I've bought stacks of laptops from them during the pandemic when some things were difficult to buy. $15k worth of laptops left on the stoop. This happened multiple times.

Meanwhile I ordered a $20 speaker cable that was factory defective and decided it was better to eat the loss than risk doing a return. I know every return you do with Amazon is a Black mark on your record. Unfortunately they bought out Audible, I have a library there I've been building over fifteen years. If I get banned by Amazon I lose all my audiobooks as well as paid music and movies on Amazon itself. I've eaten a bunch of losses actually due to this threat.

Unless you're retuning multiple things a month every month this probably isn't a realistic fear but, I guess you never know with these big corporate automated systems.

Do you have any information on this record that Amazon keeps? Is there a risk of getting banned after a certain number of returns?

So the problem is that Amazon is extremely non-transparent about the policy and what the triggers are, so you will never see it coming. This is exactly why it causes me so much anxiety, I've heard that if you have bad luck with one high value laptop being defective or God forbid being stolen off your porch, that can do you in. So I want to save all my social credit for actual nightmare scenarios like that rather than waste it on returning defective Chinese cables and trinkets. I also avoid buying high risk items off Amazon now. (Products I know from personal experience have a higher than 1 in 1000 defect rate.)

https://bestlifeonline.com/banned-from-amazon/

Why not just stop ordering there?

Do you mean to punish them because of what I dislike or mainly to protect my media collection? Just so I can reply accordingly...

I'm sure Amazon knows theft rate by zip code.

They do. That sort of thing is tracked internally. There are some neighborhoods we know to not leave things laying around because they'll get stolen. OTOH, in most any suburban environment as long as its out of sight from the street and is protected from the elements, then it's considered to be in a secure location. If you're getting packages stolen then honestly the best solution is to have them delivered to an Amazon locker near you. That might not be convenient, but you'll definitely get your stuff.

I'm not sure what counts as "really expensive", but I ordered a $1k laptop via amazon and it was shipped with FedEx, no siganture required. (2-3 years ago, southeast US)

It’s a few thousands of USD. I don’t know what or even if there’s a magic cut off. But there’s some point where they seemingly no longer trust minimum wage subcontractors. Or perhaps it varies by locale… Even the Whole Foods security guards are armed where I live.

> Even the Whole Foods security guards are armed where I live

I don't remember ever having seen _any_ security guards in a grocery store before, let alone armed ones! It's possible I've mistaken some for regular employees if they wore the same uniform, but I'm fairly certain I would have noticed if they were carrying weapons...

Local grocers here (UK) have security guards (not armed!) I once saw one chasing a shoplifter; the shoplifter ran faster. But most of the time they're just standing around, diddling their mobile device.

I don't think their purpose is to deter shoplifters; it's really to deter assaults on staff. Shoplifting is just part of the cost of doing business as a grocers.

I once saw a couple of armed cops in my local grocers; UK cops are generally not armed, but these guys were carrying big old pistols as they wandered through the aisles looking for sandwiches. I'm not keen on sharing supermarket aisles with gunmen, even if they're in uniform; so I complained. Armed cops should disarm (e.g. leave their guns in the cop-car) if all they're doing is shopping for lunch. I was treated with scorn.

UK also. I reported a minor crime and had armed plod turn up on my doorstep as they were "in the area".

I rather politely told them to fuck off. (We can do without militarisation of our police service thankyou.)

I live in an EU inner city. Most of our grocery stores are quite small, so it's usually like one cashier, one person stacking shelves, and maybe extra people at peak hours to handle deliveries or open a second checkout. A security guard would definitely be out of their budget. For americans, think like a double size 7-11.

Larger stores in the suburbs definitely do, and my understanding is something like whole foods would be similarly sized to those.

I think it depends on the seller, I've had to sign for $20 items but not ones that cost a few hundred.

I have never (hundreds, maybe even 1000+ deliveries) had to sign for an Amazon purchase. The only thing I can recall signing for, from any vendor, in the past 10 years was my wine club shipments and that's only been 50/50 since Covid.

I have $300 purchases that I had to read a 6-digit character to the amazon driver, the driver enter it in their device, and then release for shipment.

I've gotten laptops shipped that supposedly had a signature required, but they ended up leaving it at the door anyway. Then the signature on the order shows a misspelled version of my name. I guess it just doesn't matter to them.