Literal enshittification?
Amazon’s process for inspecting returned items is “broken,”
Just ask anyone down a notch in the retail food chain about what’s really in those boxes of Amazon returns. Seriously… anyone… it’s not surprising that those problems continue through to Amazon’s own returns chain.
I heard from a friend that there’s an retail outlet not too far away where Amazon sells returned merchandise at discounted prices. That sounds like a reasonable way to separate the returns from the original business who sold the merchandise. At least if you got a dirty diaper in the store you’d blame Amazon’s people and not Mom’s Friendly Diaper Sellers, Inc.
Um, sounds like we can ask you too? What really is in those boxes?
… our whole world is one big meme stock
Trump Media shares spike 30% after assassination attempt
One vendor I know of hates it when a someone buys a second product in order to return the first one that they broke, usually in a not-covered-by-warranty way. It’s often not at all obvious what’s dead, making it very hard to spot.
Wrong but visually similar products returned, often when there’s an update to the previous model.
…the list continued, but I stopped remembering with those two…
Thanks.
So most people who return items are lying scammers?
Wow, now I feel even more cynical today. Ugh.
No, but there are enough scammers out there that I refuse to sell stuff online anymore. In-person, cash in hand only. Got scammed out of a used ham radio when the buyer disputed it ever arriving to PayPal, even though I had tracking showing it was signed for. They didn’t care. Cost me $400.
Make everything digital, they said. Google will save everything, they said. Online is forever, they said. Let’s get rid of physical archives cause paper is obsolete they said…
Ugh. Reminds me that it’s long past time that I pull everything off my Google Drive and Photo accounts, back up locally, and cancel those services. Just too much risk exposure having it all in their hands.
My university library is still doing that. On the one hand I have amassed a ton of books they’re throwing out, on the other hand it’s so short sighted it hurts
Cory Doctorow, a clever fellow and Toronto-born internet dude, invented the term to characterize the declining service and products made by IT monopolies that generate armies of algorithms to bully people like storm troopers.
A bit condescending there…
It’s like having our very own enshittification mascot.
For the most part, university library print collections are limited by space above all other considerations. Even with 90% of collections budgets going to continuing subscriptions, new print acquisitions are (to paint with a broad brush) basically impossible without one-to-one weeding. That said, collections dollars “go further” with e-book purchases than with print (for certain values of “further”, depending on the license terms) and allow some novel mechanisms like demand-driven acquisitions.
The elephant in the room with library collection budgets is subscription costs, which are high and just getting higher. (Ask me about the list price for Journal of Chromatography A!) But the weeding of print journal collections is surprisingly well managed. Many libraries participate in LOCKSS, which basically means that there’s at least a couple of reasonably accessible copies of any print journal run even after the majority of libraries have weeded their print version in favor of continuing electronic access.
It’s not a panacea, but it does a good job of balancing opportunities and liabilities, and ensuring the ongoing existence of a print record, in a world of increasing subscription costs and shrinking collections budgets that have universally been turned towards electronic-only access.
(This is a US-centric view of large academic research libraries; other experiences may differ!)
Something about putting all your eggs in one tech basket but, at the moment, it doesn’t look like Microsoft have fucked up one of their updates again?
It was CrowdStrike, an endpoint protection company (fancy antivirus, basically) pushing a driver update that causes machines to go into a reboot loop. We are a Microsoft user at my job, but don’t use CrowdStrike and so we haven’t had an outage.
