It's so bad that I've started to disregard any customer support that happens as a chat. I'd rather drop and email or a support ticket than talk to some godforsaken chatbot or wait in line for 2 hours to talk to a human. It seems to me that the "chat support" craze has been used as an excuse to gut customer support teams.

This really shouldn't be a surprise. Even the outsourced Indian human support lines, where they are required to recite the corporate litany, and monitored to make sure they do, are really just human shields that protect the corporation from accountability...

Most of the outsourced support I've tried to get help from really might as well be chatbots. They will just keep repeating the same things which don't actually answer my question.

They were mechanical Turks waiting for the real bot upgrade.

I think the human on the other side is given tools with canned responses to select from so they too often lean on that.

That and they are required to have like 20+ windows open.

I could not do that job.

I’m travelling in Asia at the moment, and I had forgotten how much I loved the WhatsApp customer support approach. Most businesses have a WhatsApp account, and you just send them a DM when you need to talk to somebody. Response times are typically very quick, and sending a DM takes sooooo much less effort than a phone call. I wish the rest of the world would adopt SEA’s love for WhatsApp business accounts.

In the US, Apple's iMessage support chat service is incredible and I'm correspondingly much more likely to do business with companies that offer it, just in case I end up needing support.

> Amazon has started selling items that aren't returnable and I wish I could opt out of it

Is that legal?

I would not buy something where the seller can literally ship junk and legally you have no recourse.

> Is that legal?

Not in Europe.

I think we're conflating two things. A seller has to refund / replace / repair any merchandise that is defective or not as advertised, and that's true in the US and in the EU.

A seller does not necessarily have to accept returns if you changed your mind, found the item cheaper somewhere else, or just don't like it. Pretty sure that's also the case in the EU.

That is not the case at least in the UK; you have 14 days after receiving an item, for any online purchase you make, to return it, even if you just changed your mind.

Consumer protection regulations are genuinely so nice for feeling at ease with buying stuff online.

It is not the case in the EU, the legal term is "cooling off period". You get 14 days to change your mind for physical products ordered online

In Brazil you have 7 days to return any online order, no questions asked. You can use the product and return if you don’t like it, provided the product is not scratched etc. Companies might try to bullshit you and say that the ToS states that they only accept returns for products that weren’t opened, but they always cave after I send them the exact part of the consumer laws that support me. They have to refund the full amount, including shipping.

Caveat Emptor.

AFAIK it's legal. Might be courteous to disclose "no returns accepted" on such listings, but I don't think it's mandatory, at least not everywhere.

Buy with a credit card that offers warranty coverage on purchased items.

Even brick and mortar stores definitely will sell special items (discontinued items, returned items, etc.) on an all sales final basis sometimes.

It's reasonable they could do a chargeback on the basis of violation of implied warranty of fitness.

Edit: it's probably a violation of implied warranty of merchantability.

in the US yeah. it takes coordinated pressure from the working class to get reasonable-seeming laws like that passed. when we leave our rights to corporate charity, this is what we're left with

You mean Japan, not the US.

https://www.reddit.com/r/japanlife/comments/zt9ra1/why_is_it...

That’s in a physical store, which aren’t obligated to accept returns in Europe either (though they often do). Accepting returns is only mandatory for online sales, because there the buyer can’t physically evaluate the product like they can in a physical store.

Imagine you order a box of condoms, open the box. The product doesn’t violate any factual claim of the seller, but it’s not what you had in mind and want to return the box.

Should the seller eat the loss and accept the return?

That’s one simple case, but there will be myriads of other cases where a customer simply opening the case means the product has no retail value anymore.

You can’t blanket set a rule where the seller eats the loss no matter what. The customer having to prove beyond doubt that they were shipped a product that is fraudulent under objective standards is a natural evolution of a marketplace.

The middle ground is heuristics and surveillance of overall customer claims, but I’m not sure that’s what we’re arguing about.

That’s the easiest proposition ever.

Do you want to be the entity that enabled my wife and I to have an all weekend sexathon, with the piece of mind that there’s no surprise baby coming? Or do you want the be the entity that cock-blocked me by sticking us with the condoms she doesn’t like?

It’s worth more than the value of the product to be the vendor that got me laid.

Companies like Amazon are making bad customer decisions like this because their growth trajectory is falling and they didn’t see it coming. So they are stuck with stupid capital investments and with running their own version of the post office that they don’t really need.

So now the MBA idiots assume that I’m some sort of criminal scamming them out of condoms. (All the while operating the largest carnival of grift ever devised via FBA) Whatever, I’ll go to CVS and deal with the inconvenience and awful shopping experience rather than risk being stuck with a product I don’t like.

Do you get to return condom boxes at CVS ?

> It’s worth more than the value of the product to be the vendor that got me laid.

This is of course the key. Is it actually worth more to them ?

To jest, if for instance you were ready to give up on Amazon and go buy everything from Wallmart at the first sign Amazon isn’t treating you well enough, and expect to be buying high brand goods at lower than market price, your LTV will probably be pretty low to Amazon. And of course, as you don’t like their condoms, you’re also basically dead to the seller.

On the other hand, if you were willing to eat up the price of a box of condoms, see high value in the Amazon experience, will continue to buy Amazon stuff even if there’s occasional hiccups, you’re a ton more valuable to Amazon. But then their real value to you won’t be wether they force the seller to accept the return, but probably wether they can get you a box of a different brand ASAP.

> Do you get to return condom boxes at CVS ?

Depends on the manager but at least a human is making a decision.

> The product doesn’t violate any factual claim of the seller, but it’s not what you had in mind and want to return the box.

The product doesn't have to violate any "factual" claim of the seller when the seller isn't beholden to customers.

> Should the seller eat the loss and accept the return?

Yes absolutely. Sellers should stand behind the products they manufacture. If a customer doesn't like something they purchased then the customer should be entitled to obtaining recompense up to, and including, a refund.

Suppose you go to a restaurant and order the McFatmeup Burger Prince. You take one bite of it and decide you don't like it.

Should you pay for the burger?

Yes? In what McDonald's do you get to walk away from that? Maybe in a super fancy restaurant that builds subjective satisfaction into the cost of doing business, but then you can also go to department stores where they have unlimited return policies, not some discount place like Amazon.

Now granted, Amazon used to have good customer service, but now they are definitely discount.

McDonald's and fast food places deal with situations like that everyday, and from what I see, they just make the food how the customer wants it in retrospect, let them substitute it for something else or refund them.

Refusing to do so over a $6 sandwich is how you get irate customers calling corporate to complain, who will then give them coupons for free meals in response.

> Should you pay for the burger?

I’ve had restaurants replace an order for various reasons, some as silly as “our kid read the wrong menu line”, and while we’re ready to pay for it the restaurants usually eat the cost.

But we’re still paying for the whole meal and additional purchases, and the restaurant’s loss (time and raw ingredients) is hopefully covered by the rest of the orders. We actually make an effort to order enough for that tbh.

I were to go to a fancy burger shop, order a menu, take one bite, stand up and get out of the shop shouting “that burger is disgusting” with a horrified face, I’d definitely should be paying for that burger, yes.

> The customer having to prove beyond doubt that they were shipped a product that is fraudulent under objective standards is a natural evolution of a marketplace.

So I will sell you on Amazon an enpty box instead of a Rolex. You open the box and its empty, how are you going to prove the box was empty to begin with?'

Suppose I ship you a CPU i know to be broken, how will you prove it was broken? I, the seller, can alway say you broke it.

Welcome to retail.

On online retail, that’s why delivery services weight the packages, take photos of the boxes delivered etc.

On retail in general, we’ve enjoyed these same questions for decades. You buy a video card, open the box and a connector is bent. When getting it back to the brick and mortar store, you’ll have quite a time explaining you didn’t crush it by accident. Shops that value you will help. Other will just show you the door, and you’ll need to find many other people with similar issues to finally get your voice heard.

A lot of people here seem to be arguing Amazon returns are black and white… they are not, and you’ll have the same discussions as everywhere else, except you’ll be sending messages and photos back and forth.

There is an important distinction - if you buy something in store, at least hypothetically have a chance to inspect. You at least will see that the box is sealed and undamaged, and you could open it if you insist.

When you get a package delivered, you can do none of those things

In my experience this is a distinction without being relevant in a lot of cases. I used to shop at a national retailer that had a very generous return policy, the other side of it being that they’d inspect returns and potentially repackage them when judging they had been unused (sealed package etc.), except for super high margin stuff where they’d be more open to just discard the returns.

But then fraudster learned the ropes, and after a while knowing wether your product was actually new or not got basically impossible. They still had a generous return policy, so you wouldn’t be left SOL, but expectations got a lot different.

I’ll aim for a brick and mortar retailer if I go for a specific well established brand I’m willing to pay extra for (in particular if it’s the brand’s direct store), but otherwise I don’t feel physical retail has much of a high ground compared to online ones given the overhead and other limitations.

> Amazon has started selling items that aren't returnable and I wish I could opt out of it. I got a laptop/phone bracket that was made with some crappy, brittle plastic, but Amazon didn't accept returns on that item.

Every time I read shit like that I feel like EU's intrusiveness and overreaching might in the end be worth it if it stops [1] corporation from shit like that

* https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/shopping/gua...

Maybe the intrusiveness and overreaching was just fundamental consumer protections all along.

Oh, no, there is definitely some questionable overreach in regulations, the most known example to the outside is probably just how shittily the "cookie law" was written, good intentions with law that made the intentions irrelevant as implementation just trained users to click the stupid button and get on with their day.

And stuff like pushing for EVs before infrastructure is there, all while planes are fine and dandy to run on fucking leaded fuel...

The cookie law wasn't half as shitty as the lazy ways companies adhere to it. But even that I'll take any day over the time before the cookie law (which, BTW, is much more extensive than just regulating cookies).

If a law results in companies taking actions that annoy and impede hundreds of millions of people in aggregate, there's something wrong with the law. Governments need to consider the actual effects when they write laws, not what the effects would be in an ideal world.

The law doesn't result in the companies taking actions that annoy, that is the decision of the company. Why do you absolve the company of any and all responsibility?

The law causes malicious compliance therefore it's a bad law?

Well, sure. However, quite a lot of the websites aren't actually in compliance in the first place.

For example, this Christmas I had to remind a company that me placing an order was not permission for them to email me a survey asking how good the delivery was — customers aren't a free QA team.

A law that results in negative outcomes outweighing the positive ones is a bad law, yes.

Like all US tax law?

A lot of tax law is bad, yes. I certainly wouldn't say all though.

Maybe they should have worked out some basic scenarios and written the law with those in mind?

That what appears to what happened with GDPR, it is much more sensible and covers the common "workarounds" of making the reject harder or blocking the site content if you reject

"And stuff like pushing for EVs before infrastructure is there, all while planes are fine and dandy to run on fucking leaded fuel..."

You have to start somewhere and go step by step, if you want to solve huge problems.

Who would pay for an infrastructure for EVs, when there are no EVs around? Chicken and egg problem.

There is many crazy shit the EU has done, like the famous regulation on how cucumbers are supposed to bend exactly, which they abolished by now, but still once a month, the whole parliament and stuff moves from Strasbourg to Bruessel - and back, because they cannot settle one one place to be, but the slight push for renewable energy would not be on my list of big faults, even if it is inconsistent.

> Who would pay for an infrastructure for EVs, when there are no EVs around?

The owners, obviously. You think we installed gas stations before we had cars?

But an ICE car is an obvious improvement in both cost and usability to a horse-drawn carriage. Half of the value of an EV is that it's cheaper and easier to refuel. Making everyone who'd want one pay thousands to install infrastructure for them removes a lot of the reason you'd ever buy one, since it's otherwise essentially the same as an ICE car in terms of usage.

If anything, right now, an EV is literally a worse car to an equivalent ICE in terms of what it's capable of. The reasons you'd have one is either general environmental altruism or because it'll be cheaper over the long term to own one.

Back when horse drawn carriages were the most common, EVs looked better than ICEs.

We had to find the petroleum reserves before diesel and petrol could get cheap enough for ICEs to fully dominate over that era's EVs.

Sure, but that's not really relevant to the point I'm trying to make. People moved away from animal-based travel to cars because cars had distinct improvements in usability and upkeep cost. It was ok to have the infrastructure come later because they were still an obvious improvement even without the infrastructure being in place yet.

Right now, if I want an EV, I'm paying 20% more money to buy it, it's got a shorter range than my ICE for the same size car, and the infrastructure to do things like long trips with multiple recharges isn't there yet.

Okay, I'm interested, how did one get car fuel back then? Did people have to send one of their servants to a chemist for a mixture?

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filling_station#United_States :

> The first "drive-in" filling station, Gulf Refining Company, opened to the motoring public in Pittsburgh on December 1, 1913, at Baum Boulevard and St Clair's Street. Prior to this, automobile drivers pulled into almost any general or hardware store, or even blacksmith shops in order to fill up their tanks.

No, but only because gas station idea (drive through automated fuel retail) wasn't a thing.

However a human with a fuel reserve that could top you up was a thing before cars (a fuel retail). Before the dawn of the automobiles people were replacing steam engines with gas and liquid powered engines.

Here it is the USDA regulations on how cucumbers are supposed to bend and how to grade them:

https://www.ams.usda.gov/grades-standards/cucumber-grades-an...

Damn that US government overreaching, telling cucumbers how much should they bend!

...or maybe that regulation is there for a reason (most times to protect consumers)?

"or maybe that regulation is there for a reason (most times to protect consumers)"

Erm, can you tell me in what way a cucumber is dangerous to consumers, if its shape is bend a little bit more or less, so they need to be protected of that threat?

As far as I can see, if you produce a fruit that is healthy, with good coloration and the only thing “wrong” about it is the shape then you can still sell it.

You just can’t call your torus shaped fruit a cucumber because that’s not what anyone expects a cucumber to look like.

I'm looking at the USDA regulations and they seem reasonable to me. Looks like they're protecting consumers from being sold garbage labeled "cucumbers" instead of cucumbers labeled "cucumbers".

"The maximum diameter of each cucumber shall be not more than 2-3/8 inches and the length of each cucumber shall be not less than 6 inches"

Why is that reasonable?

This regulation means, that perfectly fine cucumbers that happen to be a bit smaller will get thrown away. Or well, into the lower grade category, but even in the lowest category

"maximum diameter of each cucumber shall be not more than 2-3/8 inches and the length of each cucumber shall be not less than 5 inches"

These are arbitary size regulations. You do not need to regulate that to ban garbage. You can have a cucumber with the perfect shape, that is still garbage, because sunburned or too ripe or the plant was sick or whatever. Yes it should be illegal to sell garbage as fresh food and it probably is, but I do not see the connection to shape at all. This is merely aesthetics and personally I prefer a weird shaped ecological cucumber over a perfectly sized and shiny tasteless thing full of pesticides any day.

Do you pay by the kilo (or pound) for cucumbers or per unit?

That depends on the market and seller, I have seen both. And whether I buy a cucumber depends on its quality.

What big cucumbers they sell in stores nowadays!

In all seriousness, if you’re paying by weight (or volume) then it should be OK not to have standard sized cucumbers… but pricing per unit should be reasonably consistent.

These regulations are descriptive. They exist so that there is a law somewhere that describes what a cucumber is.

Sidenote, this whole exchange is .. urgh. People criticizing things they haven't spent a minute to try to understand :/

Imagine if I came up to your monitor and started looking at individual lines of your code, and then I see an "x = 0", and I start criticizing it in a vacuum, completely cluelessly, as someone who has never coded before?

"People criticizing things they haven't spent a minute to try to understand"

Or maybe I have indeed worked on fields and packaging when I was younger and travelling and witnessed the throwing away of perfectly fine food, that just did not met some arbitary size regulations?

"Sidenote, this whole exchange is .. urgh"

But I agree to that. I am not really here to discuss the sense of defining cucumber sizes. If you are into that, have fun with it.

> can you tell me in what way a cucumber is dangerous to consumers, if its shape is bend a little bit more or less

I can't tell why a bent cucumber is dangerous, but I can tell tell why specifications for cucumbers are sometimes needed. When someone in the food industry needs cucumbers, he can't use any kind of cucumber, because it will go through machines with a calibre expectation. The industry that builds the machines also need specifications for their inputs.

Many regulations on fruits and vegetable are meant to help the food processing, since nowadays most of the raw food is processed by the food industry, not by consumers in their kitchens.

Oh, and you can still sell vegetable that are out of spec. AFAIK that's still legal in Europe, but since they can't have the right label, wholesale buyers may be hard to find at the same price.

" When someone in the food industry needs cucumbers, he can't use any kind of cucumber, because it will go through machines with a calibre expectation"

We were talking about consumer products.

"Oh, and you can still sell vegetable that are out of spec. "

Now you can. The regulations regarding sizes of cucumbers have been abolished in 2009, even though the whole theather about it was rather populism.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verordnung_(EWG)_Nr._1677/88_(... (german)

That's not stopping you from selling the cucumbers, just normalizes "quality classes" so customers know what they get. EU does stuff like that for many regional product, you can make cheese, you just can't name it say "Parmigiano Reggiano".

It's not the same as banning

Putting money in infrastructure so customer sees it's cheaper to use EVs and just buys it is fine, but ban on ICE car sales is not "slight push".

Given the size of the problem climate change, it is a slight push, especially since the sales ban is supposed to start in 2035.

I trust you are aware that a very very small portion of aviation fuel burned is leaded (mostly just small general aviation aircraft)

If companies had respected the Do Not Track and browser vendors had made it easier to adopt we wouldn't have ended up with the situation we are in now.

If we really cared about tracking and privacy, browsers would just disable 3rd party cookies (or make it easy to disable cookies). It's full-on insane to use the law to force every website developer to add their own cookie banner when we could just change the browser and be done with it.

Or, the website could just not track you and thus not require a cookie banner?

They could, but ultimately they want to track us.

People also want to perform CSRF attacks. So what do we do? Make a law against CSRF? Or change the browsers to make it much harder?

You've just said:

> It's full-on insane to use the law to force every website developer to add their own cookie banner […]

Which is obvious FUD. And this comment now makes it clear that you actually knew that you're spreading FUD.

> browsers would just disable 3rd party cookies (or make it easy to disable cookies)

Firefox has that built into its tracking protection. I don't know what's it set to by default, but it took me three clicks to reach the setting.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/third-party-cookies-fir...

> browsers would just disable 3rd party cookies (or make it easy to disable cookies).

Hasn't that been a standard browser setting since the 1990s? I remember Netscape had it.

> And stuff like pushing for EVs before infrastructure is there, all while planes are fine and dandy to run on fucking leaded fuel...

To be clear, normal planes don't run on leaded fuel. Avgas, which is often leaded, is used in small propellor planes.

Also, these seem, er, totally unrelated? The EU could ban leaded fuel tomorrow, and arguably should; this would lead to the grounding of a small number of small planes. But it doesn't have a lot to do with cars.

What's wrong with "the cookie law"?

If a website wants to spy on you it needs to make that at least very clear to the user.

Nobody likes "cookie banners". But those banners are just a result of the fact that almost all web sites want to spy on their users, and sell the this way collected data. If you don't do that you don't need any banner. (Does HN has a cookie banner? Does for example https://noyb.eu/en has a banner? Does Wikipedia has a banner? Go figure.)

But probably the truth is somewhere in between, like most of the time.

Partly. But it's wildly mixed with market protection mechanisms, and quite some pure bureaucratic craziness.

And it's not like you couldn't buy worst "chinesium" in the EU. On the other hand they will "protect" you from buying useful stuff…

The basic rules and guiding principles are at least customer friendly. (And we usually don't wait until something breaks in terrible ways. We try to enforce high standards early on. But like said, often the rules are only there to protection EU vendors and their markets in the end).

Europe is always saving everyone's ass ... Airline policies, usb-c on phones, 5 years support, etc etc. But it's still never enough.

I guess the libertarian American argument would be that the free market is already doing its job here, as the parent commenter is no longer using Amazon quite as much as they used to. Walmart is providing a better service. People will eventually figure that out and flock to Walmart. Why do we need the law to tell Amazon what to do?

Yes, but truth is that free market is not actually working.

If free market really worked, there would be no Amazon bad customer care, because they would not survive the competition of a great number of better services.

In reality in most places in America Amazon and Walmart are the only alternatives, with only one of the two easily available.

Free market has killed the small shops that provided the aforementioned good customer support.

If USA version of free market was so good as advertised, things like food deserts [1] would not exist. It's something that have an enormous impact on society at large and hits fragile families harder, if that wasn't possible by law, wouldn't it be better?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert

Yeah good points - I definitely don't want to say that free market always results in perfect outcomes. n=1, Amazon does seem to be out-competed by Walmart in terms of customer support. If they still survive after awhile of this without improving their customer support, then the stubborn conclusion would be that people on average actually don't care so much about customer support! Or maybe more like people don't use customer support quality as a big factor for deciding which website to buy from (and that definitely might be a good reason to include some regulation. customer support is in peoples' best interest but they don't think about it so much)

> started selling items that aren't returnable and I wish I could opt out of it

I'm not sure if this is legal in Australia or EU. You might also have some state-level laws that would prevent this. Have you tried pushing back against them?

Micro Center RULES!!!

Is a $9 bracket even worth your time to return it? It's going to take your time to return something at Walmart, too.

What Amazon does for me is save the most valuable thing I have - time. Buying printer paper at a store costs me an hour + gas. Buying it from Amazon - 3 minutes.

The time = money equation doesn't really work for my situation. I get a fixed amount of money every month, no matter how hard I work or don't work. I am picking up eggs and milk at Walmart anyways, so sure it's worth my time. Especially if I get to see the same faces every once in awhile. While they may not be paid the best, I'll take a smiling local face over a distant chatbot any day of the week.

As to your example, buying printer paper online, this invariable leads to my box of printer paper being smashed by Amazon's delivery people (probably b/c they are paid like crap), and I have to return it - costing more than an hour + my frustration. So instead, I can drop by Walmart, pick up eggs and milk - and squeeze my tomatoes to make sure they aren't mush - look at my lettuce to check for slime, pick up a box of printer paper and drop off my return/exchange.

Also, Target, Office Depot, Home Depot, Lowe's and Costco have great customer service compared to Amazon too. Walmart just has 3rd party sellers that other store don't offer - so Walmart is getting more of my online orders lately.

I've bought endless stuff from Amazon, and only once got a damaged package (it was inadequately packed, the package wasn't abused). I'm not denying your experience, just that mine is positive.

Ironically by far the biggest issue I’ve had with Amazon shipping is with books, specifically hardbacks with dust covers. They love to just throw them loose in a too-big box.

Annoying when it’s a new release. Infuriating when it’s a 50 year old, long out of print book.

You might laugh, but I buy the cheapest, most battered books from Amazon. I kinda like the patina of a well-used book, and let the people who like pristine ones buy the others! My LotR trilogy is one of my valued possessions: dirty, smudged, creased, battered, yellowed, dogeared, it's awesome. They've clearly been enjoyed by their previous owner(s).

Sadly, the local used bookstore tries hard to stock books only in "like new" condition. This removes the best "tell" for if the book is good or not - if it looks well-used, it's probably a great book.

I don’t mind patina, but it took my 3 tries to get an acceptable copy of of a rare naval history book.

The first arrived with the spine totally destroyed (some pages literally hanging on my a thread) and the second was shipped in such a large box that it came open during shipping, and every single page had a massive hard crease at varying angles.

Amazon handled it far as refunds, but it still took over a month, and that’s now 2 less copies of that book in existence, and it’s not exactly common.

This is a book that goes for $100+ even well used

I have some old naval books, so I'm curious of the title of yours.

Got a couple shelf’s of em, but the book in question is Breyer - Battleships and Battlecruisers 1905-1970

Useful because it (brief, but extant) coverage of nations like Brazil, Spain, and Greece, which don’t tend to get much coverage.

Wow, looks like a sweet book!

I have many, too, including the set "History of United States Naval Operations in World War II" by Morison.

I’ve been tempted by that one too… but I got too many I haven’t read already :)

Norman Friedman is excellent, very engineering heavy.

I tried to return online merchandise from Walmart at a physical store and they didn't take it. This was a few years ago. I would assume due to your story the policy changed, but have you actually done it or is this conjecture?

> Amazon delivery just throwing things on the ground and damaging them

My experience with the delivery people has been fine.

But Amazon itself keeps wrapping books that I order in bubble-padded manila envelopes that are too tight. This causes obvious damage to the corners of the book. I have repeatedly complained to them about this, and their response is "we have no way to control what packaging is used on any shipment".

They used to ship things in boxes. They should go back to that.

It's interesting you say this because for some time people in my family were using Amazon's excellent customer service to make money by fraudulently lying about misdeliveries and product conditions. From what they told me customer services reps at Amazon basically ask no questions (unlike other stores) and would happily ship you multiple high-value items. Apparently you'd have to be strategical to not make it look too suspicious, but if you can get serval households involved you could get a few new phones for free over the course of a year.

This was for higher value items though, and maybe Amazon's customer service / returns policy is different in the UK, but I'm genuinely surprised that you avoid Amazon for returns because from what I understand they're far more likely to accept a return than other retailers.

I think I probably have a biased perspective because of my background, but 99% of the time when I hear about someone returning stuff they're doing it fraudulently. That cost is then passed on to people like myself who basically refuse to return anything unless I'm sure I'm 100% not at fault so in general I wish companies didn't do returns outside of exceptional circumstances. Also working for a phone insurance company and a retailer with a relaxed returns policy made me appreciate the insane level of fraud which has to be financed by honest consumers.

But on the topic of in-store returns, one of the only times I've ever returned anything was a pair of £60 shoes which tore in the first week of normal use. I went to the store I brought it from and explained they tore and would like a replacement. The staff were extremely rude and tried to blame me which I found very uncomfortable. They then said they'd have to ship it to some department to assess if it can be repaired or replaced. A couple of weeks later I got a call saying it was decided I was at fault, so no replacement or refund would be issued and that I could come collect my shoes from the store. The store was about 30 minutes away from my house and I had to pay for parking, so this was all extremely inconvenient.

Maybe it's just because I have social anxiety, but I'll take cheerful chatbot over having to deal with a rude person instore any day of the week. In fact, it's why I use Amazon. Their customer support has always been great for me.

I think on one side Amazon started punishing those who abused the return policy repeatedly and, on the other one, the chat support has become a shit show with people not being able to help and being just as bad as chatbots.

I've personally been sent a single elastic band for hairs instead of 1 TB SSD, twice, and had to explain to them that shipping it back didn't make sense for either of us and eventually got what I needed them to understand, but only after wasting over an hour talking to some clown service who isn't allowed to use proof or their breaks. And that's just how things have been going in the last year, worst and worst...

> think I probably have a biased perspective because of my background, but 99% of the time when I hear about someone returning stuff they're doing it fraudulently.

seemsna little biased - I was looking for an item to fix a problem, in this sitiation the only way to know which item would fit was by trying. Bought four items, returned 3.

Of manufacturers of said items probided accurate and precise specification, they would save everyones time

Regardring sneakers, had similar situation, I think one ofnthose cases whwre you ahve to raise hell over it to get your way

Amazon has officially turned heel and now everyone still uses them but at least they realize it often sucks. With so many other options I don't see why people use them if another option exists.

Here's a video of horrible customer service that's better than Amazon https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECZQ7qzGbUY .