<story><title>Amazon’s $23M book about flies  (2011)</title><url>https://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>auggierose</author><text>I think I stumbled across similar behaviour, but for a used book. I was looking for a particular computer science book, couldn&amp;#x27;t find it new, and then decided to buy a used one from Amazon, ordering from the store with the best rating. It didn&amp;#x27;t arrive, and after a while (a few weeks) I received a notice that the delivery service had lost the book. I was refunded the money, though. The tracking number I got for the book from the store never worked though, I checked multiple times during those weeks. So I guess the same thing was at play here: I was sold the book although the store didn&amp;#x27;t have it. After failing to acquire the book, they just cancelled my order by pretending the delivery failed.&lt;p&gt;This boring story has a happy ending: I contacted the author (a retired MIT professor) if he could share a PDF with me, and he generated one from his old roff sources. He also sent me a signed copy from a stack he got from his publisher back then (80&amp;#x27;s), paying over $60 porto (US -&amp;gt; UK). I was blown away by his kindness and generosity.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>reaperducer</author><text>&lt;i&gt;I was sold the book although the store didn&amp;#x27;t have it.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;This happens a lot, and has recently become very visible with the death of Queen Elizabeth Ⅱ.&lt;p&gt;A lot of people suddenly hit Amazon and other online shopping sites to buy Queen merchandise, only to have their orders cancelled because the sellers weren&amp;#x27;t real stores with inventory, but just randos on the internet used to going out to tourist shops and buying one or two items a month as orders came in.&lt;p&gt;When the flood of orders arrived, they couldn&amp;#x27;t handle it, since their local shops ran dry of the specific items they listed, too.</text></comment>
<story><title>Amazon’s $23M book about flies  (2011)</title><url>https://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>auggierose</author><text>I think I stumbled across similar behaviour, but for a used book. I was looking for a particular computer science book, couldn&amp;#x27;t find it new, and then decided to buy a used one from Amazon, ordering from the store with the best rating. It didn&amp;#x27;t arrive, and after a while (a few weeks) I received a notice that the delivery service had lost the book. I was refunded the money, though. The tracking number I got for the book from the store never worked though, I checked multiple times during those weeks. So I guess the same thing was at play here: I was sold the book although the store didn&amp;#x27;t have it. After failing to acquire the book, they just cancelled my order by pretending the delivery failed.&lt;p&gt;This boring story has a happy ending: I contacted the author (a retired MIT professor) if he could share a PDF with me, and he generated one from his old roff sources. He also sent me a signed copy from a stack he got from his publisher back then (80&amp;#x27;s), paying over $60 porto (US -&amp;gt; UK). I was blown away by his kindness and generosity.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hotdamnson</author><text>Here in Thailand, there were cases where the shop sent a package containing cash amount paid by the customer because they didn&amp;#x27;t have the item they sold.  
This was an attempt to avoid some negative repercussions from the platform they were selling on (Shoppe, Lazada). Totally mental.</text></comment>