This is a company that is actively shooting itself in the foot on all fronts and by the time they realize it’s gone too far they won’t be able to turn the ship fast enough.
I have had so many issues with orders from Amazon recently that they told me I’m on a watch list for returns and could have my account terminated.
I’ve been a customer for about 20 years with this account.
I’ll be shopping at other retailers now.
Each had an issue as a result of Amazon’s shady practices. One was returned, sold as new. The replacement was defective.
So I ordered another model. First was damaged in transit. Second was a return that another OEMs charger.
I said “fuck this” and went to Best Buy, paid approximately the same price and had an actual, new, working Chromebook for my son.
Amazon has not lost, but it is definitely losing its unique edge.
I’ve got friends who’ve moved from AWS-centric roles to Azure-centric, prime is a dead product walking, twitch is unprofitable, Alexa is dead, and their original business is squeezing users, drivers, and employees. A strong viable Amazon.com alternative and they are done.
My account is not closed (but they "reserve the right to close it" anytime). I am glad I have no kindle or DRM stuff...
I tried to get an explanation, but just got a robot email.
I will never buy there anymore. Even if some stuff are hard to find elsewhere
Do they actually use such direct language? I received a passive-aggressive message from Amazon implying I was returning things too frequently (which was unfair IMHO; I had just returned three items that I had purchased as part of a bundle, but which might have made my return stats for the year look bad). But they haven't escalated it yet for me with more direct language.
What are we comparing to here?
Google Cloud? Azure? Linode? Openstack? OVH? Oracle Cloud? Hetzner?
They all suck too, just in different ways.
I can think of a dozen quotes related to the decline of a thing being "impossible", and then sudden.
Enron for example had it's best year, right before it suddenly stopped existing.
"The candle that burns twice as bright, burns half as long", and "The night is darkest before the dawn" both relate to things appearing one way because the end is more likely.
Amazon is mostly inertia, they are user hostile to a fault, which is a far removal from what made them huge in the first place. Normally when there has been such a reversal in a companies principles: it's the beginning of the end.
I'm not desperate for it, I couldn't care less. But what we will witness now is the power of capital to beget capital, don't be fooled into thinking Amazon is innovative.
Don't anthropomorphise the lawnmower.
Unless I want to buy something weird, in which case there's also a good chance delivery fails entirely for some reason and the order gets cancelled on the other side.
One point that is not mentioned is that Amazon is making boatload of money by advertising. Their ad revenue is 50 billion dollars and rapidly rising. This make them look invincible and total shit at the same time.
I make most of my money supporting companies on AWS, but I've stopped recommending it to new shops largely for the same reasons - if you're not big enough for them to knock on your door, they won't answer when you knock on theirs.
It appears to be a reasonable strategy, as seen with Apple's successful introduction of the M1 chip, which set them apart from other PC makers.
In 2023 I placed exactly 100 orders and this year I'm probably going to hit the same number. I've had very few problems over the years (my first order was March 29, 2000). During that time, I've lived in a bunch of different cities across three states.
This is my opinion and I'm not trying to convince you of it. Have a nice day.
I remember one move I made to a new city. I'd downsized a bunch of my stuff and got settled in pretty quickly. Everything was right with the world except my Harmony remote didn't survive the move and my guitar hanger got left behind.
So I looked at Amazon to at least get a baseline price for these two things, and they offered to deliver both of them to my door in a couple of hours.
I sanity-checked the prices and they were fine.
"What is this wizardry," I thought to myself, when I had both items at my door in a couple of hours.
I don't think they have the best name reputation. At least people my age, WalMart is synonymous with cheap and poor quality. But that was before the age of dropshipping and Amazon, where now Walmart's offerings are probably actually better quality than a lot of stuff. IMO they probably should have leveraged Jet there instead, but it is what it is.
There was a time before that when they had a better web presence for selling regular hardgoods than Amazon (which was still mostly known as just an online book store), and the Sears Parts website was the very first place to look online for manuals, diagrams, parts, and standard accessories for any random household thing (including shop vac attachments).
They also co-founded the Prodigy network back in the 80s when home computers were still very novel and people weren't broadly sure if the concept would ever catch on.
Also didn't have very good experiences in the UK (Cambridge and Portsmouth).
There are countless examples of companies that seem to have a lot of money then die suddenly.
There are plenty of zombie companies (IBM) too, hard to know what this will be, but I wouldn't take financials as an indicator of anything really.
Sears could have been Amazon if they kept their customer obsession.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears,_Roebuck_%26_Company_Mai...
and
https://www.waymarking.com/waymarks/wm4RCM_Sears_Tower_Seatt...
For profit businesses exist to make money. That is all. Any other claim is fairy dust and bullshit. IBM may not be making waves anywhere but they are still pulling at least 10 billion in profit so they are doing a hell of a lot better than most other companies.
The intended purpose of a corporation is to do something. Profit shouldn't be a goal in of itself, it's a consequence of successfully doing something.
Revenue is good, as it employs people and keeps society churning, but this slavish devotion to the idea that companies only exist to make profits is alien; it's the personification of greed.
Many companies exist because the founder had a passion for actually doing something, and they can make money doing it. If they chased only profit, their life would be miserable.
> If they chased only profit, their life would be miserable.
Get some hobbies and don't make work your life.
Our apartment building has a package room with a camera and my packages have never been stolen from it, and the delivery instructions in my Amazon profile say to use that package room including how to get there and that Amazon can tap into the room. Often times delivery drivers don't do that and just leave the package on a shelf out in the open next to the mailboxes. I cannot even count the number of times someone has ripped into the package to see if it contained something interesting only to leave it behind when it's boring like pencils or cleaning supplies.
Amazon refuses to take any responsibility for packages stolen and has in the past denied refund requests without a police report on the incident (which I have filed multiple for just to get a refund though the package thefts are never investigated so I'm not sure what filing a police report is meant to do here).
Their delivery is inconsistent so I just don't bother. Though that does mean that I don't order as often from them as perhaps they'd like - if I can pick it up locally after work then I'll do that rather than order it and wait for it to be present and unopened only to be disappointed yet again at the Amazon driver who didn't read the delivery instructions which state multiple times not to leave the package next to the mailboxes because it will be destroyed or stolen.
Those are three examples in the last couple of months…
The Sears Catalog was the Amazon of the early 20th century. So we must ask ourselves "Why did Sears discontinue its catalog service in 1993?" One of the answers to that question is the rise of retailers like Walmart where people could walk into a local (or at least closer to them than a Sears location) store and buy all sorts of things that they otherwise would have had to order. The catalog was inconvenient with other alternatives available.
The concern with Amazon is with its delivery ability - sure, for now, their unsustainable model that burns out drivers and pays them a pittance is working. Should that slip where they cannot deliver same-day/next day/day after reliably then that's an opportunity for other retailers to do to them what Walmart did to Sears.
You can even see it in this discussion - Walmart's online component directly competes and with many, many more local retails locations than Amazon and can often either have the items ready for pickup the same day or even deliver the same day.
So yes, there's a precedent for this, and if Amazon is focusing more on AWS and the buckets and buckets of money there but starts neglecting the retail part then that leaves a massive opening for competitors.