[mikestew]

Don't know about this being a Dark Pattern, though

I don't know, either. Frankly, of late I'm content to write it off as either apathy, incompetence, or left-hand-doesn't-know-what-the-right-is-doing.

In the end, I don't care other than intellectual curiosity so that I don't slide into the same cesspool in my work. What matters, in a world of nearly infinite online vendors, is Amazon's reputation. Without that, they're nothing in my book. And in my book, Amazon's reputation isn't anything near what it was ten years ago. Nothing major, I guess, but that reputation is being chipped away one hammer stroke at a time. Knock-off items, okay, I can mitigate that. Blatantly lied about when my item will be delivered? Bah, I grew up in an age of "allow 4-6 weeks for delivery", one more day won't kill me. But those things start to add up. Which is why I continue to seek out other vendors, and don't see myself doing much business with them in the next couple of years.

[hga]

Good point, and for that matter, a Dark Pattern they could decide is a bad idea (especially if it's not authorized at a high enough level) would be a lot better than a regression to the mean, which is much harder if not impossible to fix.

I still have a higher trust in them than pretty much any other general on-line merchant (a finely honed BS detector and general suspicious nature about anything "too good to be true" makes a difference, plus watching my father get burned on an iPhone purchase on eBay where the merchant played eBay like a fiddle) ... but they're getting me to start to look at others, which is not what I think they want....