Blog "about python 3"

[Chris Angelico]

On Mon, Jan 6, 2014 at 3:34 AM, Roy Smith <roy at panix.com> wrote:
> Amazon's (short-term) goal is to increase their market share by
> undercutting everybody on price.  They have implemented a box-packing
> algorithm which clearly has a bug in it.  You are complaining that they
> failed to deliver your purchase in good condition, and apparently don't
> care.  You're right, they don't.  The cost to them to manually correct
> this situation exceeds the value.  This is one shipment.  It doesn't
> matter.

If it stopped there, it would be mildly annoying ("1% of our shipments
will need to be replaced, that's a 1% cost for free replacements").
The trouble is that they don't care about the replacement either, so
it's really that 100% (or some fairly large proportion) of their
shipments will arrive with some measure of damage, and they're hoping
that their customers' threshold for complaining is often higher than
the damage sustained. Which it probably is, a lot of the time.

> You are one customer, you don't matter either.  Seriously.
> This may be annoying to you, but it's good business for Amazon.  For
> them, fast and cheap is absolutely better than correct.

But this is the real problem, business-wise. Can you really run a
business by not caring about your customers? (I also think it's pretty
disappointing that a business like Amazon can't just toss in some
bubbles, or packing peanuts (what we call "trucks" for hysterical
raisins), or something. It's not that hard to have a machine just blow
in some sealed air before the box gets closed... surely?) Do they have
that much of a monopoly, or that solid a customer base, that they're
happy to leave *everyone* dissatisfied? We're not talking about 1%
here. From the way the cust svc guy was talking, I get the impression
that they do this with all parcels.

And yet.... I can't disagree with your final conclusion. Empirical
evidence goes against my incredulous declaration that "surely this is
a bad idea" - according to XKCD 1165, they're kicking out nearly a
cubic meter a *SECOND* of packages. That's fairly good evidence that
they're doing something that, whether it be right or wrong, does fit
with the world's economy. Sigh.

ChrisA