FT.com / Comment & analysis / Columnists - A view from (under) the long tail

FT.com / Comment & analysis / Columnists - A view from (under) the long tail:

"I sometimes imagined the Amazon customer service folk borrowing the Tardis to deliver apologies for their incredibly rare mistakes before they even happened. But that was as a purchaser. As a vendor I entered into a shadowy different universe. Where Amazon’s normal customer service seems to be run by suspiciously cheerful MBAs from Stanford, who break off from counting their stock options to write apologies and deliver refunds, “Amazon Advantage”, the ironically named system for selling wares, is clearly based on the last days of the Soviet system.

The problem with their representatives is not that their native language is not English, it is that their native planet is not Earth. Only that could explain the strange delays of weeks in replying to emails, the apparent time distortions that will suddenly lead them to re-enter a months-long dispute in the middle, and the curiously non-terrestrial logic of their replies. When the Amazon system inserted random hieroglyphics into the description of our comic book it took many e-mails to reach a human – or at least sapient – being. When we did we were told reassuringly that Amazon’s system for updating web pages was broken and that there was no prospect of fixing it. For this, we give them 55 cents out of every dollar and an annual fee?"