Any persons in engineering worth their salt would not buy metrology equipment from Amazon. Exactly as you said, seems like the problem is Amazon, not equipment or engineers/technicians/etc.

This is good for all of us. Amazon is becoming a place to buy low end essentials and it gives opportunities to smaller businesses to build reputation and sell directly. The only thing that’s missing is a good directory of indie shops. No, Google isn’t a good one. We should build a modern yellow pages.