Amazon seems both willfully and unintentionally incompetent. They have so many strikes against them.
Their prime dark patterns are hostile enough, and I avoided it for years. But I needed a cheap plastic item quickly so I did a free prime trial with the intention to cancel. So I canceled and got billed anyway because according to their rep, on the back end the check box for “auto renewal” was enabled which wasn’t an option my settings screens. Why would it have been? I’d already cancelled and had a cancel confirmation email so why would an auto renewal option still be activated and bill me? It’s willful incompetence.
And their hire to fire practices and practice of churning through warehouse workers is terrible.
This Klein bottle incident just shows again how little they care about legit users or how easy it is to abuse the system.
They made whole foods a bad experience by treating non-prime members as second class customers. I’ve cut back there and now only occasionally buy coffee beans there, and will be cutting back even more.
And now Amazon recruiters started reaching out to me for data science positions. No I am not interested in working for a hot mess that only cares about money.
To be honest, there's not much difference between Prime and non-Prime at Whole Foods. The Prime specials are very few and far between, and usually not worth very much. There are more signs about discounts in the store than actual discounts in the store.
I think the only thing I ever get a Prime discount on is my wife's favorite cheese and occasionally steak. But pre-Amazon, the cheese was $4.99 a package. Post-Amazon, I need a Prime discount to get it down to $6.99 a package.
And for what its worth, the store experience was totally fine. I'll give them my money again next time I need something tech related.
I would call it an anomaly but the exact same thing happened when my sister tried to buy a Switch from them a few months prior.
My wife knows the person who is responsible for this, and tells me that the person who implemented these changes knows exactly what you're talking about because that person had the same horrible experiences with Best Buy decades ago. That's the reason things have changed.
Every time you hear, "<Crazy thing X> sold on Walmart website!" it's always a reseller, not directly from them.
Because "monkey see, monkey do" is pretty much the go-to leadership strategy for a lot of big companies these days.
Bad managers manage badly. Senior "leadership" rarely knows the meaning of the world.
