Not true, I've dealt with Amazon support and I thought it was better than dealing with my bank or cable company.

Someone once tried to steal my account and they would not help me unless I gave them the attackers email (they changed it on the account). This despite using the same email for 10 years with them. Luckily amazon auto-filled it on one of their sign in forms so I was able to repeat it back to the customer service agent.

Even then they were non-committal about fixing it despite the person making multiple fraudulent purchases.

As a product buyer? AWS customer? Or vendor?

As an S3 customer for web hosting, I couldn’t understand why I was paying 10 cents a month for EC2 charges since I don’t use it. They just refunded me an entire month, but I really wanted to know what was happening!

As a product buyer. I complained and they gave me a refund without any hassle.

It's not that I think Amazon is wonderful, I just don't think they're worse than any other giant corporation I've dealt with. Which is why I don't understand jdsully's comment.

I suspect that on Amazon's scale, it's probably cheaper for them to toss refunds at customers than to actually fix problems.

Having a first-tier CSR click a dashboard button costs them the 10 cents per month plus 25 cents of labour to pay the guy to read the complaint, find the button, and press it.

Opening a ticket for a well-paid engineer to actually dissect the billing system and figure out where the 10 cent charge comes from, develop a fix, push it through validation and deploy it, probably costs $300.

Oh, I’m sure. It worked out great for me, but it probably affected all S3 public web hosting users.

Though i’d Estimate a fix costs at least 10x $300, if not 100-1000x.

They are making it harder and harder to find their support page though, and as stellar as customer support is once I get hold of them... everything else about Amazon is going customer-hostile.

Google’s Fiber support line is great! Knowledgeable technical reps and I’ve never had a hold time. Unfortunately it’s only in a few cities and they’ve largely abandoned the effort.

With AT&T I tried for over a month to get internet installed and after hours of phone calls and them telling me a technician was coming they eventually revealed the billing department had flagged us and wanted a larger deposit for some reason. The two systems seemed totally separate.