I was perusing Kindle books and wanted to examine a title. Unfortunately I clicked a one-click buy button that I mistook for a link describing the product.1. Returning the item itself was extraordinarily difficult. This is exactly the sort of experience I expect from a bloated legacy company and one who prioritizes making returns frustrating in order to discourage them.2. A further complication was the item itself was a bundle of nine items. In order to cancel/return them, each item needed to go through a cumbersome process to cancel separately.3. To add to this mess, both the web and app interface would only list a few of the products in the bundle at a time, making it impossible to cancel all 9. At seemingly random times the order of these would mix, possibly as the refunds for one of the items processed and deprioritized it in whatever order the company sees fit (there's no way to change this).4. But after a certain number of refunds no force available to me could effect any more: the account was freezed out of refunds/cancellations. Only "customer service" (please read those two words in the most withering tone your mind is capable of) could handle it.5. Just as you'd expect from one of these megalithic companies, customer service is tiered, staffed with people moderately trained monkeys speaking impenetrable English, and abysmally low on the priority list of the board of directors. After a half hour and listening to the required amount of hold music and being told seven times how much my alleged patience is appreciated, they finally smashed the proper sequence of buttons on their keyboards and told me I might get some of my own money back in 3-5 days and maybe an e-mail or two.6. Fixing the problem--having this one-touch button in the first place--is impossible unless you are somehow an expert in seeking fine print on the website. The monkey who finally addressed the problem, a lovely woman who called herself Cindy in the most polite East Asian accent imaginable, had to read an entire URL five times because a. the Amazon e-mail providing the link, of course, did not show up, b. with all their vast technical know-how and tens of thousands of employees and untold billions of dollars in valuation and numerous text messages sent for every other purpose, they could not text me the link, c. "Cindy"'s lovely voice made understanding her consistently improbable, d. "Cindy" did not use the NATO-Phonetic alphabet. But we did it. We finally f***ing did it, and I got the damned buttons to disappear.d. After accidentally pressing one little button, I spent a half hour on two machines trying to remedy it and another half-hour with two monkeys before settling accounts for my egregious mistake, finally coming out financially even but an hour of my life vanished.1. Amazon, you owe me my wage for an hour. And I'm not talking in the form of a gift card.2. ENTREPRENEURS: PLEASE create a company to oust this behemoth and send it the way of Commodore computers and America On-Line.Thank you.
