Amazon went from amazing to awful in 20 years

First time I called customer service at Amazon was maybe 2010. a human answered the phone quickly with a friendly Western USA accent, you know, with a smile in her talk. 

I explained in no more than four words the problem I had, and she said oh no problem. I remember the conversation that followed distinctly. We laughed together agreeing that when a company is doing so much so fast, of course mistakes are made, and I was refunded or the product replaced and the conversation didn't last more than 5 minutes. 

I went on Facebook and raved about how wonderful Amazon is, I told all my friends they should join, when they expressed concern about shopping online I said no, Amazon is a smart company. 

That used to be true. Fast forward to the last few years, and my experiences with Amazon have turned into nightmares. Several packages arrived as piles of broken glass. I'd argue with chat at Amazon for 20 minutes before I finally gave up.

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[More DIY Hospice part of heating planet blog today]

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That happened again and again. I was stuck with a box full of broken glass that I didn't even want to open. One time I shook the box over the phone so he could hear the shattered glass. I got tired of arguing and ate the loss myself, me, when I live on 1300 a month so the billionaire can steal from me.

Then came the wedding.

How much money has Amazon stolen from how many people so that Jeff and his synthetic wife can live a life beyond biblical in its abhorrent excsses

I found my way to Prime TV but my God these are films that were on TNT 40 years ago and now if you try to watch them on amazon, even if you pay extra for commercial free, the movies get interrupted over and over again. 

The ads that interrupt every movie every few minutes are almost always ads for Amazon products because apparently very few companies want to pay for ads there so as you listen to Bette Davis deliver a brilliant line of dialogue, Bezos interrupts her in the middle of a sentence to tell you about a diarrhea medicine, and then four different Amazon products- ways Alexa can make you dumber than you already are- and then you return to the movie with no transition and Bette gets to finish her line.

Everything about Amazon went from wonderful to Awful in 20 years. Instead of feeling like I'm shopping at a smart company from the West Coast that's making the best use of this new development the internet, I am in a third world market with thieves everywhere, forced to add to the disgusting wealth of a potentate with no taste or culture, just a heavy entitled thumb on the scale because he was in the right place at the right time. 

I know he's not that smart because I went to college in Austin in the 1970s so learned that the algorithms upon algorithms were were being developed and interactive systems such as Amazon and Facebook were inevitable. It was a matter of who was there at that moment and able to take advantage of it. Beezus and Zuckerberg are not all that brilliant; they're just opportunistic and lucky. 

From where I sit none of the tech bros deserve the money they have. When I was working on The Daily Texan newspaper in Austin at UT in 1977, we were using Word Processing. Yet today, if you want to use word, you've got to give Bill Gates $100. He did not invent it he wasn't even out of high school yet when I was using it at UT Austin in the Communications Department where they had a government grant to study how a newspaper could be produced with a computer and we were all using word processing in 1977. Bill Gates is just another greedy crook of our time. 

Problem is, since 2010 I have become a crippled old woman pretty much homebound; and delivery of everything from Jeff's everything store has become vital to my survival. While Bezos's luck made him one of the richest people in human history, his company has become like a utility, a necessity for life in our current times. 

Obviously the solution is to nationalize Amazon, make it a co-op so we can all share in the profits, and Bezos can sail away on one of his yachts until he suddenly snaps out of the trance he's been put in from gazing at his wife's impossible body and yet there it is like he babbled about the city of Venice, impossible yet there it is. His company is crashing while suckling silicone seems to cause brain damage. I thought he was smart, but footage of the wedding revealed he's a doofus and what's her name came out of nowhere with her 50-inch bust and flummoxed him. Hmm.

That's what rises to the top in American capitalism.

Recently I had to change my mailing address and phone number within a few weeks, so I requested a call from Amazon customer service and within seconds a hostile robot was shouting at me over the phone then abruptly ended the call; the AI that now runs Amazon could not handle it, so I finally gave up and canceled the Prime membership I'd relied on since 2010. Target has everything I was buying at Amazon and instacart delivers the rest of my groceries so I can continue my life as a Hermit without ever using Amazon again. 

Thank god, because I don't want one more cent of my cash to go to the voluminous expansion of the Bezos empire. They ain't smart at all.

-ke