<story><title>Amazon destroys $1.5m of sellers inventory – now homeless</title><url>https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/ruined-my-life-after-going-all-in-on-amazon-a-merchant-says-he-lost-everything-20201028-p5697l.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>AussieWog93</author><text>So sometimes discs won&amp;#x27;t load or cartridges won&amp;#x27;t read in their console, or they&amp;#x27;re unhappy with condition - sometimes this is as simple as apologising and accepting a return, sometimes people aren&amp;#x27;t happy with that and just want to kick up a stink.  More often than not, the people kicking up a stink return a perfectly working product, and they just wanted to make sure we&amp;#x27;d accept it by them being as foul as possible.&lt;p&gt;Sometimes we&amp;#x27;ll get people just asking for more information on an item we sell.
Usually you can tell whether or not these people are actually interested in the product or not by how they ask the question.  If they&amp;#x27;re asking about a specific detail (for example, if they&amp;#x27;re looking for a particular serial number range on a console), they&amp;#x27;ll usually follow up if you give them a positive response.
People asking less specific questions (such as asking for &amp;quot;more photos&amp;quot;) are often just bored and have nothing better to do and will either disappear or ask more questions.  You can waste literal hours serving these customers and in the process lose thousands of dollars worth of actual sales.&lt;p&gt;The worst group are just really badly socialised people - often people with serious mental health or drug-related issues.  If you engage with them, they will demand massive amounts of your time and have absolutely zero concern for your feelings (let alone your business goals).  If they feel you have slighted they, they will respond in the most foul and violent way possible.
Just today, my wife was publicly berated by an incel-type guy because she didn&amp;#x27;t respond to a message he had sent over a week ago.  There are at least 2 other occasions I can think of in the last year where this happened.&lt;p&gt;I think the thing to remember is that the average HN reader (and, by extension, most people that the average HN reader knows) is educated, values their time, and is socialised well enough to the point that they can hold down a job and maintain basic interpersonal relationships.  The type of person who contacts customer support for products that shouldn&amp;#x27;t really require support are absolutely not like this.  Mostly it&amp;#x27;s just people that don&amp;#x27;t value their own time (or the time of others), but multiple times every week we&amp;#x27;ll come across people with _serious_ social issues (I don&amp;#x27;t mean socially awkward, I mean &amp;quot;unable to regulate emotion like a healthy adult&amp;quot;) and no-one to talk to about it.</text></item><item><author>edude03</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m really curious what sort of support the retro video game business needs. My (clearly naive) assumption is that it would be as simple as sending them the cartridge and telling them to have a great day, but if you&amp;#x27;re meeting so many seemingly unpleasant people it seems to be a lot more than that.&lt;p&gt;Could you share more about the sort of issues you face?</text></item><item><author>AussieWog93</author><text>Just to give another perspective, I run a couple of small businesses with my wife and we handle support ourselves.&lt;p&gt;This is an absolute pleasure for our USB oscilloscope business - intelligent, reasonable customers ask for help with a problem they have, we help them solve it and both parties move on with our lives.&lt;p&gt;Our other business - dealing in retro video games, is an absolute nightmare.  Almost all support questions we field come from people who have no intention of solving a problem.  Most are just anxious people who need a little bit of reassurance, but plenty expect us to do pointless busywork, want to vent emotionally at someone who can&amp;#x27;t fight back, or just generally want to smear shit all over the walls because they can.
Either way, because they don&amp;#x27;t want to solve a problem, they just keep up eating up your support time and emotional energy in an extended loop for no gain - we&amp;#x27;re talking upwards of 80% of your support resources if you let these people have their way.&lt;p&gt;Having to deal regularly with the type of person that the average HN reader would never come across in their lifetime, I can understand why organisations like Amazon would set up these bureaucratic support &amp;quot;walls&amp;quot; and&amp;#x2F;or outsource all support to a Filipino call centre staffed by people that don&amp;#x27;t even know what Amazon is.
The systems are designed to make getting support hard, because most people contacting consumer support literally don&amp;#x27;t even have a problem that good support staff could solve.&lt;p&gt;In this instance, they&amp;#x27;ve clearly made an error in requiring the user to navigate an automated system when the dollar value is in the _millions_, and I understand why the average HN user would be pissed off by a system like this, but I don&amp;#x27;t think the solution to the problem is as simple as &amp;quot;provide good, human support to everyone&amp;quot; - it creates as many problems as it solves.</text></item><item><author>ethanwillis</author><text>&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  The merchants must navigate a largely automated, 
  guilty-until-proven-innocent process in which Amazon 
  serves as judge and jury. Their emails and calls can go 
  unanswered, or Amazon&amp;#x27;s replies are incomprehensible, 
  making sellers suspect they&amp;#x27;re at the mercy of 
  algorithms with little human oversight.
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
This is something our modern society was and is not ready for. Bureaucracy and the bureaucrats that administered it is a nightmare that society has known about and dealt with for a long time. But this is fully automated bureaucracy. Except instead of having well known rules or human bureaucrats we can confront.. we&amp;#x27;re now effectively at the mercy of a dice roll in the worst case. And no one can even confirm if the dice are even fair dice. In the best case you get to deal with a robot that can&amp;#x27;t even understand what you&amp;#x27;re saying.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>robotnikman</author><text>The amount of people that seem &amp;quot;unable to regulate emotion like a healthy adult&amp;quot; as you say is surprising.&lt;p&gt;I used to work at a call center job many years ago, and the amount of people who just seem unable to act like a decent person is astounding. I had to leave the job after a few months for my own sanity.&lt;p&gt;I know its somewhat biased since obviously a call center position will deal with many unpleasant people, but it worries me how it seems like there is an overall decline in mental health of the general population</text></comment>
<story><title>Amazon destroys $1.5m of sellers inventory – now homeless</title><url>https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/ruined-my-life-after-going-all-in-on-amazon-a-merchant-says-he-lost-everything-20201028-p5697l.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>AussieWog93</author><text>So sometimes discs won&amp;#x27;t load or cartridges won&amp;#x27;t read in their console, or they&amp;#x27;re unhappy with condition - sometimes this is as simple as apologising and accepting a return, sometimes people aren&amp;#x27;t happy with that and just want to kick up a stink.  More often than not, the people kicking up a stink return a perfectly working product, and they just wanted to make sure we&amp;#x27;d accept it by them being as foul as possible.&lt;p&gt;Sometimes we&amp;#x27;ll get people just asking for more information on an item we sell.
Usually you can tell whether or not these people are actually interested in the product or not by how they ask the question.  If they&amp;#x27;re asking about a specific detail (for example, if they&amp;#x27;re looking for a particular serial number range on a console), they&amp;#x27;ll usually follow up if you give them a positive response.
People asking less specific questions (such as asking for &amp;quot;more photos&amp;quot;) are often just bored and have nothing better to do and will either disappear or ask more questions.  You can waste literal hours serving these customers and in the process lose thousands of dollars worth of actual sales.&lt;p&gt;The worst group are just really badly socialised people - often people with serious mental health or drug-related issues.  If you engage with them, they will demand massive amounts of your time and have absolutely zero concern for your feelings (let alone your business goals).  If they feel you have slighted they, they will respond in the most foul and violent way possible.
Just today, my wife was publicly berated by an incel-type guy because she didn&amp;#x27;t respond to a message he had sent over a week ago.  There are at least 2 other occasions I can think of in the last year where this happened.&lt;p&gt;I think the thing to remember is that the average HN reader (and, by extension, most people that the average HN reader knows) is educated, values their time, and is socialised well enough to the point that they can hold down a job and maintain basic interpersonal relationships.  The type of person who contacts customer support for products that shouldn&amp;#x27;t really require support are absolutely not like this.  Mostly it&amp;#x27;s just people that don&amp;#x27;t value their own time (or the time of others), but multiple times every week we&amp;#x27;ll come across people with _serious_ social issues (I don&amp;#x27;t mean socially awkward, I mean &amp;quot;unable to regulate emotion like a healthy adult&amp;quot;) and no-one to talk to about it.</text></item><item><author>edude03</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m really curious what sort of support the retro video game business needs. My (clearly naive) assumption is that it would be as simple as sending them the cartridge and telling them to have a great day, but if you&amp;#x27;re meeting so many seemingly unpleasant people it seems to be a lot more than that.&lt;p&gt;Could you share more about the sort of issues you face?</text></item><item><author>AussieWog93</author><text>Just to give another perspective, I run a couple of small businesses with my wife and we handle support ourselves.&lt;p&gt;This is an absolute pleasure for our USB oscilloscope business - intelligent, reasonable customers ask for help with a problem they have, we help them solve it and both parties move on with our lives.&lt;p&gt;Our other business - dealing in retro video games, is an absolute nightmare.  Almost all support questions we field come from people who have no intention of solving a problem.  Most are just anxious people who need a little bit of reassurance, but plenty expect us to do pointless busywork, want to vent emotionally at someone who can&amp;#x27;t fight back, or just generally want to smear shit all over the walls because they can.
Either way, because they don&amp;#x27;t want to solve a problem, they just keep up eating up your support time and emotional energy in an extended loop for no gain - we&amp;#x27;re talking upwards of 80% of your support resources if you let these people have their way.&lt;p&gt;Having to deal regularly with the type of person that the average HN reader would never come across in their lifetime, I can understand why organisations like Amazon would set up these bureaucratic support &amp;quot;walls&amp;quot; and&amp;#x2F;or outsource all support to a Filipino call centre staffed by people that don&amp;#x27;t even know what Amazon is.
The systems are designed to make getting support hard, because most people contacting consumer support literally don&amp;#x27;t even have a problem that good support staff could solve.&lt;p&gt;In this instance, they&amp;#x27;ve clearly made an error in requiring the user to navigate an automated system when the dollar value is in the _millions_, and I understand why the average HN user would be pissed off by a system like this, but I don&amp;#x27;t think the solution to the problem is as simple as &amp;quot;provide good, human support to everyone&amp;quot; - it creates as many problems as it solves.</text></item><item><author>ethanwillis</author><text>&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  The merchants must navigate a largely automated, 
  guilty-until-proven-innocent process in which Amazon 
  serves as judge and jury. Their emails and calls can go 
  unanswered, or Amazon&amp;#x27;s replies are incomprehensible, 
  making sellers suspect they&amp;#x27;re at the mercy of 
  algorithms with little human oversight.
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
This is something our modern society was and is not ready for. Bureaucracy and the bureaucrats that administered it is a nightmare that society has known about and dealt with for a long time. But this is fully automated bureaucracy. Except instead of having well known rules or human bureaucrats we can confront.. we&amp;#x27;re now effectively at the mercy of a dice roll in the worst case. And no one can even confirm if the dice are even fair dice. In the best case you get to deal with a robot that can&amp;#x27;t even understand what you&amp;#x27;re saying.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mistersquid</author><text>Thank you for these details about the difficulties in handling support requests from people with underlying socialization and&amp;#x2F;or mental health issues.&lt;p&gt;As someone who is mostly emotionally and cognitively balanced and who has been trained to communicate in order to reach mutually satisfactory outcomes, I don&amp;#x27;t even think to consider that some people are too maladjusted to use support resources (i.e. communication) in productive ways.</text></comment>