I'm very surprised. My experience with Amazon refunds and in general customer support is that they care more about upsetting a customer than fighting for pesky 10 bucks.
Could it be that their behaviour is different depending on who is the customer, i.e. what is the customers yearly spend?
I shop frequently on Amazon. Last year I sent a gift to my nephew how was living in a dorm at the University. The gift was a comouter monitor about $500 worth. The package disappeared soon after it got signed by someone that was at the front desk and never made it to my nephew.
I was already getting ready for a long discussion but Amazon said they will handle it and my nephew got another monitor two days after.
I also routinely return stuff I buy by mistake and I honestly report I just bought it by mistake
My experience is that Amazon customer service did a complete 180 in 2020. Prior to that, every issue was resolved to my satisfaction, and they felt too generous, if anything.
Today, every Amazon rep I speak to isn't even empowered to resolve the most basic issues, and sounds like they hold their employer in complete contempt. Which is to say, they follow the scripts and /try/ to sound friendly, but it's clear they hate their employer, and want to satisfice their KPIs to keep their job, but all else being equal, would prefer for Amazon to die.
This also corresponds to a huge increase in problem rates. Prior to 2020, problems with Amazon were rare. Today, it seems like screwups happen all the time. I don't think they show up on any KPIs, though, as from Amazon's perspective, if a customer service rep e.g. satisficied and pretended to issue a refund without actually issuing one, or a customer gave up on resolving an issue, they have no visibility into the issue.
A basic, obvious issue like a missing package or a return will get handled, but anything more complex is now a black hole.
In 2018 I ordered something from Amazon and it got marked as delivered but didn't make its way to me. Amazon sent a replacement AND refunded me for the item.
In 2022 I ordered an item of similar size and cost and it was marked as delivered along with a photo of a house I could not recognize at all. When I asked Amazon to look into it I got the corporate flow-chart equivalent of "Oh haha, that sucks". I asked for it to be escalated and they more or less said that the order already has the "oh haha, that sucks" flag on it and can't be changed.
Yeah, their delivery accuracy has dropped. Since the great yuck I have had at least one delivery a year next door (easily retrieved) and one I completely didn't recognize.
> I'm very surprised. My experience with Amazon refunds and in general customer support is that they care more about upsetting a customer than fighting for pesky 10 bucks.
I'm not surprised at all. There have only been two times when I needed to return an item I got from Amazon, and both times Amazon stiffed me. One of those items was for around $10.
Amazon seems to care about petty dollar amounts more than avoiding upset customers.
The stuff Amazon gets away with is incredible. Imagine if you returned a product to WalMart and they decided to charge you for it anyways 3 weeks later.
I complained and was ignored. It was only $10 but it teaches a lesson.