Hire patsies. Motivate them by telling them they’re entrepreneurs. Every time somebody notices, act really shocked and offended, smack your patsy around (just the one they know about), coddle the customer (just the one who noticed). Bribe politicians to look the other way.
This is what they do with their logistics companies. Almost every Amazon delivery employee, driving an Amazon van, works for a "independent logistics contractor", and the rotate them every 2 years or so as the abuse becomes apparent.
It's far from unique to amazon, though. The Microsoft employee/contractor decision in the 90s made it socially acceptable to treat contractors like shit, and it's been downhill since then.
The patsies are the amazon marketplace sellers. The public and regulars have to play wack-a-mole on the thousands of disposable marketplace sellers and Amazon can act shocked shocked every time any particular marketplace seller is found to be a fraud.
Probably something to do with sellers doing it through the platform, and I imagine AMAZON responds to the right amount of complaints legally required, though these are guesses.
I also imagine its a complex and fun problem to try and solve. Ive noticed they have started in some ways, for example some brands are now labeled as "premium brand sourced" which means less likely to be fake.
Becoming a B2B company fundamentally changed Amazon's business model.
Previously (B2C): incentivized to deliver great customer experience to make money on increased sales volume and higher-price purchases
Now (B2B): incentivized to deliver easy seller experience to make money on increasing number of sellers and sales volume
To be fair, Amazon still cares a surprisingly amount about its end customers, when it doesn't need to, as a legacy of its rabidly awesome B2C days...
... but over time the company will continue to errode and optimize itself to its current customers (sellers).
Why doesn't Amazon do more to strategically combat fakes / bad products? Because sellers literally don't care about that. It's not a priority for them, so it's not a priority for Amazon.
Considering how much of Amazon has become just merchants who buy on Alibaba and sell on Amazon, or even outright Alibaba sellers, I’m shocked that it hasn’t had any blowback.
Most likely Ebay. Amazon is built around a bait and switch tactic. If you buy anything directly from Amazon, the risk of a scam is minimal, this is the bait. However, the switch tactic is that they made it increasingly hard to order directly from Amazon by co-mingling and progressively decreasing the UI distinctions between items sold by third party sellers and Amazon. When it turns out that the article is popular and profitable, Amazon will introduce a "Amazon Basics" version of the product, where the product is branded in such a way, that it is obvious that only Amazon can sell it.
The core distinction between Ebay and Amazon is that on Ebay each shop+product combination is its own listing and the seller reputation is put up front, with the buy button below the seller information. Meanwhile on Amazon there are product listings, with multiple sellers providing the same product and the seller name being put below the buy button. There is no obvious indication that you are buying from a third party seller on Amazon, whereas on Ebay you can only buy from third parties, so expectations adjust accordingly.
I suspect many small players have simply stopped playing entirely. Most alternative selling platforms are a shit-show too so implies you are big enough to run a chunky platform yourself it is difficult to compete with the low quality low margin players.
The hypocrisy is apparent when you notice that the pretty much the only brand of products that miraculously does not have third party reseller listed (and hence escapes third party inventory commingling contamination issues) is the Amazon Basics. [1]
Brand owners can apply to have their brands sold only by themselves. I think it might not stop others from selling used, but it would stop the new listings.
Last time I tried to report a fake product to Amazon it's literally impossible. It simply isn't one of the pre-determined options available through customer service, either the self service chat or to the advisers. The closest thing and what the advisers select would be "item not as described" which might be somewhat correct, but hides the problem to whatever reports get generated for management. Hard to believe that isn't intentional.
Probably the platform vs actor thing. Like hate speech on a platform that has some rudimentary reporting vs the person who actually wrote it. Most of the blame falls on the actor instead of the platform.
A lot of those big box retailers have long opened up their digital storefronts to the "marketplace" concept too. Best Buy, Home Depot, and Walmart are the first three that come to mind.
The Walmart one is particularly egregious because most of the marketplace is just "item that Walmart sells except 5x the price" designed to ensnare old people who click on the wrong thing.
Amazon is an expert at toeing the line, be it monopoly laws or product liability. I thought it was their biggest mistake to join the race to the bottom when taobao started eating into their margins - I still wish they positioned themselves as the trusted alternative rather than peddle in fake goods, but in retrospect it looks like the right move for them (not consumers).
The connection between Amazon and the intelligence community may speak to that. When the federal government needs you for something, it seems you can get away with many things scott free or with wrist-slaps.
EDIT: This is not a secret, but by all means, keep downvoting me.
You’re not getting down voted because it’s a secret. You’re getting down voted because it’s a red herring. The US shut down its primary nuclear pit production plant because of criminal environmental violations [1]. That was far more impactful than AWS is to national security. No company has a blank check.
I am surprised there have been no high profile stories of people dying due to knock-off consumables from Amazon or house fires caused by knock-off electrical items. It's a matter of time, and if it makes enough headlines it could open more people's eyes to the risks of shopping there.
By that logic, cigarettes should be regulated as medical products too, since they deliver mind-altering drugs to their users' bodies. But cigarettes have absolutely no valid medical use, and the same is true for tattoos: you're much better off without them in both cases.
They're injecting an artificial material under the skin; it may not have immediate health effects, barring contamination/infection (which itself is a real risk that shouldn't be ignored), but the long-term effects are less well understood. So, in a sense, they're similar to cigarettes that way: they affect your body, but how much? The long-term effects of cigarettes are much better understood today, but that wasn't the case 60 years ago when cigarettes were all the rage. But since so many people smoked like chimneys back then, we can now look at them today and see what their health is like, and compare to others who didn't smoke. 60 years ago, no one except sailors had tattoos, so no one investigated them much and there's not that much long-term data available (not many old people with tattoos to see the health effects). But, like in the 1960s with cigarettes, tattoos are all the rage today (in America), so in 30-60 years we'll be seeing the health effects of this craze.
But the real point here is to respond to the OP's idea that tattoo ink should be regulated as a medical product. It's not a medical product, just like cigarettes aren't, piercings, aren't, etc. Medical products are things that are supposed to improve your health and affect your body, so of course there's no call to regulate cigarettes, alcohol, heroin, methamphetamine, or tattoo ink as medical products, because they simply aren't (they don't improve your health, nor claim to usually), even though they obviously can affect your health.
Tattooing has a history stretching back thousands of years, don't let a random unsourced comment on an internet forum dissuade you from pursuing something you want.
I’ll bet you just didn’t notice. A huge fraction of the name brand items I’ve bought on there were usable, but fake or knockoffs. You’d have to already own or be experienced with the real one to know. For example, I bought an electric shaver replacement blade on there. After 3 months it was dull and the paint flaked off. The real ones are not painted so don’t flake and last 6 months but I had to already know these facts to tell.
I buy things. I get what I bought. Protein powders, USB chargers, ev charging parts, coffees, teas, brand name things, etc. I “buy again” and have no issues. I’ve bought direct from some vendors too (protein powders, oat bars, coffees…), shaving blades, and I get the same stuff I bought from Amazon.
I do tend to buy from brand stores and not aggregators or unknown sellers (I’ve been an aggregator for sneakers, but I drop-shipped via the brands directly; I’m more than familiar with SellerCentral).
And my argument isn’t that no one has these issues, but I’m pushing back on the “who even buys on Amazon anymore?” retort.
do you chemically analyze your protein powder to see if it matches the real stuff? do you tear open your chargers to see if the internals are same as the real OEM? if not how are you so confident you're not getting counterfeits?
A lot of the fake stuff on Amazon is close to, or the full quality of the real thing... many of them are "ghost shift counterfeit" - e.g. made in the actual factory by the actual workers making the real thing, but sold illegally. In this case, I could see many people not really caring.
One thing I've noticed is that you don't really know where its coming from on Amazon. It will say its fulfilled by Amazon themselves, or the manufacturer, but when the package comes it is often actually from some shady 3rd party that was never mentioned. A few times I've had broken, damaged, or dirty items that were obvious returns resold as new. Sometimes in janky homemade style packaging like an eBay item.
Same here, but presumably, I have a feeling that I have a pretty good ability for discernment. Thinking of all my non-technical and even technical coworkers that fall for the monthly corporate phishing exercises, there seems to be a non-trivial amount of folks that haven't built up that discernment muscle.
When I visit my elderly mom after several months, I can't quite understand how she's purchased all sorts of bunk from everywhere, not just Amazon. From church MLM sales, to random youtube ads that take her to a store front. While the things she has purchased isn't an absolute scam, they tend to either be low quality or far overpriced for the purchased price.
I do think that there is both a tech privilege that our cohort shares in both high compensation and a better tuned intuition as we tend to be the creators of many products and have a good smell test when it comes to how the sauce is made. The high comp allows for us to purchase the high quality, brand-name version of many products. While understanding the sauce behind a lot of stuff informs my internal heuristics of price, pictures, marketing, 1,3, and 4 star reviews.
I do get the impression that those that are scammed on Amazon tend to be the cohort that is looking for esoteric goods, bleeding edge folks, or just the generally non-privileged folks that will gamble on a $7 Amazon item rather than a $100 version of the thing.
I can see where my mental heuristic is informed that most chargers are bunk, so I never buy chargers on Amazon unless they are Anker or straight from Apple. Cables I will gamble on though.
I mean, I've never gotten any knock off items from Amazon that I'm aware of either. But I'm certainly not buying something that goes into my actual body from there.
Recently when I buy books on Amazon, they're often cheap versions printed in India. Sometimes there's even a "Only for sale in the Indian subcontinent" label on it. The quality is much worse - flimsy paper, faded ink, rough edges, and often quite dirty despite being new. Does anyone know of a more reliable place to buy new books?
We're living in the tyranny of the docile. Enough people consider "Amazon" synonymous with "shopping" and it's given them enough power to get away with whatever. Especially since covid, people have been trained to sit at home all day.
Confusingly, it appears the inks in question were knockoffs? The official manufacturer seems to be alive and well? Or maybe vice versa, hard to tell with Amazon these days.
Even if not a regulation, a formal certification could help. "This is to certify that batch NNNNN contains no bacteria, viruses, heavy metals, organic poisons from the list available at https://...".
As a platform, they can probably get around counterfeit items being listed/sold, but sending one from a different seller seems it might open them up to legal risk if Amazon knows there's counterfeits floating around.
I'm sure we all accept the risk in the fine print somewhere, but that only matters until it makes the news and a politician thinks they can get reelected by going after them
If you're quick to judge someone's character based on their tattoos, it suggests a tendency toward superficial assessments. I find it difficult to trust critical decisions made by someone who relies on such surface-level judgments. In my experience, those with narrow, dogmatic worldviews are often less interested in finding real solutions and more preoccupied with adhering to authority and bureaucratic norms.
Even if what you’re saying is true, you have no way of telling what someone thinks of tattoos. People who think tattoos show low impulse control can tell immediately. So, technically speaking, only one opinion matters in regards to hiring, which is probably why you see so few tattoos in high paid engineering jobs
> you have no way of telling what someone thinks of tattoos.
Disgust is one of the most easily telegraphed human reactions. Also, haters with suboptimal impulse control can't avoid using any and every soapbox at their disposal to make sure you know where they stand on the matter.
Is the organizational pressure that seeks conformity filtering out tattoos based on tattoos or the lack of conformity? It's tough to understand whether you're saying more about self-perpetuating hierarchies or tattoos.
I'm aligned with your base point. I'm not seeking to extend my rational to anyone other than people who make their opinions well known.
actually i think the organizational pressure is not about what people in the company think about those with a tattoo, but what they think how it will make their company look in public. to customers, business partners, investors, etc.
You do know that a transparent tattoo doesn't mean 100% transparency, right?
A transparent tattoo has parts inside of it where the skin is still completely visible or the skin is partially visible.
A solid tattoo blocks out your natural skin color entirely and is generally associated with criminal gangs such as the Japanese Yakuza or tattoo addictions.
It's unfortunate that it's not better regulated and thus safe to yolo just get one, but glow in the dark tattoos that use ink that can't be seen in ordinary light are particularly cool.
I used to think this way, but I no longer feel the signal to noise ratio provides meaningful data, in particular because people do rash or unreasoned things and develop odd habits (that they later grow out of) in their 20s. That part of your adult life is about learning, after all. (I also don’t believe there isn’t anything intrinsically wrong with tattoos.)
Moreover, having a tattoo isn’t necessarily a measure of low impulse control. I have friends who have ruminated for years about a certain tattoo. Plus, imputing bad decision making to having a tattoo is more a (cultural) projection on your part than anything else.
Bad or good decisions are always subjective to the goals and context, so of course I'm projecting my opinion when commenting on a comment section with my opinion. I do think less of someone with tattoos than someone without, and I've tried often not to, and have many friends with tattoos and would never ever say anything to anyone to make them feel bad about it. But my brain judges.
If you don't see a difference in a thought process in your head that you can meta talk about online vs going to someone and telling them they are less-than or to put them down in another way like not hiring them or something I'm not sure what to say. One is a thought process and a description of it, the other is an offense or something illegal.
I find them a good litmus test for narrow minded, presumptuous, low empathy people who invent narratives to suit their predetermined world view and run with it.
Lots of people I know with tattoos are the exact opposite of what you decide. Elaborately planned with loads of personal details, taking multiple sessions to complete.
My partner also has tattoos. I think people online pretend to be better than they are for some reason. I'm willing to bet every single offended person that is pointing the finger at the bad man that judges tattoos equally judges other meaningless things. At least I'm aware of it and try to keep it to myself and re-evaluate it every once in a while, instead of pretending I never have a bad thought.
Online discussion isn't the real world. I'm sharing thoughts in the spirit of positive discussion and didn't offend anyone.
Me thinking someone has low impulse control isn't an offense. Me telling them they have low impulse control is an offense (i never said this to anyone). Me being honest about the thought that came into my mind in a discussion board is also not an offense. And I cannot control the thoughts that come to my mind, only my actions after. If anything I learned to keep my mouth shut from this thread, it's the first and last time I discuss tattoos.
I get what you're saying. sadly the Internet is no longer the place it once was. People are just looking for ways to get offended and go off and try and cancel people. thinking things isn't doing things. thinking evil thoughts but not acting on them is entirely fine and normal and human.
people have four levels of being, there's conscious you, lizard brain, addict brain, and ideal brain. lizard brain gets the most time. it's the baser sider of things that we can't help, like who we're attracted to (masc/femme/nb) or what we think of people with tattoos. Then there's conscious brain. that's the part of us that's rational and can recognize that lizard brain does and thinks dumb things. addict brain is where there's something you're addicted to. chemical/digital/physical; whatever. addict brain will rationalize that something that conscious brain knows is wrong into being okay. Oh it's just $10 dollars and it's only Candy crush. idea brain is who you are after an interaction has happened, when you win the argument in the shower or wake up knowing the solution to a problem. sometimes idea brain will happen in the moment, but most of the time it happens later.
anyway, we can't help lizard brain, especially when we're sleep deprived, high/drunk/groggy/strongly emotional, and it can say some horrible shit. some people are able to acknowledge that this happens to everyone and exists and is human and forgive other people when they do something, others pretend like that they're not like that and that it never happens to them.
This is the divide between introvert and extrovert, btw. introverts can't "mask off" around other people, so being around other people is exhausting for them. if they say they don't belive something but that this thought still happens, eg that people with tattoos are impulsive, they get excoriated for voicing having had the thought.
sadly, as you've found, the open Internet just isn't the place for that. thankfully, there are small private communities where people do understand such detail and nuance, but they're hard to find.
cards on the table though, my current tattoo wasn't the result of much planning, but having gotten one, I more respect the time and effort that goes into getting really good ones.
on my wish list is the https://imprintu.com/ temporary tattoo printer, which seems fun.
So the thoughtful ink memorializing fallen comrades advertises a bad decision. AWESOME! I have zero desire to associate with closeminded individuals who view diversity as something to judge.
None of my tattoos have been "impulse". Planned months or years in advanced, hell I have a large tattoo project that I commissioned the piece for back in 2020 and finally starting the discussion about actually starting the tattoo.
I have several other tattoos that I have been thinking about for years. I have mapped out at least a general guide of where the tattoos I plan on getting, likely over at least the next 10 years on my body.
Tattoos are expensive. Most are not going to impulse something that expensive.
Thankfully most people have some common sense and realize that tattoos are just another way of expressing who you are and not trying to force uniformity. There are still some weird views about "acceptable" tattoo locations but thats another story.
I won't even hide my tattoo's for an interview, if you have a problem with it thats your problem and I don't care to work with you.
I don't know. I mean I am still eventually going to get the tattoos, the meaning of all of the tattoos I want are important to me. So technically no the plan hasn't changed and I am actively talking to an artist about my next tattoo. But what exactly to do about this situation... I honestly don't know yet.
I don't even know how I would vet the ink. Just asking if they got it from Amazon sure, but I have to imagine that this is not limited to Amazon and we only learned about it due to scale.
I really don't mean to offend and I'm just thinking out loud here, but I really don't understand this mentality.
As for most things, there are probably infinite reasons why someone gets tattoos. It seems highly presumptuous, almost egotistical, to presume you somehow know the reasons. You yourself don't know the reasons for why you do things, because choice is complex. You make millions of subconscious choices daily and those choices feed other choices. And then a lot of it was simply fed to you, implemented into your brain and you never bothered to circle back and question it.
I mean, just ask someone why they believe what they believe. Not what their belief is, but WHY they believe it. Most of the time they don't know. They can't tell you. And it's THEIR beliefs that they, supposedly, formed. They own them. But you think you can understand other, random people's, motivation?
I think there's this widespread, I guess, "deficiency" where people can't say "I don't know". It's like the LLMs. They can't look at something, say "I don't know" or "I don't understand" and move on. And you can see this in so, so many things.
Someone the other day asked why gay voice exists and why that's a thing. Truly, I don't know and I don't know that anyone does, even gay men. But of course this other guy chimes in about how they fake it and it's for attention. How could he possibly know that? How did he even come to that conclusion? Why do people do this?
The number of comments from people who need their choices validated by a random person on the internet under posts like this invariable proves to me that even they know that this is true and it makes them upset. Classic is/ought situation.
Tattoos are certainly something where you have to be extra careful because of the potential health effects of bad needles or bad ink. And it's difficult to vet these things.
Aesthetically it's a matter of taste, but I've certainly seen tattoos where I thought they improved the person's appearance. Though Sturgeon's law does apply.
> This is subjective. "Health" here might be taken to include mental health, in which case there could be many positive benefits.
100% this. I have a tattoo on my forearm that just makes me happy to look at. It is nearly always partially in my vision while working due to its location. If I am having a bad day I can just look at it and smile. It reflects an important part of me.
The mental health benefit of that, has been incredibly noticeable in my day to day.
Could I have done something similar with a picture on my phone or something? Sure. But this clearly has a huge impact on my mental health so why not get it tattooed. Also my 5th tattoo so it wasn't a crazy idea for me.
I bought a paddle board, nipheane or something like that for $200 from amazon last month. Previous one I bought is a body glove one from Costco for $499. All things considered, it's a smaller and lighter board and blows up twice as thick.
It's like sometimes crappier build makes things lighter and more portable. So overall i was happy with the trade off. Even if it lasts half as long. I just bought it for summer BC camping trip and gifted it at the end. If it was $500 i probably would not have bought it for such short use.
Well when you get sick from the weird bacteria after buying tattoo ink on Amazon you can go Amazon Health to get better. It's the snake that keeps eating itself.
I would assume that if this was a problem you would know pretty soon after getting a tattoo right? Like if my tattoos are fully healed and at least a few months old I should be in the clear? I don't see this mentioned in the article.
Really don't like the idea of now needing to ask my artist about the source of their ink, but I also assume that Amazon likely isn't the only source of some bad ink.
