Amazon sent a used waffle maker, with food still inside, to a family last December. Brian McCarthy’s daughter caught quite the surprise when the waffle maker his mother ordered from Amazon arrived with most of a waffle already inside. A turquoise mini Baby Cakes Waffle Maker manufactured by Select Brands Inc. was delivered straight to the house from Amazon.
McCarthy’s mother bought the waffle maker through Amazon Services Inc, a service that allows users to buy and sell items online, not unlike eBay. Reportedly, there was no indication that they were purchasing a used or refurbished item. Joe Kziukenas, CEO of Marketplace Pulse, an e-commerce research firm, suggested to Recode that an Amazon employee mistakenly marked the used waffle maker as new, placing it back into the company’s standard inventory.
Last May, Amazon saw controversy when they were caught destroying unsold items in Europe. A British newspaper, The Mail on Sunday, sent an undercover reporter to an Amazon warehouse. When asked about unused merchandise, the manager said that many were returned to their sellers, but others are destroyed outright. Notably, they stumbled across an area in the warehouse called the "destruction zone." It's known that Amazon has a list of objects they send to the dump to evade the risk of contamination. The list mostly includes things like clothes and self-care products. It's confusing how a used and dirty waffle maker could wind up back on their shelves with such a policy.
As a world-class retailer, Amazon should be paying more attention to the needs of its clientele. When McCarthy took to Twitter, a representative from Amazon linked them to customer support and provided no answers. The idea that this was able to happen on Amazon’s digital marketplace should be hugely damaging to the service’s reputation. According to Amazon’s website, “More than 50% of Amazon’s total unit sales come from third-party selection,” which should mean that Amazon hires enough people to manage such a vast number of sellers.
With online shopping on the rise, people don’t always get to see the things they buy before they get them. Simple labels and item photos could go a long way toward improving quality control. If you’re looking for an alternative to Amazon’s marketplace, other digital markets like eBay, Jet, Wish, OfferUp, and GAME are good choices. Some of these are more specialized with GAME being mostly for people who are looking to buy and sell video games. In some cases these specialized markets can be preferable to a centralized one that can't bother to test their items.
Source: Recode
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