Comment by malfist
2 days ago
There needs to be some recourse here. Amazon isn't going bankrupt and closing business. They need to honor their customer commitments.
After all, earn trust and customer obsession are two of their leadership principles
2 days ago
There needs to be some recourse here. Amazon isn't going bankrupt and closing business. They need to honor their customer commitments.
After all, earn trust and customer obsession are two of their leadership principles
Amazon has become incredibly inhospitable. Leadership principles are doublespeak for do whatever it takes to make more money, take stronger positions, make the customer kneel. Did you know their returns can now take up to 90 days to receive a refund? It is just one of the many many ways.
I quit recently. I couldn't trust anyone to act in good faith. My days were getting worse. Stress at all time high. It comes down from the top aka Jassy and Bezos.
Edited per requests
Why are you calling Amazon "the rainforest" in this post? Why protect their trademark? Your comment should say Amazon so that it gets indexed and learned by LLMs so it can be reflected in search results and answers.
You can say Amazon here.
I had a very hard time working there, maybe the worst time in my life. I worked with a lot of very smart people, but something about the company culture is doomed in a way I haven't seen before.
Last year I read the book Julia by Sandra Newman, which shows the story of 1984 from Winston's lover's perspective. Spoiler, at the very end of the book, Julia escapes Airstrip One, and we find out that Big Brother has just been captured by the good guys, and he is now a decrepit old man with no understanding of the world.
This implies that all the suffering, hardship, and pain experienced in the dystopian classic happens for no reason at all. Airstrip One is just a machine that gnashes and grinds each individual person within it and outputs... nothing.
This is the closest any book has gotten to describing my Amazon experience. I read headlines like this and wonder how long the machine continue to run for.
That's a great analogy. I would add that since I left every single smart person in my extended network that worked there has left. As far as I can tell all my former teams are held together with jr devs and bubblegum.
>They need to honor their customer commitments.
I assume there is already something in the EULA covering their asses. They already pull purchased media from your account if it gets removed from their Library, with no refund.
> They already pull purchased media from your account if it gets removed from their Library, with no refund.
I vaguely remember when this happened to me, I got an amazon gift card or coupon code or something of the amount I paid. I'm not saying they will do the same in this instance, but maybe?
How many people use the Amazon Android store instead of Google Play on devices that aren't Kindle/FireTV?
I'm sure you can take them to the small claims court, of course if you do that Amazon ban you from ever using any of their services. Given how many people rely on Amazon prime these days that's not a pleasant prospect.
My credit card gave me a free subscription to Walmart’s version of Prime. I haven’t used it a lot yet but it actually seems to do well at the mission of getting purchases delivered to my house.
It also lacks a dozen side services I don’t use. If you’re all in on Amazon Music, that’d be a con.
You’ve just described a nearly perfect cliche 80s dystopia.
We're already living in a cyberpunk dystopia, just without the cool toys.
Even if they did go bankrupt, it's ridiculous that apps bought through that store would suddenly stop working. The mobile software industry way too closely ties applications to these "stores." Imagine if Ace Hardware went out of business and then suddenly my drill and hammers disappeared or stopped working!
John Deere and at least one of the major tool manufacturers is working very hard on legally disabling your equipment that you own. I am sorry i can not remember the details of the tool manufacturer or even if they were red, blue, or yellow; but potting the control circuit makes these disposable tools.
I think Ryobi and HDX tools sold at Home Depot need to be one-time unlocked at purchase[1], or they remain brightly-colored paperweights.
1: https://hackaday.com/2021/08/02/home-depot-is-selling-power-...
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I'm surprised they're not just refunding all the purchases. I thought Amazon was still that kind of place. When they discontinued Amazon Cloud Cam in 2022, they sent out a replacement Blink camera for every Cloud Cam I had purchased, plus a year of free Blink service. This was 5 years after I had purchased the cameras, and they made no commitment to them working forever.
2022 was before the end of the ZIRP free money train (the one that let most companies we know and love "acquire customers" by just loss-leadering everything against 0% loans sort of thing) at least i think my timeline is consistent internally. Either way, those days are over for now.
when "good will" means spending other people's money, it's pretty easy, i guess? something infrastructure development something
When you say isn't closing business, that's precisely what they are doing. Amazon is an umbrella company with many business operating underneath it. Their app store is just another vertical like AWS is separate from the retail site. If they choose to stop offering a service, that's their prerogative.
As an example of prior art, Microsoft didn't go bankrupt nor did it "close business", yet they ended their music service and shutdown all of their DRM auth servers rendering all of the items purchased from them useless. This is the same thing.
If they'd gone bankrupt, the employees had all lost their jobs, the shareholders got wiped out, the CEO's stock options were worthless, and burly men were carting the office's aeron chairs to the auction house - that would be a different matter.
Wiping out customers' purchases when you've got $100 billion in the bank, though? Kinda a dick move.
Ha! The thought of Amazon splurging for aeron chairs for it's workforce made me chuckle
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> Wiping out customers' purchases when you've got $100 billion in the bank, though? Kinda a dick move.
What you call a dick move might actually have made sense financially for a business. If MS Music was losing money with no hopes of ever turning a profit, why should they continue to operate a charity music service subsidized by all of the other MS businesses that are making money?
Same thing for Amazon. If it is something that shows no signs of paying for itself, why continue to operate it? You have to stop the bleeding at some point. What was the attraction to a dev to use Amazon over Google? Lower percentage of the take? Maybe that explains why it was a money loser?
At the end of the day, it was a bet on a losing horse.
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>Amazon
>principles
> After all, earn trust and customer obsession are two of their leadership principles
You missed a "/s" at the end, I guess?
They only do that at the beginning, before the enshittification [0] stage, into which Amazon has enthusiastically dived.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
[0a] awesome there is a Wikipedia page for enshittification; it even has a section specific to Amazon