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I bought an alternator for my wife's car. While replacing it, I discovered this:

https://imgur.com/a/E53NxjE

Prior customer bought, discovered the holes were machined incorrectly (part would not bolt up), clearly marked the part, returned it, and Amazon put it back on the shelf to send to the next buyer. With the car half torn apart, Amazon offered they could get me a replacement item in 8 calendar days. Yeah, that's not going to work, so I took it over to a milling machine and had it milled out to fit (first photo shows immediately after milling, second and third photo are before, third photo has the new part doweled to the old part to align one of the holes and show how far off the second hole is). Just like this case, Amazon A2Z was willing to accept the return and ship another one, but the real customer failure was during the previous return, not when I had the complaint.

There's a customer satisfaction angle that "Earth's most customer centric company" should probably be considering here.



Amazon hasn’t actually been a customer-centric company since they got big enough to run their own in-house delivery service.


If a customer has to physically punch a new hole in a product, I consider that a full refund without return :)


That’s what I’d have expected from 2010 Amazon. It’s not what I was offered by 2020 Amazon.


I have had luck having Amazon credit me back part of the purchase price when I need to repair what they sent me. Their chat agents have refunded me 20-30% of purchase price for keeping defective items like yours.


I got a hard-anodised aluminium oven tray which was bent at the corner. These things are solid, no way it was bent in transit unless it was by heavy machinery - if you slammed it in a van door I think you'd just break the door. Contacted seller and arranged a discount but it was a pain to do and going through the Amazon systems seemed janky. It was a case where the product worked, it was really just aesthetics, but I wasn't paying full price for a [factory] damaged item. Saved some product miles at least.




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