Jeff Bezos could take a little bit of his billions of dollars to make a customer service department that actually does something. I’ve been locked out of my Amazon account for a week because some scammy lowlife changed the email on my account. I have called, tweeted, emailed, and filled out forms, and absolutely nothing has been done.
I would just let it go, but I have ebooks and music that I paid for that I would like to be able to use.
I know Amazon sucks and this is all my fault for using Amazon, but I live in a place that doesn’t have many useful stores and it’s hard to find things I need without going to a bigger city. We have boutiques and gift shops, but I’m too poor for that kind of thing.
I’m torn about Amazon, and feel that I may have to soon decide. They’re veering into the area that causes me to never spend a dime in WalMart- the destruction of any local competition. A WalMart will destroy a small town downtown. Yes it’s techically fair from a free market yadda yadda yadda point of view, but I don’t have to like it. It doesn’t help to know how rich the owners are, and how poor the rank and file workers are. Are we getting to that point with Amazon? Shit, it sure seems like it.
But goddammit, it sure is convenient to open the laptop and have near any damn thing delivered promptly.
No, it’s not fair. Legal, but NOT fair. A free market economist (I went to a Libertarian college full of them) would say “It’s not fair, the little guy gets screwed and that’s the price you pay for unfettered business practices.” They’d say I was being “a sentimentalist” for boycotting WalEMart.
Yeah, I’d be VERY concerned about that. Also…well, I’m not sure that the OP understands the implications of what s/he is complaining about. Companies these days have to tread carefully in case they are being double scammed (perhaps the ‘scammy lowlife’ IS the actual owner of the account, and the OP is the pretender…how would they know, assuming the OP hasn’t set up multifactor authentication, which seems unlikely, since the ‘scammy lowlife’ had access to change the password in the first place), and we kind of want them to be. A lot of mistakes have been made, after all, by companies that have resulted in pain for a hell of a lot of people.
I don’t think the OPs issue alone warrants the dissolution of a company the size of Amazon, but MMV.
Whatever else happens, you need to make a new email account immediately. Then log into everything else that was associated with the old email and change it to the new one.
In fact, it’s a good idea to make a new email address that you only use for Amazon, and then a separate ones for your other accounts that are connected to a credit card, and then another, general account for things you don’t care about.
It’s not fair because they can use their massive financial resources as leverage to be anti-competitive. There’s nothing fair about it – it’s dirty business.
It is interesting to compare the customer service experience across different big companies. Facebook, for example, is the sixth largest public corporation in the world by market cap, well ahead of ExxonMobil or J&J, but its “customer service” consists of links to unresolved complaints and unanswered questions by disgruntled “customers.” (Microsoft, Apple and Amazon are running-neck-and-neck for the #1 slot.) OTOH, the tiny webhosting company which charges me $5 per month is always quick with prompt and useful help when I e-mail them. (I’ve several stories of both extremely good and extremely bad customer service.)
This is most important thing mentioned in this thread: Turn on MFA on every account that allows it. Amazon, Google, your retirement accounts, banks, etc. Use different passwords for each site - use LastPass, with MFA and a unique password to manage your passwords. Everyone needs to start upping their personal security.
How is that? Unless they’re doing something like using their financial position to literally buy out all of some product or service to create a monopoly, it sounds like you’re talking about economies of scale, which aren’t necessarily “unfair”.
I’m kind of tired of this whole neo-Luddite mentality about large retailers. Does anyone really want to go back to the era where you had to shop at your local corner store, because that was all that was there?
It would be like shopping at convenience stores- since all these little groceries and specialty shops can’t take advantage of economies of scale anywhere (distribution, purchasing, etc…) their prices would rise considerably.
And we’d just shift the massive wealth creation and monopolistic power to the distributors/wholesalers anyway. Personally, I’d rather see the advantages of all that stuff be realized by the consumers, rather than see some rinky-dink storekeepers make a modest living, consumers get violated price-wise, AND see distributors and wholesalers get massively rich.
Plenty of little guys love Amazon. They’re massive influence is due to other companies selling their products through Amazon. Their control over subscriptions and the lot is a problem though, but I don’t see how breaking up the company helps that. We need stronger consumer protection regulation.
Now if they are being anti-competitive in some way, then go ahead and break them up for that reason.
That I can get behind, especially for online marketplaces and sellers. There ought to be better labeling requirements and some sort of bond or something to prevent the hordes of fly-by-night sellers of cheap Chinese crap from obscuring/drowning the people selling decent things, or even the ones selling cheap Chinese crap but in a reputable way- i.e. if it never shows up, or is even more substandard than you were expecting, you have recourse and a path to get a return.
There should also be regulations about clear indications of who the seller is and whether they’re affiliated with the manufacturer or Amazon/Ebay. Far too many sketchy outfits will list the product as “Samsung” or whatever, and you’ll think it’s an official product, when it’s really being sold by “EXXtreme Electronicz” out of some janky Baltimore suburb.
I have heard that argument too…a lot (we’ve rolled it out at work). Keep your tinfoil hat firmly affixed (not you ZipperJJ - I know you were being sarcastic) and buy a USB key. Or, like Wolf333 suggests, use one of the apps like the Lastpass or Google authenticators.