PS — while I’m thinking about it — never order TVs or anything flat-screen from Amazon. You have really good odds it will arrive broken and getting a replacement or credit will be a nightmare. They are supposed to be shipped in a certain way and they almost never are; it may end up in a large carton with 300 other things including heavy boxes and basically it gets destroyed. For Prime Week we had a thing at work where if you signed up for X-number of special shifts, you got entered into a raffle for like a 60". The dude who won got it home and it was dead dead dead. He’ll get another one to replace it in about a month unless he quits before then. (Around here anyone over three weeks is a veteran employee). For anything that sensitive in shipping, stick to a box-store where you can walk in and get some satisfaction.
I had a similar back and forth with the IRS over roughly $50 that from the git-go we both agreed I owed them. Took 2 years of wrangling to “straighten out” and when all was said and done they’d paid me $100 instead and were totally happy. 
I know they spent at least $150 on staff time dealing with this to boot.
The real truth is as Icarus said: modern low-cost “low-friction” commerce is all about keeping exceptions (and humans) completely out of the administrative chain. The moment a human has to touch a sale, the profit is gone, gone, GONE.
The business’s goal at that point is simply to make the problem go away as easily and quickly (for them) as possible. Regardless of who owes who what.
You’re done. That one phone call was more than most people would have done, and IMHO you owe them nothing further. I would keep a record of exactly when you made the call and all the circumstances and not worry about it further.
I think one’s obligation to expend extra effort on this sort of thing also depends on the company in question. Amazon isn’t going to miss your $100, and you made a good faith effort to correct their mistake. OTOH, when a veterinarian forgot to charge me for almost that same amount for doggie supplies, I went back and made sure they got paid. Any operation small enough to be able to gratefully make the adjustment is also small enough to potentially feel the loss, and vice versa for the mega-enterprises. The fact that they can’t even make a correction in their own favor should tell you how unimportant it is to them.
Yup. Years ago I used a one-man exterminator company. He’d come out every few months to spray for bugs. One time I had moles in the yard, so he set some traps & caught a couple.
He never charged us the extra he’d quoted for getting rid of the moles.
After about six months of us bugging him for a bill we could pay my wife (an attorney) sent him a demand letter on the law firm letterhead: Either send us a bill or return our moles!
We finally got a bill which we promptly paid. 
As to Amazon, the OP has done his good deed and should quit before it gets more complicated.
Once I had a PayPal account attached to a checking account, not a credit card. And one day, someone (who turned out to be in Germany) somehow stole $300 from me through them. At the beginning of the investigation, PayPal provisionally refunded me the $300, with the disclaimer that they would take it back if the investigation didn’t go my way. At the end of a couple of weeks, they concluded their investigation and refunded me $300. Again. The moral thing to do would have been for me to notify them and possibly jump through hoops to give the extra $300 back to them, but I didn’t.
(ETA it wasn’t stolen through some transaction gone wrong, it was an utterly out of the blue account hack of some sort.)
Some years ago, I noticed that municipal garbage collection trucks in Honolulu all had the slogan on them: “Satisfaction guaranteed or double your garbage back.”
Cite?
I’ve never had any difficulty getting a refund or replacement from Amazon for anything.
And I’ve ordered a flat screen TV from them. It came delivered by guys who set it up, had me turn it on and verify it was working, then sign a form stating that.
Yes OP, you’ve done your part. If they can’t/won’t process the charge that’s their problem not yours. I think Amazon’s philosophy is they would rather ship some extra items than take the chance of a customer being unhappy.
I am a Prime member with free 2-day shipping on Amazon items. I ordered an item and it didn’t arrive in 2 days, it took 4 IIRC. I wrote them to complain that this had happened several times; that 2-day shipping wasn’t reliable lately. They wrote back and said they understood that I didn’t receive my item (which wasn’t the case and wasn’t what I wrote) and they would send me another one right away. I wrote again and told them that wasn’t necessary, I was just informing them that the shipping company (USPS in this case) wasn’t doing their job. Still wound up with another item, I just kept it.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=14279661
and 2.5 years of working for them. Don’t ask what we do to boxes labeled “fragile”. 
Every time you contact Amazon with some situation that can’t be handled by their automatic systems, it costs them money. Worst-case scenario for them is that you’ll contact them repeatedly, and get other people (like the Better Business Bureau) to contact them too, and cost them a lot of money. So if you’re unhappy, they’ll pay enough attention to you to try to prevent that.
But if you’re not unhappy? They’d probably actually prefer to just do nothing, because that costs them the least amount.
This has been an illuminating thread; thanks to all who’ve posted.
A link to some random Amazon Customer Support page isn’t a cite for either of your claims:
- That a flat screen TV is likely to arrive damaged
- That it’s difficult or impossible to get a refund/replacement.
I just lol’d visualizing you receiving an unmarked parcel full of dead moles, with appropriate receipt to satisfy the legal demand.
And IMHO isn’t a place most of us usually demand cites. So I guess my response was just what you needed. 
OP: I’ll pile on and say you’ve done your part (which, in my experience, is more than most will do in a similar situation).
Prime member since 2003.
All four TVs in my house were ordered from Amazon over the years, from 28" to 46". All were shipped separate from any other items in the same order, in undamaged original boxes, and all are still working 100%. YMMV, of course.
I’ve bought A LOT of stuff from Amazon over the years. I’ve also done enough returns with Amazon to actually be concerned that we would be “flagged” for excessive returns, and lose the privilege. I’ve been told a few times to keep the (small) item, rather than send it back when returning something for a refund. Never had a problem with refunds, as long as I stick to my rule of only buying from Amazon, and not a 3rd-party vendor through Amazon.
kopek, I realize you see “how the sausage is made” as an employee, but in this case your experience as an Amazon employee =/= my experience as an Amazon customer.
I’ll go with the second part first. It does vary but more on just where you are and how Amazon services your area. Certain areas are known more for “firing customers” than others and if you are lucky you are getting things from the FC (Fulfillment Center) via UPS rather than through our sortation/transportation services. I encourage you to read through the company’s boards; they do make for some interesting reading.
As for the first part let us assume a worst-case scenario. Yes it arrived as a separate box but never think it lived life that way. That just wouldn’t ever happen. Your order was filled at one of our FCs and from there relayed to a SC. If it was of a certain size it was either palletized or loaded into a shipping carton with other boxes; as many as 500 per carton. It should have been loaded “on edge and upright” (read the box) but it probably wasn’t. Almost always they are loaded flat. And the box that landed on top of it could have been a 50 pound order of canned goods from the Prime Pantry or the pair of barbell weights someone else ordered.
When it arrives at the SC it should be separated and sent to a special department for proper handling and transfer to either AMZL or the USPS. Unless it was really big, it wasn’t. It was sent “over the roof” as we say, on a conveyor system through something called sort-slide onto another system of belts. Again, being banged by whatever happens to bang against them. From a couple items if clothing in a small padded envelope to a fire pit weighing 70 pounds or more.
Then it goes to a specific lane depending on your zipcode – in the example of something like AVP6 say D-039 for the area around Hawley PA. (You can tell your center and pallet by reading what is in the black bar across the bottom of the label). Again, it should be pulled and sent for special handling. At that point there is almost no chance of that happening unless a manager is standing right at that spot at that exact moment. More likely it will be built into a pallet headed for the USPS, again laying flat and again with lord knows how many pounds on top of it. And, as you pointed out, its in its original box and not one of our “Smilie” boxes; which makes it a target for anyone having a bad day – pretty much the same as those “fragile” stickers.
But your luck got even worse; your address is in an AMZL area. Most of our drivers are basically “flex” using their own cars a few hours a day. So in addition to getting whatever other deliveries of ours he/she is making, their kids hockey skates get thrown on top of your TV ----- which is still laying flat.
Now if you got a really big TV, it came on a special pallet probably with several others and once we get it there will be special handling within our center. The FC even put foam pads on the corners of the boxes. Problem is it was loaded into a 53 foot trailer (or maybe a pup trailer - we get more of those sometimes) with other oversized and probably team-lift heavy items to head for us. Many of which fell on that special pallet in transit. And since those things don’t go AMZL as a rule we load it onto a special pallet for transfer to the USPS. And then the pallet next to it in the trailer or box truck collapses and all that Prime Pantry stuff and weight sets ------ well, it ain’t pretty.
You may be shocked to hear what our damage rate is (what we are told varies from 30-80% depending on the season/month – especially never order things like that during Prime or Peak); I am surprised that anything like that make it to the customer intact. EVER! Things that go through UPS rather than SC/TS do better but we’re talking a different business model and employees.
It isn’t that my coworkers are assholes; most do care at least some of the time. But for what is basically part-time gigs we are pushed beyond the limit a lot of the time for speed, speed, speed. We are challenged on our rate/piece count daily and often in the middle of a shift. It becomes not just a matter of “quantity over quality” but a matter of “quantity or get fired”. You think you feel stressed over maybe being blacklisted as an Prime member? Imagine how we feel seeing people walked out for not going fast enough every day.
Our mileage varies. Our old site lead was terrific and stressed a real customer-centric attitude among us all. It was hard work and most people didn’t last long but most of us handled each package as if it was our own. Our morale was high and it showed in the quality of our work. Your chances of damage back then in our area of operation was pretty low. Our new lead is TPH (Total Packages per Hour) only; that is his only concern. Rate over 140 and never going off-task. Forget special handling, just get it done. If you do try to take the time to do things properly, you will get fired. If you obviously do things improperly, you get fired. It is the old Catch-22 and you know you are getting fired no matter what. Morale is in the toilet and 95% of the people have ceased to care — or shop through Amazon. Which is what makes certain boxes/labels more of a target when someone has had a really bad day. It looks better to some of us than a fistfight in the parking lot; one of which happened this morning.
Talk to people from the FCs, from customer service itself, from our warehouses. It all comes down to the site leads. Get a good chain of good people involved in your order and everything is peachy. Get a “pusher” and all bets are off. Don’t get me wrong; I still shop at Amazon unlike a lot of my coworkers. Just not for some things. Cite or not, I know better.
And since I mentioned Prime and cites and all
Proof positive that “low cost” is not cost free in other areas of what we consider to be a civilized society with civilized economics.
There ought to be no excuse for running a sweatshop anywhere on the planet. Running a gigantic one distributed across the entire US ought to have top leadership in jail, not riding around in private jets.
That link says that there are “more than 30” reports of broken tvs. How many thousands do you think Amazon sold? That’s got to be a tiny tiny fraction.
It also includes this quote from Amazon
So, again, both things you’ve claimed are not supported by your cites. Few TVs arrive damaged, and they are promptly replaced.
Getting away from the Amazon debate, I’m in the camp of people who feel like once you’ve made an honest effort to return the money, you’re done. I’ve had a cashier accidentally hand me change for a $20 instead of change for the $10 I paid with, and handed back the extra $10, but if I tried to hand it back, and he turned it down, then wanted me to call a corporate number or fill out a form to hand it back, I’d just pocket what is now a $10 windfall. If you do like the OP did and let the appropriate person know about the situation and attempt payment, if the company declines to accept your payment it’s really their issue, you’re not obligated to put in a lot of effort on their behalf. Especially when their own employees aren’t.
If I did that, I’d expect that the reason there was no clerk was that he, his boss, and any other customers in the store at the time were all horribly butchered in the back room. And, since I was on camera stealing the beer, I’d be getting a visit from the local equivalent of Briscoe and Logan, and my life would be under a microscope, and I’d be number one suspect in the murders.