Amazon Fired its Empty Chair

Famously, Amazon culture dictated that every meeting have an empty chair to represent the customer for which all Amazon initiatives and instincts should serve. Apparently, the customer got furloughed and replaced by a new empty chair: the Amazon 3rd party seller.

My parents are in great shape but their age puts them deep into the vulnerable category during this pandemic. They do all their purchasing online and live like happy hermits in their home. Planning for winter, they bought an exercise bike off Amazon at the beginning of October. Amazon promised an early November delivery. 

November came and went. No bike. Frustrated, my parents cancelled the order and found a bike locally which met their needs. End of story, almost. The Amazon bike showed up on the verge of New Years Eve – cancelled and 60 days after the promised delivery.

My parents called Amazon. They didn’t want the bike. They already cancelled the order. They asked Amazon to pick it up. Amazon customer service, no empty chairs in their midst, told my parents that the bike came from a 3rd party seller. Amazon is not responsible for transactions with Amazon’s 3rd party sellers. My parents had two choices: pay for the bike or return it themselves.

Two octogenarians on a pension had to figure out how to return a 200-lb exercise bike to the 3rd party seller… in China. Otherwise, Amazon and the 3rd party seller would share the spoils of an un-cancelled order. (My parents are not freight forwarders by trade so the idea of figuring out how to ship something back to China is as fathomable as a Great Wall.)

This isn’t a one-off story. I could share a half-dozen unpleasant surprises of inexpert Amazon customers who made a purchase on the Amazon website thinking it means buying from Amazon.  

I can imagine at this point Amazon fanatics and employees would chortle “caveat emptor”. But the empty chair of Amazon’s old days would reply,  “caveat venditor, Amazon”.