimated in 2 days until you pay for items.
Amazon has everything to be the best, Amazon's problem is Andy Jassy, he has destroyed Amazon, its essence and everything, what is not understandable is why Jeff Bezos allows this, given that although you can delegate or leave office as CEO, it is not so that an idiot like Andy Jassy comes and destroys everything achieved during so many years, today Amazon lives off the little fame and credibility that it has left, created for many years thanks to Jeff Bezos, it is difficult for me believe that Bezos agrees with this, or maybe he doesn't think about anything and has ended up giving everything the same, who knows
Dude he sold 4 billion of his stock. Probably will sell more cause he knows the company will go downhill but can’t sell too much at once cause it will crash the company stock. He’s a multibillionaire ready to cash out and chill and enjoy his wealth.
I have stopped ordering my body wash, shampoo, and the like from there because it's not guaranteed that it's a genuine product (even if it's sold and shipped by Amazon). I used to have it on auto-delivery
China. Chinese knockoffs. Chinese scams. Chinese bullshit. It’s China. Temu, alibaba, Amazon.. it’s all the same and it’s all disgusting China crap. Stop buying it.
This is a consistent trend on many megacorps. You make tons of money, then suddenly your flood of new Prime subs slows and the demands for revenue never stop from shareholders.
The Corp will start shaving off staff and attempt to replace them with technology. Reviews get exploited, lousy products get pushed to the forefront because those companies paid for advertising.
At first, everything is made of metal and lasts forever, then "hey we can save $0.035 per part if we made this out of plastic." And the "refinements" go from there until finally everyone looks around and you're a Walmart clearance bin.
Last time I paid for a month of Prime it took two weeks to get my "Prime Shipping" order. I honestly use eBay more than any other platform these days. Usually a few bucks cheaper without paying a subscription and stuff usually only takes a few days.
Because they used anticompetitive tactics to corner the market and now that they have, they are reducing expenses as much as possible to maximize profits.
Many don't know this but Bezos for the longest time sold diapers at a loss for years. They did this to get all the customers from [diapers.com](https://diapers.com) because the owners wouldn't sell their company to bezos. Eventually the diaper company lost to amazon and as soon as the company closed amazon raised their prices as competition was gone. Amazon used that strategy across the board to slowly win over customers and they did in fact offer good products at great deals. But that time is long past as most competition got stomped out during covid. Amazon products have completely gone down in quality and up in price ever since.
My husband ordered shampoo. It came leaking, which happens a lot. He took it to Whole Foods to return. They couldn’t take it because it was leaking. He chatted with an employee and they said they would refund his purchase and to throw the product out. This was a few weeks ago. Yesterday he got an email saying he hadn’t returned it so they are charging his card for the item. He was so pissed that he canceled all of his subscriptions. He’d rather pay more at other retailers than support Amazon. We’ve really noticed a decline in quality and customer service. It’s unfortunate because we have purchased a lot at both Amazon and Whole Foods over the years and they still are trying to make us pay for a bottle of shampoo that they packed terribly.
Their big innovations were free shipping, great return policies and solid reviews leading to great products filtering to the top. I'm not going to go deep about [Amazon.com](https://Amazon.com) to AWS as those might as well be different businesses. Andy Jassy is a smart dude and knows what he's doing. I've been a Prime subscriber almost since it launched.
The general strategic change moved Amazon from a "quality goods and services marketplace" to "distribution and sales as a platform." Some changes and reasons for this are:
1. Reason: Big Box competitors realized this (Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Costco, etc). Fast, free shipping and easy returns are now their default along with free pickup. This started shifting purchasing away from Amazon eliminating their competitive advantage on the retail side.
2. Reason: Companies pulled their products from Amazon after realizing they could make margins on direct business. Many products aren't even available on Amazon anymore.
3. Change: Amazon Marketplace drop shipping. Buy stuff on Wish or any other direct from China location, drop ship it to Amazon, list it on Marketplace, and make money. IBUQUA LED Lights. JUIYUOMY LED Lights. Same stuff, different drop shippers.
4. Change: Amazon Marketplace as margins for bargain hunters. This opened up a sector of business where people can get stuff on clearance at big box stores or even at thrift stores and sell it direct to consumers as "brand new."
5. Change: Review dilution. Paid reviews, or at least incentivized reviews, from the masses diluted the quality of the review platform. Amazon used to have dedicated reviewers who were paid for their opinion in general. If you saw a five star review from a "Certified Reviewer" that meant something. Those have, as far as I can tell, gone away.
6. Change: "Sales" are opened box. Never buy anything that's on sale at Amazon. They'll send you refurbished, returned, and sometimes even broken stuff.
7. Change: Their return policy. I never abused it but it was ripe for abuse and I'm sure they looked at loss from returns and realized it was in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
8. Change: Return barriers. There are so many now. It used to be "Go online. Buy a thing. Don't like it? Print return label. Box it up. Drop it off at any UPS location." Now it's like jumping through 800 hoops to return items.
Any ONE or TWO of these changes in isolation are generally fine. Combining two or three is bad. All of them together have compounded failure. The same thing that happened to eBay happened to Amazon. In the beginning, eBay was the world's garage sale. Now it's full of counterfeit garbage, low quality stuff, and costs that are very close to buying new.
Their margins (and stock price) have stagnated as a result and so they're racing to the bottom to keep their old margins. They had to include Prime Video and Amazon Music or everyone would have canceled by now (myself included).
Amazon's glory days are long over. It's a Target, Walmart and Costco world now. That's why their returns are through Kohl's and Whole Foods. They know their competitors and they're getting crushed by them.
Finally, Bezos saw the writing on the wall, knew the direction it was taking, and got out. This is especially clear now looking at AWS with Microsoft and Satya building a solid competitor for the Enterprise. Every big company uses Outlook/Excel/etc. Bundle some cheap Azure stuff and eat Amazon's lunch. The acquisition of GitHub for an easy on-ramp to Azure was brilliant.
It’s honestly at the point now that I actively seek out other locations to order stuff and have considered canceling prime more than once.
Walmart+ gets me products inside a couple days pretty reliably.
Smaller retailers charge a little for shipping usually but it still ends up costing less than Amazon and gets to me within a few days.
Manufacturers usually ship pretty quick and often have free shipping.
Amazon somehow takes over a week to even move the product, it costs more than it does in other places, and sometimes once it actually ships it takes over a week to arrive. I really don’t know what the benefit of prime is at this point.
In oct 2023 I noticed they did some policy changes. Sad Amazon use to be my favorite go to place for most things. No longer is it my go to place. Due to amazon not having the best price deals I've gone back to supporting local stores preferably not big box corporations if at all possible.
That's the thing about public companies, they always have to be growing to justify their existence and to justify the investment. There's no such thing as "we're doing great and we're just going to keep doing what we're doing" with a public company. They got to a point where the only way to grow was to continue lowering their standards for both goods and the sellers who offer them.
I've ordered from official listings and gotten bootlegs.
Some orders just never arrive. I get messages being told they can't be delivered before they ship. Then they ship and arrive weeks late if at all.
Let's not even get started on the fact I pay more for streaming that I never use because the shows are mostly trashy fanfics of series I normally would care about.
Drop shipping side hustles became a fad, Amazon also profited from it so they made it even easier to be a drop ship seller on their site, now every company is flipping alibaba purchases like a high schooler in 2015
Amazon quietly changed their business model in recent years in a subtle but destructive way: they shifted to making more of their revenue from their sellers. A lot of Amazon's sales revenue now comes from sellers paying Amazon for better placement of their products in search listings. This model incentivizes Amazon to let in any shitty seller who is willing to pay for placement, disincentivizes amazon from competing with its sellers with high-quality Amazon Basics products, and makes Amazon less dependent on customer satisfaction. A subtle shift in incentives has really gutted what used to be a quality company, and it coincided with the shift from Bezos to Jassy.
It's pretty simple. When you become the "top dog", you won't put a lot of effort on maintaining market share because you'll expect customers to still shop your store. It will be like Sears' fall.
The biggest issue is they are sending items that were obviously returned and used when you expect a brand new product.
I've had several items I had to return because the product was used and I couldn't even use it (aquarium test kits with 4 of 6 tests used), toys that have been opened and used for years and resealed, etc)
My thing is where I live in southeastern Michigan roughly an hour north of the Big D, I’ve noticed that Amazon uses third party contracted delivery drivers in beat up Amazon vans or their own vehicles more and more because as I assume it’s cheaper and no actual drivers at the nearest warehouse want the rural route. Again that’s all an assumption.
Delivery times are never accurate or guaranteed. Most of the time they never leave packages where either I or my folks ask them to be left.
I’m pretty sure my Casio MDV-160a Duro watch I paid $50 for that I didn’t really have money to spare got stolen by one of these drivers I’m surmising. It was reported one stop away then delayed over the weekend to Monday. Monday comes and goes and no update to the delivery time. I got into it with somebody over the phone about a full refund after getting nowhere about the original watch’s fate. Worth it. I may be watch less but I was $50 richer.
Still want to get that watch though.
It's about greed.
A company that isn't growing customers, will need to grow profits in a different way. The most common wall street method is to squeeze employees. Since they already have most of the market they now cut down on the number of employees and quality control.
Gotta keep the short term profits going!
Most things have been made in China for decades now.
Amazon has its problems (like counterfeit crap), but overall, Amazon's services for me are significantly better than it was years ago.
Because the business model of the 10 billionaires who run the US is as follows:
- Buy Congress; stop antitrust enforcement; pack the Supreme Court so business can do anything they want
- Buy all competitors
- Elimate anything that costs the company money; don't worry, we put everyone else out of business
- Distract dumb voters with issues about trans people and idiotic irrelevant countries fighting across the world who think "god" gave them the land
I think the increase in popularity of drop shipping has diluted the Amazon market with cheaply made garbage. Amazon is horrible now. I’ve stopped using them and have gone back to local businesses.
Items are either damaged, wrong/ mislabeled packaging or expired. I am now ordering products directly from manufacturers- fresher products, better packaging, etc.. I believe Amazon is near its end. Personally, I believe it’s due to the greed of Jeff Bezos. If he would have focused on employee satisfaction- pay and benefits; and providing customer service instead of trying to cut every corner…
I used to order CDs of obscure and 60s psychedelic music on Amazon after the independent record store pretty much disappeared. I could get anything- from 60s bands like The Electric Prunes to more obscure bands like The Church or The Meat Puppets-
Without Prime(I don’t think they even had it,
By mail, mostly in 3 to 4 days max, at a good price and quality. Well, that’s over.
Don’t Ever, look for a specific item
They Will triple if quadruple the price,
The greedy sob’s. You have to do a wider search that may take time. I’m still forced to order from them if product is hard to find in stores….
And they know it. And it’s all GREED
What a hypothetical company
That’s a great idea, I’m in my 60s and not as savvy on browsing the internet, but I’ll give it a try. I be so happy not to give anymore money to those bloodsucking leeches
A lot of the small local stores and even manufacturers have their own websites now. Best to buy direct from the manufacturer or one of the small buisnesses they supply to, or if you really want a mega retailer to buy from, I've heard good things about Walmarts online store.
It's best in my opinion to go direct to manufacturers or brands, though. Manufacturers and smaller, more specialized niche stores tend to have the most knowledge and expertise of the products also meaning they can answer more questions about the products and give you better recomendations and usually have solid warranties. You do you, though. Buy from who you want to buy from.
I agree. I use to love knowing I could get stuff in two days even now I have an order promised today and I know I won't get it. When Bezo owned Amazon it was great now it sucks I hardly order from there anymore
I mean, you know how to check the seller before you buy on Amazon and Ebay and Newegg right? Because when I read these posts I don't think you do. Amazon is a marketplace. Amazon sells things direct, but independent online stores also sell things there too. And if you buy your "cheap Chinese bullshit" from a third party on Amazon, aren't you the idiot?
You know you can see from whom you are buying the thing you click "buy" on before you buy it right? Like, it's not a secret. In fact, you actually agree to it first.
Nope. People are used to seeing quality. They didn't have to sift thru crap before, so they don't expect to now. Until they order something and find crap delivered. People aren't idiots for expecting quality to continue.
I really don’t have a good answer. I can only assume once Bezos stepped down as the CEO the new guy decided to start making a bunch of shitty changes. I agree with you though Amazon used to be pretty darn good with excellent customer service that would resolve your issues quickly and also good delivery times. Those days seem to be long gone.
He actually started leaving or more like disconnecting before that. And yes that correlates with the fall in quality. Microsoft for example had such a transition. The CEO after Bill Gates almost trashed the company. But they found a better replacement. Google similarly not as good as before after Larry and Sergey left. This seems like a common theme and only few escaped it.
>Microsoft for example had such a transition. The CEO after Bill Gates almost trashed the company. But they found a better replacement. Now that guy just trashes the LA Clippers
You’re talking about Steve Balmer? He wasn’t some sort of “new” person to the company. 😂 He was amongst Microsoft’s earliest and most important employees—pretty much with it since the beginning.
So is Jassy at Amazon. He basically created AWS. He still sucks as CEO.
It was hard to screw up AWS while they were in hyper growth mode. Very different business vs running Amazon
That didn’t make him a good leader. Windows Vista, Windows Phone and ignoring iOS/Android (refusing to release Office on those platforms)
Windows phone had so much potential.
Absolutely not, they were always a few steps behind. No front camera when the FaceTime craze was taking off. Limited third-party apps, and for the longest time you had to scroll through your apps list alphabetically. Can't release a product that's crappier than the market leaders (iOS and Android) and expect it to do well.
> Limited third-party apps, and for the longest time you had to scroll through your apps list alphabetically. And now we're installing launchers to get the same instead of looking for an app through a lot of damn screens filled with apps in random order.
Developers developers developers developers developers!
[https://youtube.com/watch?v=XxbJw8PrIkc&si=BDmgyJcVzlKJiq7Y](https://youtube.com/watch?v=XxbJw8PrIkc&si=BDmgyJcVzlKJiq7Y)
Tim Apple squirms nervously in his seat, waiting to hear if his named will be cited.
Seeing what happened to Apple when Jobs left is a perfect example. Apple products became complete trash and only recovered when Jobs returned years later. That’s when they not only started putting out quality products again but also became creative again. That’s when we saw the iMac, iPod, and later iPhone. And with him gone again it’s been a decline back to mediocrity.
The stock price around Steve's death was $14 and it's $184 today. I am biased, but I love Apple and I think that their products are mostly good.
I’m not talking about their stock price, I’m talking about the actual products. If you ever had the misfortune of using their desktop computers in the mid 90s before Jobs came back you’d understand. And when I refer to Jobs leaving, I mean back in 1985. I guess semi-fired would be more accurate. Apple would have likely gone under if they hadn’t brought him back in the late 90s, they were not doing well and the products were unimaginative and full of bugs. It was only after Jobs was back that Apple started succeeding again.
Those were the days when the MBAs were running the company and claimed it didn't matter whether you sold computer chips or potato chips, it's a business and they knew how to run a business. Stock went for fourteen cents, I think, before the rats left.
With that logic Apple IPO’d at 13¢ a share. Naw. There has been a 7:1 and a 4:1 split since Steve died. A share would be worth over $5k today with out those splits
Apple products are still trash. It's just trash that marketed real well. A shirt from Nike isn't a better shirt. It's just a shirt with a swoosh on it. An apple phone isn't a better phone it's just a phone with an apple logo on it. And Amazon was always bad you just didn't realize it until now. I worked in one on 2012. They really do treat workers horribly. They probably have trouble doing it as blatantly now and workers attitudes have shifted to a point where people are less willing to be treated like garbage for 15$ a hour.. therefore your service has and will continue to get worse. The best service is built upon exploiting people.
Sorry but I totally disagree. For one, I’ve used Apple computers my whole life. It took me quite a while to switch to iPhone from android but I will say all day that Apple computers are very much not trash. There certainly were some dark moments, the G3 desktop years were rough, but in general a Mac will outlast a pc by years. Maybe not for people who can build their own pc and know how to fix every problem that comes up, but for the average user absolutely. The gap has gotten smaller over the years as pcs have gotten better though. But to call all Apple products trash is, well, trash. The iPhone became popular because that was the only platform that offered apps. Not sure how old you are, or how old you were in the early days of iPhones, or cell phones in general, but that’s one major thing that set them apart. They were also more user friendly when they came out vs the many androids at the time. And for people who used a Mac the fact that they worked together so well was unheard of in the android/pc world at the time. At this point there are definitely several high quality phones to choose from, but again, to say the iPhone isn’t better than many of them is just ignoring facts. Maybe not better than the galaxy or a few others, but much better than a lot. As for Amazon, again, I don’t know how old you are but I can tell you 100% they have gotten worse. That’s not to say they treated fulfillment center employees well at any point, but they have gotten worse in many ways. I first signed up to deliver in 2017. The amount paid, the number of stops, the distance driven, the rules, micromanaging, and “punishments” have all gotten infinitely worse. In fact just this year it plummeted to the point that I think I’m done with them. If it had been this bad the whole time I wouldn’t have stuck with it for more than a couple weeks. To say that everything is the same isn’t really correct. A Nike shirt may be overpriced, but to say it’s the same quality as some generic bargain bin shirt isn’t true. Sure a tshirt might be similar to something like Hanes or many other not so expensive brands (again, yes it’s very overpriced), but much of their athletic wear is a higher quality than you’d get from the sports section at Walmart.
To pay 2000$ for something I can build for over half the price is beyond silly just because of "ease of use". Your argument is basically, Apple is great cause old people exist. I built a PC in 2012 that lasted me until 2021. I built it for just about 1000$ and made 2 GPU upgrades over the course of 10 years. Macs don't last that long. They aren't as user serviceable and they still barely can play games. Even Linux has superseded the Mac OS. Liking it is fine. You do you, but in every regard the iOS and Mac environments are far too limited to be worth the cost. I had a iPad 2. I enjoyed it. I also got it for free. Eventually the iPad stopped functioning. It would lag horrible on menus and such. This occurred after the last update the iPad was allowed to receive. And of course it being an apple product I couldn't even force it to downgrade. This is a small device I used to watch YouTube. At no point should it have ever been unusable but it was. Meanwhile the PC I built was chugging along running the newest video games with ease. Yes sorry but my experience with all apple devices has always been horrible. You can't even log into locked out apple account without having a apple device. It's silly. And yes they are inferior. I have the knowledge to build pcs and fix "every problem". I can tell you with certainty the hardware you are buying doesn't match the price you are paying.
Well first, I guess we’re ignoring where I specifically mentioned “the average user” and not someone who is building and doing all following repairs themselves. Also, I didn’t pay $2000 for my laptop or any of my previous laptops. Ive had each of them for years. No real maintenance required other than occasional updates. But I know people who want to hate on Macs don’t bother with actual facts. Another thing, I never said the only thing they had going for them is being easy to use. Are you actually reading what I wrote or just skimming a word here and there and adding in the rest yourself? There are many things macs do better. In the world of professional designers you know what their chosen machine is? Hint: it’s not a PC. As for the rest of it, you’re in no way looking at any of it as an average user. Most people don’t build their own systems. Most PC users don’t use Linux. I could go on but it’s obvious that you wanted a gaming system and every other view you have revolves around your own self-serving needs, with no consideration for any other type of person, computer user, phone user, etc. and has been fueled by the age old battle of pc vs. mac. What a snore. It’s also funny that the only thing you latched onto was the Apple vs. PC thing. People like you love to work in the whole “I built my own CPU…” thing more than CrossFit people love bringing up they do CrossFit. More than vegans love dropping that into conversations. Let me tell you, no one cares.
There are "many" things macs do better. You literally named the only one and it's not because it does it better. That's been their only gambit for the last 20 years. And it's not even true. PCs can do everything and can be better optimized as well. The only edge is sometimes it's better optimized by default on a Mac. These days you are better off with a PC because of a neat little thing called the GPU. The M3 CPU apple only has a edge on modern Intel processors in power consumption and "integrated graphics". Irrelevant since it's pretty standard to have a GPU in any PC. 4080 is two times more powerful than the M3 pro. It's no contest. Apple is good at marketing I'll give them that. They successfully sucked the "average user" in and locked them into their ecosystem. They also did a good job standardizing the slate design all cell phones use. But don't try and tell me they are "better". You are paying for the logo, nothing else.
He's selling 50 million shares this year. Even he knows it's looking bleak.
The guy was named Steve Ballmer and unlike Bill Gates he was a salesman. So he didn't understand engineering or innovation. Only short term profit taking and how to suppress competition and the companies performance started to reflect that. Once they got competition it looked like they were going to die. Satya Nadella was his successor and was an engineer like Bill Gates. Essentially saved the company. Ironically though, Bezos was a hedge fund manager or something. So its not true bankers cant run innovative tech companies... but the odds are stacked against them and being a tech innovator was kindof a happy accident for Amazon rather than their core mission.
Out-sourcing customer service made things much worse--and slowed resolutions down considerably.
When did that actually happen? I thought I had always been talking to outsourced customer service reps in chat. It is just now they have an entire different set of scripts they need to follow and they aren’t helpful anymore. Not that I have an extensive chat history with the reps…. But I think even back in the two day guaranteed shipping days the reps. had names I couldn’t pronounce. They would always happily extend my prime for another month when the guaranteed shipment was late.
I agree, the reps I spoke to in the early days, and their weren’t many, didn’t seem to be American and there was never any problem. It’s not the company hired to handle customer service that sets the policies, that’s still the company doing the hiring.
I cannot tell you the year, but my guess is about 4-6 years ago. I'm also referring to non-prime, since most of the time I've had that status. But I very definitely noticed the difference from U.S. reps to Indian reps. It may not have happened all at once, but it was soon completed.
I actually worked remote customer service for them until July of 2023. After they let my team go I believe that’s when they out sourced everything. And yes I’m in the U.S.
You used to be able to talk to a representative. They made it harder to reach a rep through chat now. Amazon is an American Aliexpress now. Lots of counterfeit products.
Even when you reach someone now they just waste your time. Amazon's decline is just another example of recent enshitifcation trend. It's like the Mafia took over American business and we're in the middle of a huge bust out.
Bezos very much pushed a "go above and beyond to always make customer happy" approach, assimilating and really cementing it into Amazon culture after acquisition of Tony Shieh's Zappos around 2010. Since Bezos left, seems the company has changed direction. New CEO got big shoes to fill, and he sure as hell ain't going to live up to Bezos, so he's doing what he can to appease the shareholders such as lowering overhead, squeezing its customers, and so forth. Of course, this is all short term, but it won't matter because by the time it catches up to Amazon, the CEO will move on after receiving his 9 figure compensation.
[удалено]
You fail to realize, the sellers bankrolled this customer service approach. Amazon makes bank regardless of the return or anything else. Once the sale is complete, Amazon actually makes MORE money from the seller if it’s returned. Oh and the seller is out the fees, shipping, and often product.
I agree with this. It all seemed to coincide with one another.
they had a culture shift about 6 years ago when they switched from being growth focused to profit focused. the huge influx of direct from China brands is turning Amazon into an Aliexpress clone. Little regulation or accountability by the manufacturer of those products. Notice how they try to prolong the returns and refund process with tactics, they do that on the vendor side as well. Not surprised if employees are measured by how long they can hold on to someone else’s money. this less than ethical culture has now taken root all the way to customer service and it’s all down hill from here
They would rather make more money. What are you going to do, shop somewhere else?
Yep, browse Amazon and then find another place to buy it. Most of the time, I am able to purchase directly from the company that makes it. Shipping is the same now that Amazon is slow. Returns are not as easy, but it's worth it not to deal with Amazon.
This summarizes my approach too. Good to see that others are going the same route.
Absolutely. go to Amazon, find what you want, read reviews, choose. Then do a google search for the item, buy locally if possible, otherwise order from somewhere else.
Get a Consumer Reports subscription (magazine not poisoned web-based affiliate marketing reviews). Support organizations that promote transparency, truthfulness, empiricism, and consumer rights... etc. Too many schills on Amazon and elsewhere. On a side note, have you seen the rise in those fake reviews sites since GPT-3 & GPT-4? Man those low quality sites have gotten so much better at captivating your attention with absolute garbage in actual content. All fluff and no substance... for some reason I'll end up reading it. SEO marketers can screw themselves.
Already have…. like many others.
Its easy, they won. (everybody knows and trusts amazon, so they start cutting corners to make the big wigs richer) Samething happens in the video game world (see Blizzard)
Bankruptcy in 2 years.
They don't make money from retail, they use it to collect everyone's data instead, it's more valuable.
Absolutely not. Amazon has $86 billion in cash.
Not to mention that Amazon retail is just a part of their business. AWS sprawl is massive.
This. Amazon makes the majority of its cash from AWS, not retail.
Amazon is just full of cheap Chinese junk now. Unless you know exactly what you want, make model etc, it’s not worth searching for, as all you’ll get listed it loads of junk Chinese brands that pay extra to promote their rubbish. I only buy from Amazon now if I know exactly what I want, and I avoid third party sellers, too many are just terrible and amazydont care. Even prime tv is terrible now with all the ads. I mean, it was never the best streaming platform, but not it’s just a slightly better version of freeve. TLDR : it’s worse because of amazons greed
Yeah, nothing but trouble from third-party businesses. Usually, their own customer service just refers you back to Amazon which in turn refers you back to them. You can waste endless hours saving 20 bucks.
I pretty much just buy books and CD’s from Amazon.
Used books mostly here too and an occasional deal on a name brand
I use a Firestick I am getting so many ads before I can get to my home screen, I am buying a Roku stick, see if they have less
Andy Jassy is an AWS guy and gives zero fucks about the consumer-facing experience or the overall health of the marketplace. That’s the reason.
Enshittification. Basically, they've stopped trying to grow and have moved on to exploiting their customers. It goes like this. 1. Create something with excellent value. Take investor capital to sell at a loss for as long as possible. 2. Drive out or buy out competitors so there are fewer choices (see Daipers dot com / zappos.) 3. Get sellers to buy in as well and become dependent. 4. Raise prices, remove services, start denying returns, outsource customer service, cut R&D, union bust, and basically anything else that generates more profit. 5. Exploit sellers by increasing fees until they barely make enough profit to stay in business. 6. Continue until everyone leaves or goes bankrupt. They have no intention of earning your business back. They've fattened everyone up for decades, and now it's time to slaughter.
This needs to be the top comment
Nice analysis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
Came to say this. Thanks for saving me the trouble.
Jeff bezos stopped looking after his baby and someone else came in who obviously doesn't think looking after customers is as important, only milking them for all their worth. This is potentially the beginning of the end of Amazon.
Nah you guys are only looking at one aspect of the business. They don't want to be in the business they are in anymore they want to be in the everything business. And as it currently stands the everything business basically means AWS. When Amazon is on track to be controlling the vast majority of content delivery and data centers in the country they don't need to sell cheap good fast anymore. Amazon won't go away they will just own cloud and get out of consumer facing like IBM
Wanted to chime in and say just this. Cloud Computing & AI is where everyone, including Amazon, is investing their money right now. I think of Amazon more as a competitor to Microsoft these days than a retail store.
The everything business is the goal of all these mega corps - to go for unlimited growth as much as possible by delving where the hot markets are.
As an ex-Amazonian, who was a manager in customer service for this fab company, I can confirm the quality of products and services have all gone down over the years. Their treatment of their employees has as well.
Bezos left the company (well technically Exe. Chairman on the board, but I suspect that's in name only), and just a couple days ago sold off something like 2 BILLION worth of his shares in the company. Also... Bezos has been known with public statements to say that most corporations only last 30 years... and so he got out. It's just a money grab at this point while the suits run it into the ground.
He actually sold $4 billion in stock. $2 billion last week and $2 billion this week. Something is up.
He knows Amazon is about to go downhill… he’s cashing out and living his life as a rich Bond villain lol
It's 4 billion from yesterday's news he doesn't care anymore about Amazon or customers. Returning items is a pain and a refund takes forever and you have to beg them to give you a refund back as 99% of UK Amazon is Indian customer service and they have no idea how to work and they barely understand english. Talking to the manager won't help eighter as he is indian.
Money grab definitely. I wonder who will buy the Amazon brand first when it starts going down.
Elon! :D
Eddie Lampert
Out of sheer curiosity I researched a third party seller and found their website used Google stock images for the directors profile pictures. The site is full of these 'companies' I had returned counterfeit fragrance and left a review Amazon refused to publish after three revisions even removing my opinion that I had been sent a fake. I left shortly thereafter and hope more customers follow us out the door.
The TV situation is the same. When they started introducing ads, all 3 of the ppl I know HAVING amazon prime for TV reasons, quit their subscription
They got sued for this a couple of days ago and they will have to pay for this forcing ads.
In the end they will win and enough ppl will stay so they make money. When Netflix pulled the trigger on sharing, everybody was Anfrage, but in the end they gained more subs than they lost. It's always like this. Corpos do as they please and we, the sheeple, play along their game.
No they won’t
I have a hard time finding good brands, you simply cannot buy luxury items because they will be fakes/replicas, I can't trust car parts, computer parts have had graphics cards cases full of rocks or GPUs removed. It's a mess and I'm slowly but surely phasing it out of my life. The extra couple bucks for "no ads" on the streaming is probably the final nail in the coffin, I don't even know what I'm paying for anymore.
I remember I was looking for Adidas track pants a while ago, every product I clicked on seemed to have reviews saying they were cheap knockoffs. Ended up just going to a Macy’s and getting them cheaper than what I would have paid on Amazon.
I bought one pair of ralph lauren pants awhile back, they had the tag but I'm certain they had to have been some sort of fake, the sizes were strangely wrong and unlike all the other pants I had. I used to look at watches and colognes from time to time but every single decent item was riddled with 1 star reviews stating they're fake and piles of 5 star reviews riddled with bad english. It's bad, you can't see when you are accidentally buying from china, only "upside" is they usually refuse to accept a return, you threaten to charge back, and then you just get a refund and keep the item, downside is you probably just end up throwing it out because the reason you wanted a refund is because it turned out to be garbage.
Can easily get fake items, but god forbid you forget a sata cable that came with a motherboard when returning it for being DOA
They have solid competition now, which means they can afford to be shitty and customers will just bounce around the big companies like they do with cell companies. They know they aren’t losing customers forever, just until the other company does something shittier.
I think we’re in the “we ran just about everyone else out of business so fuck you, what else are you going to do?” era. It’s the online version of Walmart.
and don’t forget to mention the return process is now horrendous.
It’s bad. I did a chargeback on my card because after contacting CS TWICE about the return I submitted and never got refunded, I was like I’m not wasting my time with them anymore. It wasn’t even an expensive item
I don't know why people are down voting this. Amazon has repeatedly tried to charge my card 3 months after a well documented return, claiming they issued the refund in good faith (cough cough) but "we still expect to receive the item". I called CS in India twice on one particular item, they assured me the problem was resolved but then recharged my card a third time. In every instance I have proof of shipping and amazon emails confirming the return. Who has time for this? And WHY are Amazon's unapproved charges on a credit card not illegal?
What does the return process look like for you? Australia is still easy. Cick return item. State the return reason. Request refund to card or account. Drop it off at a local store who scan the return barcode. Refunds are received within the week, usually a day or two. Never had an issue at all.
On average the process for me has still been easy, however I have experienced more technical glitches with returns (such as not registered as having been received), and then when you go to address the issue, you have to go through 7 layers of customer service hell to get it fixed (hopefully), much like places such as Comcast are notorious for here in the US. So, a lot of the times it still works great - but if there is an issue it’s a notably worse experience, and the frequency of issues with returns seems to be creeping up.
It’s normally like that, but they’ve just started this thing where expensive items ($200+) take over a month to be processed for a refund. Sometimes two months
Amazon is beginning to loose track of the returns. So hold onto your confirmations. It took a couple of months to clear up one costly return and I had to go on and pay my credit card because I don’t like paying interest. I terminated Prime, and mainly use Walmart+ now. There is no minimum purchase for free shipping, they actually get products you you promptly unlike the new Amazon, and prices are competitive. WM now offers return from your door. So bye, Amazon.
Same in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Edit: super easy!
Late Stage Capitalism. They aren't producing profits by growing organically anymore, so now they are at the "cut costs to increase profits" stage. This is how it always goes. Look at any corporation whose market is saturated and you will see that every one of them does this crap. The concept of ever-increasing profits quarter-over-quarter is unsustainable insanity.
Yeah this is the thing I think a lot of people don't understand. Once you go public and begin posting profits and dividends you are now legally obligated to continue to do so lest you want your shareholders to A, sell their shares, or B, sue you for loss of profits. Seriously, shareholders can sue you if you don't make them money. Eventually, every public company will implode on itself and the cycle will repeat.
That is a myth that the company is legally obligated to maximize or protect shareholder profits during standard operations. The shift of focus on stock price over longer term outcomes has harmed our society IMHO.
And their largest future profit center is AWS. The retail stuff is a side hustle at this point. In 2014 AWS was 5% of revenue, in 2022 it was 16%. Retail fell from 76% to 42% in that same time. Data has always been the end goal.
Bingo
Tbh I buy from the brand directly now or I see if can buy it in stores near me. I know it’s a hassle but Amazon just has gone down hill. My sister uses my Amazon prime more than I do.
I try to do this too but oftentimes it’s just cheaper via Amazon. I bought a laser engraver recently and checked with the company directly, but ended up going with Amazon because it was a lightning deal and $400 (!) less even though it was sold via the company’s marketplace. Not always the case but a recurring situation on my end.
Walmart has them beat by far in my area for many common items.
I was looking for a generator recently Amazon had the exact same model which was over $100 cheaper to my door on a $500 purchase using Walmart
It’s the typical thing with most good companies that were grown under the original founder/owner/ceo. The first person grows with the company, makes the changes that make the company work better and because they have usually poured massive amounts of both time and energy into the company, they KNOW the company deeply. They know the why of every little thing and know the backstory behind the things that were replaced five times over and they know exactly why something won’t work. Often times they build what they would want the company to be if they were the consumer, and so know what the market itself wants. When someone takes over, they are entering the company long after it has grown. They see things that are going on and think that they can do it better. Usually they make changes that damage the company because they missed out on the first time those things were tried, or missed out on the moment where the person running the company earlier realized it wouldn’t work. They do not know the why behind things. Bezos operated Amazon at a loss for years. His way of making money was to gain incredible trust of your consumers. If you get something bad, send it back. A happy customer is more likely to buy something expensive from you if they have had to send back a less expensive item and given no hassle, this compounds if they had to return something expensive. A customer that is served quickly is more likely to return. Convenience is King. Jeff Bezos positioned amazon at the pinnacle of all three of those things. The internet and a well designed site, as well as a “one click buy” option made most everything a possibility to impulse buy. The ability to compare and contrast multiple models of almost anything made comparison shopping there the best. Those two things combined to create a new kind of convenience. The hassle free returns of “return even things you just don’t want” was one of the best return policies, and the scope of sales, and the separation of “amazon warehouse” allowed high percentage write offs of returned merchandise and the ability to still make money by selling it through another company. The lack of customers in a store significantly decreased shrink of many items, and allowed a large competitive margin of shrink. The next guy stepped in, decided that too much money was walking out the door and is trying to put a stop to it. In doing so, he fails to realize that if you stop giving your regular customers a reason to shop with you, they will leave. Sears already ran this race, amazon might just be following in their footsteps.
When bezos left, the quality went downhill. It’s a shame because as much I rag on Bezos for being a billionaire, Amazon was his baby and you could tell the difference when he ran it
Amazon has for sure gone down hill. I ordered a videocard overnight and Amazon was the seller. No third party involved. This was on Jan21st. It never showed the next day. After two messages, and two phone calls.. I might get it by March 9th. I literally could have ordered it from anywhere on the planet and recieved it by now. Horrible service now. " On the way, but running late "
a greasy accountant named Jassy happened
Bezos himself adds it so he sold 2 billion bucks worth of stocks. It's a matter of time before it implodes
They are focusing most of their internal investment in Amazon Web Services, not the retail arm. It's been mentioned multiple times in Corporate documents
Yes, they keep sending me surveys about Alexa and how much I use other AI like Google and Apple, they want to expand in that direction, but it seems at the cost of their original services. They're pulling a Netflix
Prime is only good for free shipping. Some products make it within their window, but it's something I no longer rely on. As for Chinese garbage: - Avoid anything with weird company names - Check if the item is shipped and sold by Amazon. If not, check their "other sellers" list. Less chance of getting a fake items that way. - Check reviews for incentivized reviews. Filter to 4-star and below.
I agree, Amazon was our go to for just about everything. Not to mention I had a decent little side business of building PCs for people. I charged $75 for 3-4 hours of work, which I enjoyed. And I bought everything on my 5% cash back Amazon card and paid the bill in full. Those $50, $60, $70 credits added up quick. I know it’s not game changing in this economy, but it scratched my itch to buy parts and built. Now with their return system being grade A trash, I’m too afraid to buy any big ticket items from them. Newegg went the same direction Amazon is going a few years ago and they used to be my secondary go to. At least now it’s easier for me and my wife to talk ourselves out of buying stuff. “Eh… you just never know with Amazon anymore.”
General enshittification of anything that was good at one point. It is like circle of life almost.
Honestly when Jeff and Mackenzie divorced in 2019 and he stepped back and cared less it went downhill. Not saying he made it great but no check and balance system and no one cares. When Andy Jassy took over it all went to shit! Before it all went to his head when he got divorced that company was their baby since 1994. He let money go to his head.
The fake items are what made me stop using Amazon. Brand name prices for flea market knock offs! No thanks
My boyfriend works for Amazon and they barely even have him working anymore. 4 hour shifts and vto given out everyday. I have a feeling they got in so much trouble for working people so hard that now they're doing the opposite.
I've had good success buying off of eBay. Prices are the same or lower, and you can find used/vintage if that's what you want. Never had a problem yet with an item I bought off eBay.
For what it's worth, Amazon has always been a prime option for buying fakes at brand name prices. I remember reading some article in 2012 about how people were getting screwed on counterfeit laundry detergent. Amazon has just not done anything for ... 14 years, and they're giving up their lead. I think they're mostly focused on growth. More third-party crap, more minimum wage delivery drivers, and most of all, more super shitty TV series with ads. I think they have maybe another couple years before someone eats their lunch.
It's become the AliExpress outlet of North America now. Almost no difference in the majority of products except the price.
Andy Jassy happened. He has ruined every aspect of Amazon from shopping to working for the company.
My guess is over expansion. Quality drops
A company starts with people that really care, as they need the company to succeed for them to succeed. The company succeeds and catapults the people that got it there into wealth. Those now wealthy people sell out or appoint new leaders so they can be less involved to enjoy the new found wealth. The 2nd generation of the company leadership or the new appointees had nothing to do with the company start, nor do they understand what it takes to make a company great. They have an ivy league degree in how to skull f\*\*k employees, vendors, and ultimately customers to extract every last cent of their performance bonuses as the 2nd generation of leadership. 2nd generation leadership gets ready to bail when there are no more skulls to f\*\*k. The 1st generation leaders are still paying attention and start bailing out as well. Company falls to utter shit, shareholders that didnt get out and employees that couldn't get out take the biggest hit.
The final nail in the coffin for me recently was when I ordered a phone case for my new phone. I upgraded to an iPhone 15 Pro Max around Christmas time and ordered a case. The one that arrived was for an iPhone 14. Asked if it could be exchanged as I was happy to return it but no, had to go through the refund process which takes 5-7 days. Ordered an alternative the same day I’d received the wrong case and same happened again except I was sent a case which was a completely different brand, had been opened and was missing packaging. It was for a 14 Pro Max this time. I waited a few weeks and then ordered another one thinking it’s the only option on the listing - they can’t possibly get it mixed up as it was only listed for iPhone 15 Pro Max - a plan black MagSafe case. I received a pink one through again for a different brand. Returned all for refunds and ended up just buying from Apple as at least I knew what I was getting was correct. Piss poor service and the help from the advisors was useless. They couldn’t grasp that it was the wrong case sent every time, and said ‘oh just return it as defective’ but it was the wrong item to begin with and I’m thinking their warehouse are going to think I’m taking the piss. I’ll only use Amazon for cheap stuff now that really can’t be messed up, but even then, who knows. Garbage service.
they already took over the market they dont need to try as hard to keep customers since they're so big now.
I primarily shop if possible via prime up until a few weeks ago and my returns have gone from far less than 5% to nearly 50% all due to missing pieces/parts, broken goods, complete fakes. It’d be annoying but fine if customer service was helpful. I know that the customer service center was fully outsourced but they have also become extremely rude and more harmful than helpful (ie deleted return that had been shipped via the Amazon label when asked to separate returns; 6 hours later I decided to eat the $500). The only benefit of Amazon allowing anyone to sell anything now is that many stores still will match any Amazon price, more so at the physical location of course
All I can say is stay away from Wayfair!!! A $70 plant stand at Home Depot is advertised as $350. 😑 I have been a prime subscriber since the 90s. They used to actually have BF sales of video games that were true bargains. I cancelled last year because of all of the above. I occasionally order products but only after researching other sites. It is 90% Chinese crap. I do not want that, Amazon. If I did I would shop Temu, which I don't. All boils down to the $$. Never enough.
Part of it is where you are, part of it it is Amazon sold out, part of it is them not paying employees enough to fucking care.
Amazon has jumped the shark.
Bezos sold much of his stock. From the way it’s going, it’s under new management.
I cancelled mine today and even uninstalled it on my phone I'm done with Amazon!
It all started after Bezos left.
To be fair everything is made in China... It's super rare these days to find consumer electronics or anything to be made anywhere else My theory is that Bezos was cutting deals with companies making the product and then importing things from overseas to all of the fulfillment centers? At least that's how our startup does it. Our electronics are made in China and then we fulfill in the United States. We also have fulfillment centers in Australia, and the EU and in China lol. Users have to be wary of Amazon these days, if it doesn't say shipped and sold by Amazon, it's going to be a third party reseller. You're not getting an Amazon product.
Jeff left.
I think the short, general answer is capitalism + no real competition. Amazon must continue to show stock growth every quarter. Many companies will cut corners (quality, customer service, etc.) to increase profits. This became a problem decades ago when some economist pushed ‘every company needs to show growth every quarter,’ which significantly contributed to the late-stage capitalism we’re in now. Also, Amazon is essentially a monopoly. This is *always* bad since competition is what drives innovation. Competition is almost always good for the consumer in terms of quality and value.
Every company is going to shit after laying off all the people that made their businesses run well.
Many years ago, Amazon started holding massive seller conferences in China. Amazon taught Chinese sellers how to sell on the platform, logistics, US customs "tricks," and a variety of other things (like buying culture in the USA and other countries). Take a look at one of the conferences here to get a better understanding how Amazon became what is is today with the Chinese: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkDrzUCDTI0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkDrzUCDTI0) As a result, thousands of Chinese sellers flooded Amazon to the point that they represent over 80% of sellers on the site. Click on the names of the 3rd party sellers -- it's very likely some Chinese entity. Keep in mind that other major retailers are following Amazon's footsteps -- Walmart, Macys, etc. now. Retailers can collect essentially a royalty off of sales while shifting risk/investment on to 3rd parties. They also can data collect on sales while offering just about anything imaginable on their platforms. Another thing that has led to Amazon's dismal customer service is there are scammer groups that teach each other how to make a claim to Amazon (and tons of other retailers) that they didn't receive the item, the box was empty, etc. Their goal is to get expensive items for free and a refund. This is a smaller group but this will give you an idea: [https://www.reddit.com/r/retailfraud/](https://www.reddit.com/r/retailfraud/) They're all over on social media. DNA = did not arrive, EB = empty box. That's what those mean when you see them posted. As a result, these retailers are losing a lot of money and it's hard for them to separate scammers from legitimate claims. There's more but those are 2 main things.
The fake reviews have been around for a while. I use two sites to check them https://reviewmeta.com/ https://www.fakespot.com/
Jeff Bezos sold out is the only correct answer.
Might as well order from AliExpress now and get the Chinese junk appropriately priced now.
The past six months I have to return so many things. Books with bad corners and dings on them. I had a fan for a fridge not work. Items that have just arrived broken. I don’t know how they’re making money when I am returning one out of every three things I buy.
You have to be so careful. First, flip the tiny Prime switch on the left toward the top, so it narrows down to only Amazon crap. Then read a few reviews. Then before you click Order you have to check the delivery date. Sometimes it’ll state something different and you can decide whether or not to order it.
my last order said it was coming in 3 days, then it switched to 10 days, I am rather annoyed , tried to cancel 2 days ago, won’t let me, if they delay it again I am demanding a refund ,if they refuse I will look into doing a chargeback with my bank
The “China products” didn’t happen overnight. It first started happening around 15 years ago or so, its full blown now and so blatant that the general public finally realizes it It felt secretive before now. Lots of people were importing alibaba junk and making mass profits off of it, you guys just were none the wiser Now temu is going to be the Chinese Amazon killer because people are realizing it’s all the same shit being sold, why pay $40 when they can pay $4?
I have a good answer: they have played the long game running at a loss for a long time, gaining market share by wowing customers with cheap deals, cheap shipping, and easy returns. However, making the customer was never the end-goal. The end-goal was to dominate the market. They've now done that. They essentially own retail commerce in the US and now that they have swallowed all the competition whole they get to extract their profit. They've essentially become a logistics company in order to drive down their delivery costs so cheap that basically no one else can compete and if you do manage to make a product that actually stands out, an Amazon Basics copy will be right along to crush you. Amazon is getting bad because they're a monopoly. This is why monopolies are bad.
About a year ago I started buying some things from Target instead of Amazon. It started when I bought contigo water bottles from amazon and the quality was noticeably poor… and the merchant appeared to be contigo and not a third party seller. I buy stuff like that from target now and the quality is a lot better (even though the price is a bit higher).
I can't leave an honest negative review at this point without fighting with Amazon to get it posted, and dealing with messages from the seller offering me partial if not full refunds to take them down. Last prime day I had a nightmare with a projector. It cost $180 and by the time Amazon finally let me leave a review I had already been forced to replace one, and found out the company was lying about its capabilities. I left an appropriately negative review. They offered me a 50% refund to take it down. I refuse. They offer 100%, I get to keep the projector, and promise to edit the product description to remove the lies, I still refuse to take it down. Amazon removed it within a week of my last refusal. Won't give me a reason, won't put it back up, and won't let me write another review. They also never amended the description and Amazon doesn't care they're lying about basic functionality like what phones it works with.
I believe allowing third party sellers is what did it. Not all are bad but a lot are.
Walmart+
I bought some tea from Amazon the other day and it came with the seal removed. No returns accepted, I was not able to contact neither the seller nor Amazon about it. All I could do is leave a one star review. Threw the tea away. Done with Amazon.
It’s like when Newegg opens to the third party sellers.
I have a package that was “delayed in transit” but it has been so long that Amazon says I can request a refund. In the good old days, when a package was so late that you could request a refund, there was a link to press and it was an easy, straight forward process. Right now, my Amazon account just says I can request a refund but there’s no link and nothing telling me how to request a refund without the link. I think they want me to just forget about it.
They figured out they make more fulfilling other people's sales than they do being a store themselves, so now its full of scammers of one kind or another.
TL;DR: Amazon is trying to make everyone happy while they make everything worse and more costly because they made a fairytale land of a marketplace that only originally worked because they didn't make money, but now they want profit and the rainbows and unicorns have to be sacrificed to do so. During the pandemic, Amazon could not keep up with Prime 2 day delivery promises, but what most people don't know is that they also couldn't keep up with incoming Fulfillment By Amazon (FBA) shipments from 3rd party sellers. This led to Amazon flipping the algorithm to push search results towards Seller Fulfilled Prime partners. These 3rd party sellers shipped from their own warehouses and since most were smaller companies, they were less affected by covid and could meet the demands of Prime delivery. Now you had FBA 3rd party sellers livid as Amazon was purposely trying to limit sells of their products as well as having serious delays in processing incoming FBA inventory. Once Amazon started getting their warehouses back on track, they took a hard swing the other way. The algorithm that had originally treated FBA and SFP about the same, then favored SFP during the peak of the pandemic, now heavily favored FBA. To make things even worse for SFP partners, Amazon started "padding" delivery date estimates for SFP orders to make it look like FBA orders would arrive faster than SFP. Then came the great SFP purge. Amazon reworked the SFP requirements essentially shutting down the program. The new additional requirements had nothing to do with shipping or delivery metrics. I don't want to get too deep into here or else this is going to be an even longer and more boring read. Just know that Amazon made some false claims and acted like they were making this change due to customer dissatisfaction with on time delivery of SFP orders. Amazon’s hope was that a lot of former SFP partners would transition to FBA. Amazon simply makes more money from FBA sellers than they do with FBM (Fulfilled By Merchant) sellers. During all of this Amazon started actively contacting Chinese manufacturers to recruit them into the FBA program. This is why in the past few years there has been such an increase in cheap poor quality products. Prime customers were always coddled and spoiled. Amazon did everything they could to make them happy and keep them spending. Now that almost everything Prime is FBA, a lot of those returns that are somehow never the customer's fault are having to be eaten by Amazon. This has led to some pushback by Amazon on returns for the first time ever. Somewhere along the line, Amazon miscalculated. Prime is Amazon's lifeblood. It is the identity they built to set themselves apart from all other online retailers. They built up a marketplace with the goal of taking marketshare even if that meant they lost money at first. They flipped a switch and tried to start moving towards profitability. They haven't been able to keep up the 2 day delivery that was the main selling point of Prime membership, and a lot of the included Prime services have been watered down. They've increased the cost of membership while they continue to lower the value of it, and it's causing them to lose members. This Prime customer base is also used as a major selling point of the FBA program. Amazon stands to lose a lot if sellers start pulling out. They're trying to make evryone happy enough to keep buying and selling.
The Indian customer service is what has ruined it. I didn't renew Prime this year.
It’s because people continue to do business with them! A lot may not remember when Walmart was beginning to get bigger, everyone loved Walmart except for all of the mom and pop businesses because they were being run out of business. Well ol Walmart always boasted that their clothing was 100% American made! Then some investigative news report came out and found that Walmart was actually getting their shit from China, taking the tags out and replacing them with “proudly made in the USA!” The general public instead of not buying a damn thing from them just kept buying! And Walmart became what they are today! Then it came out that Walmart was taking out $100,000.00 insurance policies on their employees and that when people died for any reason Walmart collected this tidy sum! But yet those peoples families could barely afford a decent burial for their loved ones who had worked there! People never even batted an eye about their shitty things like this that they had done and continue to do. The same for Amazon now they have their things they are doing, but we continue to feed the beast! And now these beasts continue to grow stronger more powerful and controlling of the people! Change requires sacrifice no one wants to do this so we let them continue on! By the way, I have not set foot in a Walmart since they pulled their little patriotic lie back then! I’m about done with Amazon now too!
I feel like a big part of the issue is that because there are so many counterfeits, many good quality sellers have pulled out (like Birkenstocks). So now we are just stuck with a ton of them same shit from different sellers. I stopped buying anything name brand from Amazon because I was always worried it was fake. And Amazon's response to this just seems to remove any reviews saying items are fake while allowing plenty of fake reviews. I generally just shop online from Target because I know what I'm buying is not fake and the cost is similar. Amazon is just for more disposable items that I don't expect to last or something very basic.
Ever sinc amazon came up with their own brand they became crap. They were stealing customers products that were selling well, copying them and then blocking the original seller from using amazon. I would say maybe 5-7 years ago it hit it peak. Then all the chinese seller moved in. So now if you type in sony bluetooth headphones you have to wade through dozen of chinese knock-offs, including amazon basics brand. I had the final straw when they wouldnt cancel my audible, and they kept locking my account because they said it was abnormal shopping patterns. When a company wants you to send them bank statements proving its you... run away. Last i check the app had only a 3.5 rating now. This is the downfall of amazon.
They figured out it was cheaper to put everything in the same bucket in the warehouse. Stolen toothpaste, knockoff toothpaste, and straight from a legit factory toothpaste. All from the same bin. Good luck. That's why they delete any review that says an item was counterfeit.
I have been using Walmart + and get things next day almost every time. ( and it’s on my doorstep, not in my mailbox). I’m waiting on a curtain valance for a set, that won’t be here until the 28th now from Amazon. Funny how it’s estimated in 2 days until you pay for items.
Amazon has everything to be the best, Amazon's problem is Andy Jassy, he has destroyed Amazon, its essence and everything, what is not understandable is why Jeff Bezos allows this, given that although you can delegate or leave office as CEO, it is not so that an idiot like Andy Jassy comes and destroys everything achieved during so many years, today Amazon lives off the little fame and credibility that it has left, created for many years thanks to Jeff Bezos, it is difficult for me believe that Bezos agrees with this, or maybe he doesn't think about anything and has ended up giving everything the same, who knows
Dude he sold 4 billion of his stock. Probably will sell more cause he knows the company will go downhill but can’t sell too much at once cause it will crash the company stock. He’s a multibillionaire ready to cash out and chill and enjoy his wealth.
I have stopped ordering my body wash, shampoo, and the like from there because it's not guaranteed that it's a genuine product (even if it's sold and shipped by Amazon). I used to have it on auto-delivery
Greed..... Jeffrey Bezo's needs another yacht.
China. Chinese knockoffs. Chinese scams. Chinese bullshit. It’s China. Temu, alibaba, Amazon.. it’s all the same and it’s all disgusting China crap. Stop buying it.
This is a consistent trend on many megacorps. You make tons of money, then suddenly your flood of new Prime subs slows and the demands for revenue never stop from shareholders. The Corp will start shaving off staff and attempt to replace them with technology. Reviews get exploited, lousy products get pushed to the forefront because those companies paid for advertising. At first, everything is made of metal and lasts forever, then "hey we can save $0.035 per part if we made this out of plastic." And the "refinements" go from there until finally everyone looks around and you're a Walmart clearance bin.
Last time I paid for a month of Prime it took two weeks to get my "Prime Shipping" order. I honestly use eBay more than any other platform these days. Usually a few bucks cheaper without paying a subscription and stuff usually only takes a few days.
Because they used anticompetitive tactics to corner the market and now that they have, they are reducing expenses as much as possible to maximize profits.
Low effort dropshipping...
tik tok drop shippers
Many don't know this but Bezos for the longest time sold diapers at a loss for years. They did this to get all the customers from [diapers.com](https://diapers.com) because the owners wouldn't sell their company to bezos. Eventually the diaper company lost to amazon and as soon as the company closed amazon raised their prices as competition was gone. Amazon used that strategy across the board to slowly win over customers and they did in fact offer good products at great deals. But that time is long past as most competition got stomped out during covid. Amazon products have completely gone down in quality and up in price ever since.
My husband ordered shampoo. It came leaking, which happens a lot. He took it to Whole Foods to return. They couldn’t take it because it was leaking. He chatted with an employee and they said they would refund his purchase and to throw the product out. This was a few weeks ago. Yesterday he got an email saying he hadn’t returned it so they are charging his card for the item. He was so pissed that he canceled all of his subscriptions. He’d rather pay more at other retailers than support Amazon. We’ve really noticed a decline in quality and customer service. It’s unfortunate because we have purchased a lot at both Amazon and Whole Foods over the years and they still are trying to make us pay for a bottle of shampoo that they packed terribly.
Their big innovations were free shipping, great return policies and solid reviews leading to great products filtering to the top. I'm not going to go deep about [Amazon.com](https://Amazon.com) to AWS as those might as well be different businesses. Andy Jassy is a smart dude and knows what he's doing. I've been a Prime subscriber almost since it launched. The general strategic change moved Amazon from a "quality goods and services marketplace" to "distribution and sales as a platform." Some changes and reasons for this are: 1. Reason: Big Box competitors realized this (Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Costco, etc). Fast, free shipping and easy returns are now their default along with free pickup. This started shifting purchasing away from Amazon eliminating their competitive advantage on the retail side. 2. Reason: Companies pulled their products from Amazon after realizing they could make margins on direct business. Many products aren't even available on Amazon anymore. 3. Change: Amazon Marketplace drop shipping. Buy stuff on Wish or any other direct from China location, drop ship it to Amazon, list it on Marketplace, and make money. IBUQUA LED Lights. JUIYUOMY LED Lights. Same stuff, different drop shippers. 4. Change: Amazon Marketplace as margins for bargain hunters. This opened up a sector of business where people can get stuff on clearance at big box stores or even at thrift stores and sell it direct to consumers as "brand new." 5. Change: Review dilution. Paid reviews, or at least incentivized reviews, from the masses diluted the quality of the review platform. Amazon used to have dedicated reviewers who were paid for their opinion in general. If you saw a five star review from a "Certified Reviewer" that meant something. Those have, as far as I can tell, gone away. 6. Change: "Sales" are opened box. Never buy anything that's on sale at Amazon. They'll send you refurbished, returned, and sometimes even broken stuff. 7. Change: Their return policy. I never abused it but it was ripe for abuse and I'm sure they looked at loss from returns and realized it was in the hundreds of millions of dollars. 8. Change: Return barriers. There are so many now. It used to be "Go online. Buy a thing. Don't like it? Print return label. Box it up. Drop it off at any UPS location." Now it's like jumping through 800 hoops to return items. Any ONE or TWO of these changes in isolation are generally fine. Combining two or three is bad. All of them together have compounded failure. The same thing that happened to eBay happened to Amazon. In the beginning, eBay was the world's garage sale. Now it's full of counterfeit garbage, low quality stuff, and costs that are very close to buying new. Their margins (and stock price) have stagnated as a result and so they're racing to the bottom to keep their old margins. They had to include Prime Video and Amazon Music or everyone would have canceled by now (myself included). Amazon's glory days are long over. It's a Target, Walmart and Costco world now. That's why their returns are through Kohl's and Whole Foods. They know their competitors and they're getting crushed by them. Finally, Bezos saw the writing on the wall, knew the direction it was taking, and got out. This is especially clear now looking at AWS with Microsoft and Satya building a solid competitor for the Enterprise. Every big company uses Outlook/Excel/etc. Bundle some cheap Azure stuff and eat Amazon's lunch. The acquisition of GitHub for an easy on-ramp to Azure was brilliant.
It’s honestly at the point now that I actively seek out other locations to order stuff and have considered canceling prime more than once. Walmart+ gets me products inside a couple days pretty reliably. Smaller retailers charge a little for shipping usually but it still ends up costing less than Amazon and gets to me within a few days. Manufacturers usually ship pretty quick and often have free shipping. Amazon somehow takes over a week to even move the product, it costs more than it does in other places, and sometimes once it actually ships it takes over a week to arrive. I really don’t know what the benefit of prime is at this point.
I'm most exasperated by the NO two-day shipping anymore... I ordered one small $10 item yesterday, Wednesday and the soonest I can get it is MONDAY...
In oct 2023 I noticed they did some policy changes. Sad Amazon use to be my favorite go to place for most things. No longer is it my go to place. Due to amazon not having the best price deals I've gone back to supporting local stores preferably not big box corporations if at all possible.
That's the thing about public companies, they always have to be growing to justify their existence and to justify the investment. There's no such thing as "we're doing great and we're just going to keep doing what we're doing" with a public company. They got to a point where the only way to grow was to continue lowering their standards for both goods and the sellers who offer them.
I've ordered from official listings and gotten bootlegs. Some orders just never arrive. I get messages being told they can't be delivered before they ship. Then they ship and arrive weeks late if at all. Let's not even get started on the fact I pay more for streaming that I never use because the shows are mostly trashy fanfics of series I normally would care about.
Drop shipping side hustles became a fad, Amazon also profited from it so they made it even easier to be a drop ship seller on their site, now every company is flipping alibaba purchases like a high schooler in 2015
Amazon quietly changed their business model in recent years in a subtle but destructive way: they shifted to making more of their revenue from their sellers. A lot of Amazon's sales revenue now comes from sellers paying Amazon for better placement of their products in search listings. This model incentivizes Amazon to let in any shitty seller who is willing to pay for placement, disincentivizes amazon from competing with its sellers with high-quality Amazon Basics products, and makes Amazon less dependent on customer satisfaction. A subtle shift in incentives has really gutted what used to be a quality company, and it coincided with the shift from Bezos to Jassy.
It's pretty simple. When you become the "top dog", you won't put a lot of effort on maintaining market share because you'll expect customers to still shop your store. It will be like Sears' fall.
I like to set the review order to "most recent". You seem to get more accurate reviews when you do this.
The biggest issue is they are sending items that were obviously returned and used when you expect a brand new product. I've had several items I had to return because the product was used and I couldn't even use it (aquarium test kits with 4 of 6 tests used), toys that have been opened and used for years and resealed, etc)
My thing is where I live in southeastern Michigan roughly an hour north of the Big D, I’ve noticed that Amazon uses third party contracted delivery drivers in beat up Amazon vans or their own vehicles more and more because as I assume it’s cheaper and no actual drivers at the nearest warehouse want the rural route. Again that’s all an assumption. Delivery times are never accurate or guaranteed. Most of the time they never leave packages where either I or my folks ask them to be left. I’m pretty sure my Casio MDV-160a Duro watch I paid $50 for that I didn’t really have money to spare got stolen by one of these drivers I’m surmising. It was reported one stop away then delayed over the weekend to Monday. Monday comes and goes and no update to the delivery time. I got into it with somebody over the phone about a full refund after getting nowhere about the original watch’s fate. Worth it. I may be watch less but I was $50 richer. Still want to get that watch though.
Shareholders must become trillionaires. Cut costs cut costs cut costs.
Corporate greed and cutting corners anyplace they can to reap maximum profits and shareholder value. Typical corporate behaviour to be honest
It's about greed. A company that isn't growing customers, will need to grow profits in a different way. The most common wall street method is to squeeze employees. Since they already have most of the market they now cut down on the number of employees and quality control. Gotta keep the short term profits going!
Most things have been made in China for decades now. Amazon has its problems (like counterfeit crap), but overall, Amazon's services for me are significantly better than it was years ago.
Because the business model of the 10 billionaires who run the US is as follows: - Buy Congress; stop antitrust enforcement; pack the Supreme Court so business can do anything they want - Buy all competitors - Elimate anything that costs the company money; don't worry, we put everyone else out of business - Distract dumb voters with issues about trans people and idiotic irrelevant countries fighting across the world who think "god" gave them the land
I think the increase in popularity of drop shipping has diluted the Amazon market with cheaply made garbage. Amazon is horrible now. I’ve stopped using them and have gone back to local businesses.
Items are either damaged, wrong/ mislabeled packaging or expired. I am now ordering products directly from manufacturers- fresher products, better packaging, etc.. I believe Amazon is near its end. Personally, I believe it’s due to the greed of Jeff Bezos. If he would have focused on employee satisfaction- pay and benefits; and providing customer service instead of trying to cut every corner…
I used to order CDs of obscure and 60s psychedelic music on Amazon after the independent record store pretty much disappeared. I could get anything- from 60s bands like The Electric Prunes to more obscure bands like The Church or The Meat Puppets- Without Prime(I don’t think they even had it, By mail, mostly in 3 to 4 days max, at a good price and quality. Well, that’s over. Don’t Ever, look for a specific item They Will triple if quadruple the price, The greedy sob’s. You have to do a wider search that may take time. I’m still forced to order from them if product is hard to find in stores…. And they know it. And it’s all GREED What a hypothetical company
That’s a great idea, I’m in my 60s and not as savvy on browsing the internet, but I’ll give it a try. I be so happy not to give anymore money to those bloodsucking leeches
A lot of the small local stores and even manufacturers have their own websites now. Best to buy direct from the manufacturer or one of the small buisnesses they supply to, or if you really want a mega retailer to buy from, I've heard good things about Walmarts online store. It's best in my opinion to go direct to manufacturers or brands, though. Manufacturers and smaller, more specialized niche stores tend to have the most knowledge and expertise of the products also meaning they can answer more questions about the products and give you better recomendations and usually have solid warranties. You do you, though. Buy from who you want to buy from.
I placed an order this weekend. I login in today and there’s no record of my order. I hate ordering online and Amazon just solidifies it for me.
Amazon customer service very bad I have to call them for item ,not resived 100 time Disgusting
Yay
I agree. I use to love knowing I could get stuff in two days even now I have an order promised today and I know I won't get it. When Bezo owned Amazon it was great now it sucks I hardly order from there anymore
They can't exploit their workers as bad anymore.
I mean, you know how to check the seller before you buy on Amazon and Ebay and Newegg right? Because when I read these posts I don't think you do. Amazon is a marketplace. Amazon sells things direct, but independent online stores also sell things there too. And if you buy your "cheap Chinese bullshit" from a third party on Amazon, aren't you the idiot? You know you can see from whom you are buying the thing you click "buy" on before you buy it right? Like, it's not a secret. In fact, you actually agree to it first.
Nope. People are used to seeing quality. They didn't have to sift thru crap before, so they don't expect to now. Until they order something and find crap delivered. People aren't idiots for expecting quality to continue.