Head Tale

I’m trying as hard as I can to avoid buying from Amazon as I’ve grown to *really* dislike their business practices – from how they treat workers to resellers engaging in fraud to simply the fact that Jeff Bezos does not need one more penny of my money.

I mean, Wal-Mart is a shitty employer too but at least they have employees in my city and pay taxes here and so on. I haven’t done it at Wal-Mart but most bricks & mortar stores also making returning stuff you bought from their online stores a lot easier (recently returned some clothes to Old Navy, no problem!).

This article and related MetaFilter discussion is useful to outline just some of the problems with Amazon.

Here’s a sample of a couple of the comments on the MetaFilter thread…

My biggest problem with Amazon these days is that so many of their third party sellers are practicing fraud. I only buy the most basic items there anymore because too many times, even slightly above bottom-of-the-barrel brand products have turned out to be not the item claimed, but rather cheap, low-quality alternatives in fake packaging.

Also:

The issue has been that Amazon’s warehouses consider all “same” items interchangeable. In the “Fulfilled by Amazon” system, the seller ships their product to Amazon, who keep it in their warehouses until it’s bought. If another seller is selling the same item, their stock is mingled with the first seller’s stock at the warehouse. If one of these sellers is sending fakes to Amazon, you as the customer have no way to avoid them when buying that item. Buying from seller A or seller B has no relationship to whether the item you receive is originally from one or the other.