I’ve mentioned before Christmas how cyber entities like Amazon.com are eradicating “box stores” and the humans that work there like a Best Buy or a Barnes & Noble. Sites like Amazon exist because our society are a bunch of freeloaders, wanting things for cheap and these same bunch of brats have no idea what the value of a dollar is. I think that is easier said than done.
Amazon is “cheap” for a number of reasons. They have limited overhead. One is they have a few warehouses, and item coming out of those warehouses go right to the customer as opposed to a box store. Second, is they have limited customer services. Ebay has much better customer service, given how badly managed they have been lately.  Like in the earlier story, I’ve mentioned there is no toll free number, and the emails are “generic” but are manned by an agent sifting through thousands of emails. Customer Relationship Management or CRM is the computer app where these agents look at the email and decide how to solve it by cherry picking a few drill down options and add a sentence or two of a personal message then presses send back to the customer.
Amazon is anonymous in the Seattle region, one of the city’s largest employer.  A Seattle paper wrote a story last year about how all the other big companies in the city like Boeing, Microsoft and others giving money to local charities and reaching out, while Amazon’s employees are forced to be anonymous and work in buildings that are unmarked. The western part of the United States is nothing but mind boggling how there are so many adolescents who think they have the freedom to run a company but hold no accountability.
That same story, the newspaper tried to get in contact with Amazon.com’s public relations, and they got a response back. The response was probably done with their CRM app, because it looked so generic!
I’m not even done with this story!
On Christmas Eve, the eastern part of the US, their side business of providing cloud services for companies like Netflix went out. This was the fourth occurrence in less than a year. NetworkWorld, wrote a story last week comparing their “apology” emails dating to April of 2011 and how there was only a few words that differentiated all of their messages that appeared a generic  CRM reply.
Dealing with retailers that are CRM, even worse contacting via the web, in this case Amazon.com is sobering. You have to deal with rules and e-tailer’s policies and there is no way around it. It’s the childish “rules are rules.” With traditional retailers, they can bend around costs, returns or refunds based on human instinct.
But I live in a free country. The country wants do things for cheap to free, and unfortunately when we want things for free, we give up for other things, like fending for ourselves if we need customer assistance on a messed up order and another childish phrase “dealing with it” just like how they responded to the cloud outage on Christmas Eve.