Amazon insisted that was impossible because their deliveries are GPS fenced within a small distance of the address.

However the delivery photo didn't match the apartment of any of my previous 100+ deliveries or any apartment in my complex for that matter.

They made me fill out by hand an incident report for every single item in the box (like a dozen) before they would give me a refund and now my account seems silently flagged for fraud where every CSR interaction is difficult and tedious.

I finally found a matching photo of the random apartment by browsing google street maps and sent it to them but they could care less.

The problem with a company so big it has millions of customers is that you become easily replaceable once some poorly coded automated system decides it's so and no-one can override it (or is willing).

Oh also, all my Amazon deliveries since then now come via USPS and not their own drivers/contracted

> The problem with a company so big it has millions of customers is that you become easily replaceable once some poorly coded automated system decides it's so and no-one can override it (or is willing).

Yep, I edited my comment with additional Amazon elaboration, probably while you were responding, because they're the worst. Haha. They didn't refund me properly for an expensive returned item and ended up giving me a "one-time exception" for money they owed me. It's not only just frustrating and mindnumbing, it's like getting slapped in the face. Sort of like those robot patrol cops in Elysium. And the silent flagging you described is what happened with my DoorDash account.

We are heading more and more into a "computer says no" dystopia. How many times per day are we already told things like "the system won't let me do that", "I'm not sure why the system says that", "that's weird", "just wait and it'll sort itself out", etc.

We have however many lines of code running that has little proper encoding of domains and required knowledge, but the systems are treated as the single source of action and truth.

They have even been farming out R&D and testing to customers and unwitting participants, such as the self-driving car companies and even Apple with features like their fall detection flooding 911 call centers with false positives.

You might like the short film “Please Hold” for a more nuanced take.

In triage, my customer segment is one you'd want to save. At least thinking rationally as a business owner.

If you have ever worked in one of these move fast companies, you know that nobody in the company cares. Every single person there is just doing enough for a promotion or to avoid a pip. Quarter after quarter, they are just focusing on BS metrics such as tickets resolved, lines of code and other such nonsense.

Fundamentally, these companies are not set up with the right mission and the right incentives. Doing good by customers and employees is not a thing.

This is something that is at odds with my firsthand experience here, too. Your previous characterization:

> nobody in the company cares. Every single person there is just doing enough for a promotion or to avoid a pip. Quarter after quarter, they are just focusing on BS metrics such as tickets resolved, lines of code and other such nonsense

... also applies to them—i.e., large, inefficient orgs that have nothing in common with the move-fast approach. Slow companies are slow because their size and approach to hiring/retention means they're stupidly inefficient. They end up with ossified corporate and social structures that the defenders don't even understand. (Ones that aren't a form of redundancy or the result of other wisdom, but because tons of people in the org, including leadership, can't see beyond the end of the shift, let alone to the same quarter the next year, and can't be bothered to care, either).

I notice this all the time with software. I tend to keep hardware for 5-8 years, and by the end of that window, apps and websites start feeling sluggish. Of course they do: all the devs have modern hardware and don’t notice how crappy the experience is on old hardware. You can tell them, but they don’t feel the pain and their empathy is limited by how much it actually impacts the bottom line.

It sounds like you were in the Middle East... my guess is that you got flagged by their denied party screening, which would also explain why nobody's telling you what happened. (Not trying to excuse Uber or "the system" here.)

What vendor does this, is it possible to correct one's profile? Also, is there any general redress mechanism?

The whole thing is strange since Uber and Grubhub dont have any real identification on you except phone/email/creditcard name -- is that even enough to do denied party screening and blacklist someone?

Also, anyone know the rationale to conduct denied party screening on food orders?

Can you fill in what that means? Why is the Middle East relevant and what is 'denied party screening'?