Loved that. This quote just sums up customer support in 2020 (and, apparently, also in 2014):
Me 'Hi- I just called about a 12 foot balance beam
delivered to me – along with my toilet – in error.
Are you the one I talked to?'
'No'
Me- 'Excellent!'
Amazon accidentally shipped me a book a few months ago, by getting one digit in the address wrong. I pinged Amazon to return it - but I got the same response, "why don't you keep it?". I said I didn't want to, and this went on for a while, and I realized that they aren't going to to take it back. They said they were going to ship another copy to the correct address anyway. A day after the conversation, I was still not satisfied so I decided to walk down to this other house to drop off the book. Unfortunately no one was in when I made my visit, and I didn't want to drop off the book without speaking to them (it'd have been confusing if they had received some kind of an apology mail from Amazon in the interim etc). I had to immediately leave for a long business trip right after, and, well, the book is still with me. I didn't bother after my return - I convinced myself it was too late.
But mine was a book, yours was a beam. So I got off easy I guess :-)
My best/worse "duplicates" have arisen since they started using their own last-mile shipping:
A package gets marked undeliverable. I go ahead and re-order the item. The next day the package is marked delivered on-time (it definitely didn't arrive the day before), and is un-undeliverable. I now have to cancel the replacement I ordered, and have to talk to customer support to make them eat the cost of it, because fuck them. There's no record on the amazon page that it was ever marked undeliverable at all - I now have started taking screenshots.
I'm assuming this is some fuckery played by people in the field having trouble hitting their metrics, but I don't actually know. I just know that at least once this has ended with a next-day-shipping replacement arriving alongside the "undeliverable" item, and Amazon demanding I mail it back to get my refund. Because nothing says "fun" like now having to take the time out of my day to ship an item back to them so as not to get double-charged due to their own fucked up shipping practices.
I ordered a mattress off of amazon. 2 days later, I get the money back on my account. Not wanting mto be banned from amazon, and thinking maybe the payment bounced on my account, I called customer support.
"I think I accidentally received a refund of my mattress.", I said. "you want to return your mattress? I will send you a shipping label." they helped.
"NO! I have the mattress, and want to keep it, but also got the money back. I want to return the money!". "OK, I will contact the seller to take care of your refund."
"you don't understand! I want to return the money. The seller accidentally returned the money after delivering my mattress!."
They finally understood and asked the seller. The seller didn't refund anything. Amazon didn't either. But I have both the money and the mattress to this day. Go figure.
The "Update 3" made my day, thanks for posting that.
>Amazon is now making arrangements with CEVA – some top secret group which is responsible for finding homes for lost balance beams and other unwanted and unusually sized packages.
It was not until I read through the whole article and saw the picture that, finally, my mind was at rest knowing that someone didn't order a 12-foot long balance beam to try to somehow put into their roof.
There’s actually laws regarding stuff sent to you in error. Basically, they can’t ask you to return it unless you offer. Hence why there’s probably no formalized process for it.
It should also not come as a surprise that a company whose process is highly optimised to move product in one direction has problems dealing with unusual situations in the other direction.
This is not accurate. If the company intentionally sends you an item that you did not request, it's a gift and they can't demand it back. If they send you an item in error it's not a gift and you are not entitled to keep it for free.
Seems like there should be laws about being able to make them come pick shit up too.
Like, a simple magic phrase that makes it clear you don't want the thing they (perhaps accidentally) dumped on you and that they should come remove it, something like "I don't want it, come take it back."
Amazon didn't want it back, they said she could keep it, but she didn't want it and didn't want to dispose of it:
“Ok. hold on please…” Comes back 2 min later… “It sounds like it was sent in error. But no problem- you do not have to return it to us. You can keep it, or donate it to charity or just dispose of it yourself”
> 8. Today I figured out the problem. The granola company and the coaster company buy THEIR boxes from the same people I'm trying to by mine from. And the barcode scanners at @amazonca are picking up the old sticker - from the box company!
So the granola company, coaster company, etc. forgot to remove the old bar codes from the outermost box before packing it full of their own product and sending it out. One could tell them this, but there will probably always be more small companies making this mistake.
Probably what should happen is for Amazon to mark this item (the box of boxes) as requiring special handling when scanning on entry into the warehouse, verifying that it actually is a box of boxes (right weight, no other barcode, etc), and explaining why. And audit all the ones currently in the warehouse.
I have no idea how to convince Amazon to do this. Like the author, I'd give up and start buying my boxes elsewhere.
> I have no idea how to convince Amazon to do this
Funny enough, I do. I know and work with a lot of the people who would be involved in that. My org in Amazon is all about ensuring everything is ready to be used for customer orders. (We're hiring; Toronto, Seattle and Nashville).
We call this the "multiple scannable barcodes" problem. In terms of inventory tracking, we trust that there's only one barcode on the item that maps to a valid product because that's nearly always the case. It's also really hard to notice/catch when it happens.
I'm going to send this to a few friends today. I definitely know someone on the operations side who would know what to do about it (and would laugh at the absurdity).
I ran into this once..I ordered an empty box for storing a card game with several hundred cards. Instead I got the box I wanted but it was full of 600 Yu-Gi-Oh cards.
The seller of the boxes could fix this by putting an outer wrapping on the boxes to which they affix the label so that there was no way for the label to stay on the box.
I used to sell stuff on amazon--they do specifically tell you to remove or cover any other barcodes on the box when doing fulfillment by Amazon.
Sadly that leaves me to believe the sellers will have to eat the cost in these cases, which leaves relatively little incentive for Amazon to improve vetting.
Weight or volume is also another metric that could possibly be employed, i.e. save the weight and rough volume of each item being scanned...when there's a significant deviation for an product that's shown no or litte deviation in the past, flag it for manual inspection?
Probably too costly for such an edge case problem though
> So the granola company, coaster company, etc. forgot to remove the old bar codes from the outermost box before packing it full of their own product and sending it out.
So the idea seems to be that amazon.ca is collecting goods in boxes from various suppliers, and those boxes have no shipping labels on them, only product labels, which it trusts the suppliers to produce correctly. Amazon then fills the original downstream order, matching it by type, which is indicated by the product label.
Something similar happened to me about ... 10 years ago. This was back when everyone was going on and on about how good Amazon's customer support was, but what I noticed is that they don't actually listen to the customer, they're just robots that give you money for talking to them. The customer only comes out ahead if their Internet connection is free and their time is worth $0/hour. But people love it!
In my case, I ordered road bike tires. They shipped me mountain bike tires from the same manufacturer. This was hilarious because the road tires were "folding" (they have a kevlar bead instead of a wire bead, so don't take up as much space in shipping) but the mountain bike tires weren't, so the set of 2 tires arrived in a refrigerator-sized box. I opened a ticket with Amazon. "Oh sorry, we'll send you the right item." Same mountain bike tires arrive. "Oh sorry, we'll refund you for both." This was about 2 weeks later and I checked the product page... everyone in the reviews section was complaining, but Amazon took no action to fix it. Like the author of this Twitter thread, I finally ventured to a bike shop that I heard was really good, and they were really good. I never bought another bike part from Amazon.
If I were Amazon, I would be super alarmed that people "in the field" don't have the ability to talk to people in the back office. Every one of these incidents should be a ticket for the supply chain management team. But instead the customer service team looks at CSAT scores, the warehouse team probably looks at "average time to pack an item", and the investors look for growth. Nobody cares if the business runs well, just that each individual department set an arbitrary metric and met it. If you want to eat a big company's lunch, this is how you do it: look at the business as a whole, not as a million parts that don't work together. (See also: Google and 5 chat apps, Google WiFi vs. Google Fiber WiFi, etc.)
Hilariously, there's no way anymore to get help from any "real" person over at Amazon anymore, even for Prime members. I've gotten all kinds of weird stuff shipped to me, including a $12,000 server motherboard once, which Amazon told me I was free to keep as they would ship out the $124 SSD I ordered. I insisted that I return it, and after much hassle over several weeks, I was finally able get ahold of a non-chatbot, non-foreign service rep that finally took the time to listen and sent me a return label. Since I finally got ahold of someone real, I remarked this is the last time I go through such a hassle to return their property because of the way they treated me when I was trying to do them a favor.
I doubt anyone would buy a 12k mobo from someone off the street. In fact, I doubt anyone would accept a _free_ 12k mobo from someone off the street - if you need that kind of hardware, the risk of questionable sourcing is probably higher than the cost the board.
I have a very contentious address problem and have gotten humans from Amazon every time, I even had one take gps coordinates so they could re-route a truck in transit to the wrong location. Youd have to be almost intentionally messing the support process up to not get a human.
Maybe it depends on the country? I've never had to (touches wood) deal with Amazon customer support though, I'm completely pulling that out of thin air hah
I've had good luck calling the main Amazon customer support number (USA) and simply asking to speak to someone in the United States of America. I don't know how Amazon's systems work, but they seem to have more options available to them than the foreign call center reps.
Not on a personal note (and maybe there are details missing) but this comment makes me sad: it's like we've internalized the codes of capitalism to the point where we, as individuals, feel obligated to fulfill our marketplace commitments while we accept that corporations such as Amazon will not fulfill theirs. Did you invoice AMZ for your time? Will AMZ do you a "favor" as well? Personally, I see no moral obligation in my transactions with corporations, as they see no obligations towards me, my patronage or my data.
Again, not addressing this personally to you but just responding here.
In addition to that, the constant defending of corporations worth multiple billions of dollars by regular people ("consumers", to use said businesses parlance) always boggles my mind. These companies are not our friends.
> Hilariously, there's no way anymore to get help from any "real" person over at Amazon anymore, even for Prime members.
That's wrong (from a non-Prime member). I've had certain cases where I had to revert a refund I got for an untracked item that arrived several weeks after the ETA.
Just thinking about what a process managed by Google for that would look like gives me cold sweat.
It’s been a while, but at least last year I got a real person both times. They even try to push me to let them call me instead of chat/email. But it’s Amazon Germany, we still didn’t adopt many of the North American problems.
Not the OP but amazon screwed up and sent someone else's(i.e. not amazon's) server mb to the wrong person. Does the seller get refunded for the cost of the mb? Who absorbs the cost of the mis-delivered item?
It's not the customer who actually bought it because amazon will always refund them or reship (as we see in the article) and I bet you amazon has some EULA or TOS that absolves them of responsibility. so now some random seller has to absorb the lost revenue/profit of amazon's mistake.
> Hilariously, there's no way anymore to get help from any "real" person over at Amazon anymore, even for Prime members
That's not been my experience at all. I've had occasion to call them 3 times in the last 6 months or so, and in all cases I've had no trouble getting to someone who quickly resolved my problem.
1. I ordered an Echo Dot on Prime Day last year. The two colors I liked best were listed as out of stock, with no estimate of when they would be available, so I ordered my third choice.
That one then was delayed and the other two became available so I called to see if they could change my order to one of those colors. I went to "Help"/"Need More Help"/"Contact Us" and on that page selected "We can call you", and filled out the form.
In less than 10 seconds, my phone was ringing and when I answered I was talking to a person. (It turned out that she couldn't update my order, though, so I did end up with my third choice color. Turned out OK, though, because it also turned out that the place I had thought I'd put the Dot was not very good. The ideal spot, it turned out, was a spot where that third color fit much better).
2. I ordered some pants and shirts about three weeks before Christmas. I got a notice on a Friday that USPS had delivered them, saying that they had been left in the garage or some other outbuilding. I could not find them. Amazon's site says that sometimes you can get a notice notice up to 48 hours before actual delivery, so I waited until Monday. Then I went to the USPS office, and they told me that it had actually been left at my neighbor's and that USPS would retrieve it from the neighbor and bring it to me.
I went and checked with the neighbor and they had not seen it. We even checked her garage, since the delivery notice mentioned a garage, but nothing.
So I called Amazon. Again, less than 10 seconds after submitting the form I received a call from them. I explained what happened, and the person offered to send replacements. I requested a refund instead, since I didn't actually need this stuff for Christmas. It was just coincidence that I ordered near Christmas. I'd rather have a refund, and then just re-order the items myself later after the Christmas shipping madness ended. He immediately granted the refund which was processed within a day.
3. A week after that, the missing package showed up in my mailbox! So I again called Amazon. Yet again, less than 10 seconds from form submission requesting a callback to getting that callback.
I explained what happened and asked them if they could re-charge me for the order, or if they wanted me to ship the items back, or what. I was put on hold for maybe 30 seconds, and then told that they couldn't really re-charge, so just keep the items for free.
Anymore? I don't think there was ever a time where you could actual human help from Amazon other than pressing the "refund" or "resend package" buttons. I recall back in 2005 I went through 4-5 improperly packaged boxes of glass items that arrived smashed. Each time Amazon claimed that the issue was fixed and the next one would be property packaged, yet they always arrived improperly packaged and smashed. I eventually just gave up.
This sorta thing has been a problem for a long time.
> 11. I responded, with honesty: "The error has been fixed? It wasn't fixed the first three times.. so I'm skeptical!"
> @amazonca responded: "You will get the correct item. I do not want any more hassles for you. Please do not worry. "
> So I re-ordered the @PkgWholesalers boxes...
... and got packages of granola again in 1 PkgWholesalers boxes.
I hate how frustrating it can be do convince a multijillion dollar company that, No, they are wrong, and I am right.
It's like we need an "No, I actually need you to help because they problem is unsolvable from my Point-of-View phone number" that's kept a secret from anyone.
Had a similar issue with my credit union where they referred to a payment number entry field the wrong way.
I managed to schedule a call with someone, and they didn't understand the problem. They said: "So you want us to change this just for you?". My answer of "No, I want you to change it for everybody." didn't go over well...
Used to be that getahuman[1] was a thing, but like all good things on the Internet it seems to have not been able to hold up to the sheer volume of bad actors.
>I hate how frustrating it can be do convince a multijillion dollar company that, No, they are wrong, and I am right.
If it were easier, then a lot of people who were wrong would be convincing the company that they were right and they wouldn't be a multijillion dollar company for long.
Once bought spark plugs for my car from Amazon. I got three new ones and three from the Amazon Warehouse since those were about 30% cheaper and I figured what could be wrong with spark plugs? Got the right box, wrong spark plugs. Returned them. Re-ordered. Got the same spark plugs. This time I marked the boxes with and plugs with a permanent marker. Returned them and reordered. Got the exact same ones. Finally returned and ordered new ones. I am sure those same plugs are still in the mail going back and forth between Amazon and frustrated customers years later.
Minor plug for a vendor I've used with great success for a long time: Rock Auto, don't even try to deal with Amazon for specific parts. Their website is a nice throw back to actual usability too.
A little bit of a non-standard sort of HN post, but it illustrates an interesting sort of system failure.
My speculation, never having set foot in an Amazon warehouse:
1) Amazon stockers are told to put the incoming inventory in a spot, and scan all visible barcodes on the product, which are all associated with that product in Amazon's DB henceforth. Normally extraneous barcodes are no problem because they aren't SKUs, so no one ever tries to pick them by the extra codes. Easier to tell the stockers to scan everything than to try to get them to pick the right one.
2) Company X, Y, Z ship their products to Amazon with their own barcodes and fail to remove the box company codes. Dozens of different random products around the warehouse end up with a secondary, identical barcode associated with them.
3) Someone orders boxes. Inventory system probably automatically sends pickers to the closest source of SKU 12345, of which there are - unusually - many scattered around the warehouse. So the product received is essentially random, out of whoever uses these boxes. Product roulette!
4) Customer service can't solve this problem. Maybe there's someone in Amazon's inventory team that can go in and fix it, but it occurred for good reasons! Everyone was behaving rationally. There are probably other similar problems in the database as well.
Amazon FBA requirements are that the UPC barcode for your product be the only visible barcode on your packaging.
I would bet money that in the name of "efficiency", warehouse employees are trained to scan the first barcode they see and use the result, whatever it may be.
Just a thought, could this be engineered to work in one’s favour? For example, order a box of something expensive, receive it, attach a barcode for something cheap which is low in stock / rarely ordered, then send it back. Now order the thing you labelled it as, and see what turns up. Perhaps you’ll get a box of Epyc CPUs for the price of a box of out of season kwanza decorations.
This reminds me of a problem I ran into in a previous life. It has nothing to do with inventory control, but all about how clean/sane is thd data you are storing in the database. We had a system with a set of webUI based forms used by non-technical users to use to add info to the database. However, the forms were outdated, and were importing bad default values. The devs told me they felt that bad data was better than no data. I laughed out loud at the reversed logic. It did nothing but cause grief, and was only solved (for me) by my no longer working for that company.
Everyone was behaving rationally maybe the first two times this happened. After that though someone should have double checked the outgoing package.
#4 is really by far the biggest problem here. No matter what, with a company of Amazons size things are going to go wrong that just cant be solved in an automated fashion. They need support with the training and authorization to escalate issues like this to staff that have the power to fix them.
Amazon has absolutely no memory. All of your customer support woes go to people working from a script. The likelihood of getting the same customer support person is zero.
You can get an actual human who can look at what’s going on if you send email to Bezos; that gets forwarded to the secret support team that can actually make decisions instead of just following a script. Or at least you could a few years ago.
That’s the same situation when we shipped code with “I swear this time it works correctly with all new excessive to-the-point tests we wrote after analyzing the last failure in detail” label. Understanding the problem in a complex automated system doesn’t always make it disappear overnight.
Readit News
Trying to return it was a bit of an ordeal:
https://kkeeter.wordpress.com/2014/06/02/dear_amazon/
Deleted Comment
But mine was a book, yours was a beam. So I got off easy I guess :-)
A package gets marked undeliverable. I go ahead and re-order the item. The next day the package is marked delivered on-time (it definitely didn't arrive the day before), and is un-undeliverable. I now have to cancel the replacement I ordered, and have to talk to customer support to make them eat the cost of it, because fuck them. There's no record on the amazon page that it was ever marked undeliverable at all - I now have started taking screenshots.
I'm assuming this is some fuckery played by people in the field having trouble hitting their metrics, but I don't actually know. I just know that at least once this has ended with a next-day-shipping replacement arriving alongside the "undeliverable" item, and Amazon demanding I mail it back to get my refund. Because nothing says "fun" like now having to take the time out of my day to ship an item back to them so as not to get double-charged due to their own fucked up shipping practices.
But giving an incorrectly addressed package to your neighbor seems like a general good idea :)
"I think I accidentally received a refund of my mattress.", I said. "you want to return your mattress? I will send you a shipping label." they helped.
"NO! I have the mattress, and want to keep it, but also got the money back. I want to return the money!". "OK, I will contact the seller to take care of your refund."
"you don't understand! I want to return the money. The seller accidentally returned the money after delivering my mattress!."
They finally understood and asked the seller. The seller didn't refund anything. Amazon didn't either. But I have both the money and the mattress to this day. Go figure.
Handling the refund costs hours of work and might end up being more expensive than the return/refund.
>Amazon is now making arrangements with CEVA – some top secret group which is responsible for finding homes for lost balance beams and other unwanted and unusually sized packages.
Like, a simple magic phrase that makes it clear you don't want the thing they (perhaps accidentally) dumped on you and that they should come remove it, something like "I don't want it, come take it back."
“Ok. hold on please…” Comes back 2 min later… “It sounds like it was sent in error. But no problem- you do not have to return it to us. You can keep it, or donate it to charity or just dispose of it yourself”
They certainly can ask.
So the granola company, coaster company, etc. forgot to remove the old bar codes from the outermost box before packing it full of their own product and sending it out. One could tell them this, but there will probably always be more small companies making this mistake.
Probably what should happen is for Amazon to mark this item (the box of boxes) as requiring special handling when scanning on entry into the warehouse, verifying that it actually is a box of boxes (right weight, no other barcode, etc), and explaining why. And audit all the ones currently in the warehouse.
I have no idea how to convince Amazon to do this. Like the author, I'd give up and start buying my boxes elsewhere.
Funny enough, I do. I know and work with a lot of the people who would be involved in that. My org in Amazon is all about ensuring everything is ready to be used for customer orders. (We're hiring; Toronto, Seattle and Nashville).
We call this the "multiple scannable barcodes" problem. In terms of inventory tracking, we trust that there's only one barcode on the item that maps to a valid product because that's nearly always the case. It's also really hard to notice/catch when it happens.
I'm going to send this to a few friends today. I definitely know someone on the operations side who would know what to do about it (and would laugh at the absurdity).
Sadly that leaves me to believe the sellers will have to eat the cost in these cases, which leaves relatively little incentive for Amazon to improve vetting.
Maybe it's only every 25th box that has a barcode sticker.. so they've just assumed it was package theft.
I would imagine this is hard to debug as a seller.
Probably too costly for such an edge case problem though
So the idea seems to be that amazon.ca is collecting goods in boxes from various suppliers, and those boxes have no shipping labels on them, only product labels, which it trusts the suppliers to produce correctly. Amazon then fills the original downstream order, matching it by type, which is indicated by the product label.
In my case, I ordered road bike tires. They shipped me mountain bike tires from the same manufacturer. This was hilarious because the road tires were "folding" (they have a kevlar bead instead of a wire bead, so don't take up as much space in shipping) but the mountain bike tires weren't, so the set of 2 tires arrived in a refrigerator-sized box. I opened a ticket with Amazon. "Oh sorry, we'll send you the right item." Same mountain bike tires arrive. "Oh sorry, we'll refund you for both." This was about 2 weeks later and I checked the product page... everyone in the reviews section was complaining, but Amazon took no action to fix it. Like the author of this Twitter thread, I finally ventured to a bike shop that I heard was really good, and they were really good. I never bought another bike part from Amazon.
If I were Amazon, I would be super alarmed that people "in the field" don't have the ability to talk to people in the back office. Every one of these incidents should be a ticket for the supply chain management team. But instead the customer service team looks at CSAT scores, the warehouse team probably looks at "average time to pack an item", and the investors look for growth. Nobody cares if the business runs well, just that each individual department set an arbitrary metric and met it. If you want to eat a big company's lunch, this is how you do it: look at the business as a whole, not as a million parts that don't work together. (See also: Google and 5 chat apps, Google WiFi vs. Google Fiber WiFi, etc.)
- Amazon would have paid the seller of that motherboard 12k, out of pocket
- the seller of the motherboard would have made money as if you had ordered the motherboard
- Amazon would be out 12k
- You'd have a 12k mobo you can resell
- Amazon would be out 12k
- And also, Amazon would be out 12k
I doubt anyone would buy a 12k mobo from someone off the street. In fact, I doubt anyone would accept a _free_ 12k mobo from someone off the street - if you need that kind of hardware, the risk of questionable sourcing is probably higher than the cost the board.
Again, not addressing this personally to you but just responding here.
That's wrong (from a non-Prime member). I've had certain cases where I had to revert a refund I got for an untracked item that arrived several weeks after the ETA.
Just thinking about what a process managed by Google for that would look like gives me cold sweat.
It's not the customer who actually bought it because amazon will always refund them or reship (as we see in the article) and I bet you amazon has some EULA or TOS that absolves them of responsibility. so now some random seller has to absorb the lost revenue/profit of amazon's mistake.
That's not been my experience at all. I've had occasion to call them 3 times in the last 6 months or so, and in all cases I've had no trouble getting to someone who quickly resolved my problem.
1. I ordered an Echo Dot on Prime Day last year. The two colors I liked best were listed as out of stock, with no estimate of when they would be available, so I ordered my third choice.
That one then was delayed and the other two became available so I called to see if they could change my order to one of those colors. I went to "Help"/"Need More Help"/"Contact Us" and on that page selected "We can call you", and filled out the form.
In less than 10 seconds, my phone was ringing and when I answered I was talking to a person. (It turned out that she couldn't update my order, though, so I did end up with my third choice color. Turned out OK, though, because it also turned out that the place I had thought I'd put the Dot was not very good. The ideal spot, it turned out, was a spot where that third color fit much better).
2. I ordered some pants and shirts about three weeks before Christmas. I got a notice on a Friday that USPS had delivered them, saying that they had been left in the garage or some other outbuilding. I could not find them. Amazon's site says that sometimes you can get a notice notice up to 48 hours before actual delivery, so I waited until Monday. Then I went to the USPS office, and they told me that it had actually been left at my neighbor's and that USPS would retrieve it from the neighbor and bring it to me.
I went and checked with the neighbor and they had not seen it. We even checked her garage, since the delivery notice mentioned a garage, but nothing.
So I called Amazon. Again, less than 10 seconds after submitting the form I received a call from them. I explained what happened, and the person offered to send replacements. I requested a refund instead, since I didn't actually need this stuff for Christmas. It was just coincidence that I ordered near Christmas. I'd rather have a refund, and then just re-order the items myself later after the Christmas shipping madness ended. He immediately granted the refund which was processed within a day.
3. A week after that, the missing package showed up in my mailbox! So I again called Amazon. Yet again, less than 10 seconds from form submission requesting a callback to getting that callback.
I explained what happened and asked them if they could re-charge me for the order, or if they wanted me to ship the items back, or what. I was put on hold for maybe 30 seconds, and then told that they couldn't really re-charge, so just keep the items for free.
This sorta thing has been a problem for a long time.
> @amazonca responded: "You will get the correct item. I do not want any more hassles for you. Please do not worry. "
> So I re-ordered the @PkgWholesalers boxes...
... and got packages of granola again in 1 PkgWholesalers boxes.
I hate how frustrating it can be do convince a multijillion dollar company that, No, they are wrong, and I am right.
It's like we need an "No, I actually need you to help because they problem is unsolvable from my Point-of-View phone number" that's kept a secret from anyone.
Had a similar issue with my credit union where they referred to a payment number entry field the wrong way.
I managed to schedule a call with someone, and they didn't understand the problem. They said: "So you want us to change this just for you?". My answer of "No, I want you to change it for everybody." didn't go over well...
[1] https://gethuman.com/
If it were easier, then a lot of people who were wrong would be convincing the company that they were right and they wouldn't be a multijillion dollar company for long.
You have to convince someone who answers phones, and has no idea about the actual technical issue, and just clicked resend.
My speculation, never having set foot in an Amazon warehouse:
1) Amazon stockers are told to put the incoming inventory in a spot, and scan all visible barcodes on the product, which are all associated with that product in Amazon's DB henceforth. Normally extraneous barcodes are no problem because they aren't SKUs, so no one ever tries to pick them by the extra codes. Easier to tell the stockers to scan everything than to try to get them to pick the right one.
2) Company X, Y, Z ship their products to Amazon with their own barcodes and fail to remove the box company codes. Dozens of different random products around the warehouse end up with a secondary, identical barcode associated with them.
3) Someone orders boxes. Inventory system probably automatically sends pickers to the closest source of SKU 12345, of which there are - unusually - many scattered around the warehouse. So the product received is essentially random, out of whoever uses these boxes. Product roulette!
4) Customer service can't solve this problem. Maybe there's someone in Amazon's inventory team that can go in and fix it, but it occurred for good reasons! Everyone was behaving rationally. There are probably other similar problems in the database as well.
Almost.
Amazon FBA requirements are that the UPC barcode for your product be the only visible barcode on your packaging.
I would bet money that in the name of "efficiency", warehouse employees are trained to scan the first barcode they see and use the result, whatever it may be.
#4 is really by far the biggest problem here. No matter what, with a company of Amazons size things are going to go wrong that just cant be solved in an automated fashion. They need support with the training and authorization to escalate issues like this to staff that have the power to fix them.
You can get an actual human who can look at what’s going on if you send email to Bezos; that gets forwarded to the secret support team that can actually make decisions instead of just following a script. Or at least you could a few years ago.
Said by someone who did not understand the problem at all.