Comment by ADSSDA
7 years ago
You'd have to be insane to buy anything you'd put in your body from Amazon. Just this week I received an obviously used item that was "Shipped and sold by amazon.com" and sold as "new".
I realize they're trying, but Amazon is clearly failing to control the tide of fakes that is infesting their storefront. I find that for almost anything I search for, the knockoff/fake is actually the Amazon "recommended" item.
They've been "trying" for years. They may truly be trying, but the fact that they've neither succeeded in any meaningful way, nor made the choice to shut off the parts of their service that make the whole site scam-tastic and shitty until they can figure it out, show they don't actually care.
Probably this is because a non-trivial part of their revenue comes from the dark patterns and scams that make their whole site feel so much like the kind of flea market where you're pretty sure some of the stuff's stolen and if you ask around one of the vendors can get you some Oxy, but you wouldn't buy it from them even if you wanted it because it'd probably be fake. IOW I'm pretty sure their site and fortune's based largely on crime and generally anti-social behavior, else they'd surely have stopped it by now.
>IOW I'm pretty sure their site and fortune's based largely on crime and generally anti-social behavior
Honestly, isn't that what's at the base of the culture of 'disruption'? Look at Uber - let's take an established, regulated industry and just ignore the regulations long enough that we're everywhere and they can't shut us down.
Honestly, when I hear the word 'disrupt', I immediately think of shady, anti-social behavior.
> You'd have to be insane to buy anything you'd put in your body from Amazon. Just this week I received an obviously used item that was "Shipped and sold by amazon.com" and sold as "new".
I bought a new mp3 player from Fry's once which, oddly enough, turned out to be stocked with a sizeable music library already.
I'd still be pretty comfortable buying a candy bar from them though.
In the case of Fry's, you have evidence that they've received a counterfeit product from a single supplier. It may be rampant, or it may not be. With that single datapoint, it's hard to say.
In the case of Amazon, we know them to have a long and extensive history of selling a wide variety of counterfeit products. There is not nearly as much ambiguity to the situation. Elsewhere in this discussion the comparison to a flee market has been made, and I think that describes it well.
No, in this case is Fry’s selling a returned product as new. This is actually the main reason I stopped shopping at Fry’s. It could be the case that the customer re-sealed and returned, but I’ve seen it often enough at Fry’s that I suspect the store is re-sealing returned product and re-sell as new.
I once received a Garmin GPS as a gift (back before cell phones had GPS in them). I took it out of the box and plugged it in and started setting it up. It had a bunch of information in it already, including a "home address" and several trips around Detroit at over 100 miles per hour! I'm pretty sure the gift-giver was not the one who had used it since the home address didn't match, and they were unlikely to be driving there that fast. I'm not sure whether they bought it online or from a retail store.