> Have you seen Miracle on 34th Street, where Kris Kringle convinces Macy's and Gimbels to tell their customers that their competition has what they're looking for? That isn't as fictional as Santa Claus. I was in a Walmart yesterday when I heard a clerk tell a customer that the hardware store down the street has the thing that Walmart didn't. It happens a bazillion times a day.

One of my favorite movies, yes! And I absolutely believe that a clerk will do this; if there was ever a loyalty of staff to the retail companies for which they worked, it was probably misplaced then, and is definitely misplaced now. But that's a matter of human discretion that overseers haven't yet been able to engineer out, whereas here we're talking about something that would have specifically to engineer in. The unwillingness of Amazon even to try to confront the massive review-gaming and counterfeit-items problem leads me to believe that, to the extent that they ever viewed their mission as getting the customer what they wanted, they don't now—and so will not change their search in a way that would facilitate that.