If a rich person went onto Amazon and bought something 50 times more expensive than anything else they’d ever purchased and claimed it didn’t arrive, Amazon would drop them like a hot potato.

You’re talking like there’s no legal recourse (or even financial, like a chargeback). There simple aren’t enough resources to track down the source of every sob story, the hard truth is this “inhuman” efficiency is a huge boon for the vast majority of us.

A bare minimum level of diligence is required before denying a claim. Else you -should- run into bad faith, punitive damages, action from regulators, etc. It's not some super magical extensive investigation to realize that you shipped a box that weighs much less than the item and that there's likely a big problem.

There may be very valid reason to shortcut claims and to grant dubious claims of high value customers. But you really shouldn't just ship an empty box and say "sorry, you're not getting your money back unless you sue us". (And worse, break the customer's existing digital content if they do, because you can hold it hostage).

I mean, I get that it's financially appealing to externalize the costs of in-warehouse and in-transit shrinkage to random low-value customers, but brah-- that's just not right.

It worked as it should have been - situation got resolved and on top of that Amazon got reputational damage.

Via media intervention? Eh. That concerns me and makes me worry that 99% of the time this happens it silently goes away from a customer who is not able to get media attention.

IMO this should be a flag for regulators to start taking a look, too, to understand how systemic this is.

Out of all things such as app store monopoly abuses and taxes, right to repair abuses in both devices and cars, search/ads monopoly power abuses, consumer protection is already reasonably and well regulated and not the first thing that needs additional regulation.

There's already decent regulation, yes. It may be time for the regulators to actually look at Amazon using those extant regulations, if they are declining returns in clear-cut cases like this.

I have a vague sense this overlooks inelastic demand and living wage somehow but I can't put it into words.