Maybe they figure that people who like dogs enough to want to see more will also click the link [1] to find out more about the "Dogs of Amazon", which seems to be unaffected by their problems. There they will find a story about Amazon's dog-friendly offices, 30+ pictures of Amazon dogs, and a video showing many of them. The time to consume all that is time the person is not hitting refresh on the shopping site, so maybe is a net win for Amazon.

[1] https://blog.aboutamazon.com/working-at-amazon/how-much-does...

Interestingly, despite not being a dog person, I found the first instance of a dog to be a cute, human-relatable inclusion. On later pages I found it frustrating and annoying.

I'm sure there's a fundamental UX principle or two at work there, but I won't pretend to truly know what they are.

It's called the Duck Hunt principle.

Any sources for me to read up on? Googling just gave me the BattleChess duck story, some unrelated UX examples using ducks, and info about how the duck hunt "gun" worked.

I've never heard the term before, but I do recall plenty of people playing duck hunt shooting at the dog when the game said they failed. Although, he kinda earned a laser zapping by laughing at your failures, right?

It's like https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/oopsie-woopsie

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Dammit I made the mistake of searching "Goatse" at work.

Oh, shoot, I forgot there were yungin's in the room. I'll edit that.

(Another "makes you feel old" moment when someone says they had to look up "goatse".)

Goatse, much like its counterparts are to me a litmus test of your internet culture / age.

Not even 30 yet - damn it hurts to put it writing; but clearly old enough to know the old interwebz :)

The dog pictures are cached locally in the app - can confirm because they also show up when traveling through a cellphone-signal-free zone everyday.

The pictures might be local, but I sure hope that retry button actually generates a request to the server.

I appreciate the edit for anyone whom has not experienced goatse as it also put my age in check.