I bought an $800 winch from Amazon, shipped and sold by Amazon, in “new” condition. When it arrived, not only was it clearly used, but it had been damaged by improper use and would have been extremely dangerous if I tried to use it. If I hadn’t known what to look for, I probably would have used it and been at risk of serious injury. Amazon is clearly marking returns as “new” if their clueless returns staff thinks they can pass it off.

Yeah, me too. I imagine it's a process that is difficult to scale without error.

I like buying Amazon Warehouse deals when the item makes sense to me. With larger items I think their quality control is higher, and the saving tend be bigger. The box may arrive super beat-up, but item is just fine.

My motivation is probably less about overall savings, but more about me feeling like I'm doing Amazon a favor. Weird, isn't it? I'm conditioned.

As a tangent: I've also purchased used that ended up being a return of a similar looking, but much less expensive item. So I just re-return it. In this case I assume it was fraud on the original return. With my patterns I doubt Amazon thinks -I- returned them the wrong item. Without customer context their job figuring stuff like that out would be much more difficult.

I wouldn't buy anything I need to trust on Amazon.

That's not just Amazon though. I bought a band saw from Lowes that once I opened the box had clearly been used and dropped, so much that the base was bent.

Generally speaking my personal experiences with Amazon have been good. However, I’ve similarly shifted most of my online purchases elsewhere because (1) I don’t trust the reviews anymore and (2) I don’t trust Amazon’s suppliers.

Ironically, my purchases on Amazon these days are almost exclusively books and ebooks.

Same, but for books I've switched to my local bookstore. Mainly because I would like to continue having a local bookstore. Now that I don't have Prime anymore, cost and speed are about the same.

I've been meaning to check out alternative ebook vendors too. Anybody have something they like on Android?

I like Kobo out of the big players. Google feels like they could give up anytime. I've also had issues getting downloadable ePubs from them.

If you like SciFi/Fantasy, Baen sells ebooks direct with no DRM on their website in multiple formats and have for like 20 years. Some other publishers do this too like Image comics. Most don't though so you need to go through one of the bigger stores unfortunately.

The rule in our house is to not order anything that goes in or on our bodies from Amazon.