Originally published at: Amazon won't help Klein bottle seller after another company hijacks his product listing with a blackhead remover | Boing Boing
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None of these big tech companies want to put you in touch with a human to rectify a problem if they can help it. At best they’d rather fob it off on crappy AI or, more often, just consider it a cost of doing business. The only way to get action against them is to make a public stink in the press.
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Proud owner of a Cliff Stoll klein bottle. So bummed to hear about this n-dimensional bullshit.
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In 2020, the American multinational e-commerce company, headquartered in Seattle, Washington, employed 1,298,000 full- and part-time employees.
They have almost 1.3 million employees and they can’t take fraud like this seriously enough to have one of them talk to sellers about it on the phone or via email or chat? What the hell are the 1.3 million people doing that they can’t spare at least one to handle something this significant?
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That sounds extremely unfair. Although Cliff could choose to leave Amazon, it seems to have been working for him outside of this. I do appreciate knowing he’s got inventory and is still selling. I have ordered direct over the years and will look forward to doing so again in the near future.
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Packing boxes
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Proud gifter of Acme’s Klein Stein, the beer mug with one continuous surface. I am budgeting for a purchase for myself one day soon.
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i would love to see CliffS go all old-skool on Amazon.
bought a Klein Bottle for my pops years ago, it was one oof his prized items.
The work Stoll did tracking down hackers was amazing, and if you haven’t seen his TED Talk, stop everything and go there now
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this is amazon’s business model if you do not like it … fix it!
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And here were are.
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That’s infuriating. I hope the increased attention from the public helps get things resolved in his favor.
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This is also pretty good, PBS Nova filmed contemporary to the events. Lots of fun seeing the old tech that was the new tech. Around this time I stole Stoll’s pager messenger idea to make an automated alarm scanner to monitor a packet switch I was accountable for. (don’t remember if that detail was in this doc, but it’s in “The Cuckoo’s Nest” . Cliff used a voice pager to send him messages in Morse code. He was (is?) a ham radio operator. )
EDIT : fix spelling, thinking errors
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mom and pop just retired and are looking for something they can do from home. they were thinking they might start selling stuff at the farmer’s market, but i’ll mention this to them.
starting a world wide shipping business - especially one that leverages it’s monopoly powers to dominate logistics - might be something they hadn’t considered.
though i guess actually amazon is also a giant media company, and a giant tech company. so maybe they’ll have to put in some weekends too. 
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The business model is to let other companies fuck over other listers? That’s a shitty model.
It sounds like that is the call to action for the post - fix it.
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I’m still boycotting Amazon. It’s easy & fun! Especially when I read posts like this one.
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I’ve got some books to help with that. Let’s start with…
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Cliff Stoll? The Cliff Stoll?
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Is there any chance a good lawyer would be able to get some sort of misrepresentation or fraud suit going against Amazon (or some other civil liability offense)?
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