[greghatch]

I think that was his point, he's critical of Amazon because they lied about their reasoning for not carrying the products, not questioning the legality of not carrying specific products.

I thought that was obvious, and a charitable interpretation of his post would've made this clear, I think.

[MichaelGG]

Yep. Several CSRs told me "Oh it's out of stock" (not explaining the 404, or no "marketplace" vendors). I escalated. Then I was told the Chromecast was not sold due to "too many complaints". A supervisor then flat out denied that, as well as denied there being any ban on any such product.

I asked about the Apple TV. After other lame "stocking" issues, a supervisor said "oh, we don't have licenses to sell Apple TV" and went on about how there's all sorts of legal issues.

It's vile for a company that's supposedly pro-consumer.

[yomly]

Disclaimer: I used to work at Amazon.

Amazon and Apple have had a long patchy history when it comes to selling Apple products.

Primarily it comes down to Apple's need to control the pricing of their products and Amazon's desire to drop prices far into the realms of lossmaking, which in part is due to their customer centricity. I cannot comment on this specific case but it is not always necessarily as clear cut as you think.

As an aside, the customer obsession is not fluff. It is deeply engrained within the business and is taken very seriously. Any decision that is not customer centric (e.g. Halting the sale of Harper Collins titles) is usually escalated to Diego (head of Retail) if not to Jeff himself. Any business is well within their rights to make money and preserve their self interests, and occasionally strategic decisions may well clash with the culture so not every decision Amazon makes will be perfectly customer centric. With that said, from both the inside and outside I've witnessed really great customer obsession on the whole especially when compared to other businesses.

[ikeboy]

The problem is that they won't allow third parties to sell them on marketplace. Even if Apple won't sell to Amazon, as long as third parties want to list they should be allowed to and it shouldn't cause problems. (I'm probably missing something; what is it?)