A user feedback regarding Amazon customer services that is sadly echoing my own experience with the French branch of Amazon customer service.
It is also one of the reasons why a few years ago I decided it was time to move most of my business away from online giant corps and from the Web, back to local businesses.
I don’t think ‘enshitification’ was a thing when I started realizing things were not betting better, but the feeling was there. Not just with Amazon, but as far as they are concerned the triggering event for me happened some 10 ago. I can’t recall the exact date, it doesn’t matter that much.
What matters is that for a couple years prior I had noticed a growing number of issues with the stuff I ordered being, well, not of the best quality. And issues with user reviews being not that honest. And, much more worrying for me, with Amazon’s own website moving away from that lean and easy to use UI that I liked so much in favor of an always more cluttered experience, offering less and less relevant results in exchange for more and more ‘promoted products’. They had been impressively good at a time and now they were getting real… mediocre. Exactly like Google, back then an impressive search engine, was getting real bad to the point of being unusable.
I also noticed more and more of my orders were not reliably delivered (not respecting the delivery date, or parcels were just dropped anywhere instead of ringing at the door, or they were not being delivered at all). But since Amazon always arranged things for me, I was like ‘It doesn’t matter that much, right?’
That day, I once again did not receive an order that was marked as delivered on the website. Not surprised, I did what I knew to do: fill a form and ask for refund or for them to send me a new parcel, expecting a quick resolution. Not this time, as my request was denied.
Back then, it was still doable to reach an actual human to speak with at Amazon France. I did that, explaining the situation on the phone an asking why my demand had been rejected. They replied they had a signed receipt for that package. Signed by me. I insisted I had signed no such thing and had received nothing, and asked to see a copy of that signed receipt I had signed which they refused to show me, telling me my only option was to go to the police station and file a complaint against the delivery guy.
Like, WTF?
Was that missing parcel really worth bothering me, their customer, with such shitty manners and with even shittier expectations—like telling me to file a complaint against someone who may have done nothing wrong? And even if that person happened to be a thief, it was an Amazon issue not mine: I had not received what I paid for and there was nothing more I needed to explain, or to do. But they refused to act. I hung up. Pissed of.
This helped realize something I should have understood many years earlier, before betraying those local businesses I had been a customer. That is, no matter how much I had spent with Amazon I was still less than a drop of water in their almost infinite ocean of money. They could not care less about keeping my business. Unlike those local store who would at least value my money, if not me.
The next day I had decided to moved most my business away from Amazon to other shops. ‘Most’, not all of it? Yep, I still use Amazon, rarely and only for those inexpensive little things I can’t find anywhere else.
That could have been the end of a not very smart customer against one of that naughty GAFAM (I could also share frustrating experiences with Apple and Microsoft, mind you) but the funny thing is that the real interesting part, to me at least, started right after that story.
Like I said, I started doing business as much as possible at local brick ’n mortar shops. Places where I could speak to an actual person if I ever needed to.
Sure, most of the time, the service was better. But one thing still struck me very quickly: an increasing number of those ‘local’ stores were selling the same low-quality shit as Amazon was. And finding quality products was getting herder too. Not impossible (we live in Paris, we still have a lot of options) but it required more efforts to spot the few quality shops among the many non-quality ones that were constantly popping up everywhere, replacing overnight an old bakery that had just closed, or a nice restaurant, with a snack franchise selling industrially processed junk food, or with a nail salon, or some (fast) fashion boutique. Interchangeable and short-lived businesses that show zero care about quality and about the place they’re settling in, or about the people who live there.
And it was not just snacks and false nails.
I purchased an extra bookshelf, not from Ikea. It was not cheap but it started wobbling just by looking at it. A bookshelf that is supposed to hold tons of books. Or is that bookshelves are just decorative?
Also, books, the object itself, are getting worse. Some are so poorly made their pages will start falling apart the moment one cracks it open to read it. Or they will be so poorly printed they’re barely legible, which is kinda rude from a book. A book is not just about its content (or its shiny cover), it’s also a container, an object that is supposed to endure. And those shiny new books are not able to endure much. They’re trash.
Expensive trash I’m tempted to add while I’m flipping through the pages of this 1841 edition of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives (Greek/French) I found this morning at a flea market in the South of Paris.
There is no need to go back as far as the first half of the XIX century to find decently made books. Here is an Oxford edition of Byron’s poetry from 1912. Sure, that book cover is well used but it holds fine, and more than that considering it’s 113 years old. Next to it is a 1982 edition of Jules Verne and not a very fancy and expensive run (this was a largely distributed print from a popular Book Club) stil it is very well made and it feels as nice to open it today than it was some 46 years ago.
Don’t get me wrong, not all books have turned trash. There are still many fine books that are being made today but they are not the norm. So much so that I find myself avoiding anything printed after the late 90s early 00s unless I know it’s from a publisher that does care about their books or if I can check in person how well the book is made.
And it’s not just hardbacks. Paperbacks too are concerned. Here again, save a few exceptions that do care, most pre 90s-00s editions will stand the test of time better than more recent editions of the exact same paperback from the same publisher. Why?
And why is that we seem to be OK to pay for shittier products and books?
Shouldn’t we be protesting books being made as if they were single use objects (if even that), and not as something one may pass onto the next generation, and to the one after that?
Or is this already acted that he next generation won’t ever open a book?
Published: 2025 Dec 11