[mcny]

It is so easy to say that customers are our number one priority but I realized Amazon.com was different when my team was implementing gift cards at a smaller (still subsidiary of a public) company (not Amazon).

The question was simple: why do gift cards have to expire? The answer that nobody wanted to say: because we don't want to leave money on the table.

It was a frustrating exercise in futility as the customer priority took a back seat at the first sign of decreased liability/free money.

Also we would cancel orders for relatively minor pricing mistakes where I believed we should have ate those costs as a teachable moment.

On the other end though, as a customer I'm more scared of Amazon than walmart. As an Amazon.com customer, I consciously avoid returning unless I absolutely have to because I care about my account. I fear amazon will honor my ridiculous requests to a point and ban me at some point. I (unsuccessfully) tried to return an air mattress to Walmart after a week of use because it didn't hold air perfectly (they never do). I don't fear being banned by Walmart.

[socialist_coder]

> The question was simple: why do gift cards have to expire? The answer that nobody wanted to say: because we don't want to leave money on the table.

My understanding from working on online game time / game bux cards (a little different from gift cards but not really) is that it makes the accounting much easier if your gift cards have an expiration date. Because you can't properly recognize the revenue until the gift card is used / expired, and if there is no expiration date, then you could potentially have revenue sitting around forever that you could never recognize. Terrible from an accounting / finance perspective. So it's not really greed it just makes things much easier to deal with and makes your books more sane.

That is my understanding anyways. I could be wrong.

[pgayed]

> So it's not really greed it just makes things much easier to deal with and makes your books more sane.

Thus serving the convenience of the accountants over one's patrons.

[tomatocracy]

It's not a problem for banks. They don't seem to feel any need to put an expiration date on their depositors' money.

Any sensible company should account for the gift card balances as a liability on their balance sheet exactly the same way a bank does its depositors' money.

The potential problem is that predicting how much liquidity you'll need to fulfill those liabilities in a given year isn't so easy. Banks are regulated to ensure that depositors are never out of their money. Some businesses have gone under as a result of getting this wrong with gift cards.

[katbyte]

> As an Amazon.com customer, I consciously avoid returning unless I absolutely have to because I care about my account. I fear amazon will honor my ridiculous requests to a point and ban me at some point

From my experience i've had the opposite approach. Anything that doesn't live up to my standards or simply doesn't work out i return. I return ruthlessly and i've never had any problems. However my rate of return is still less than 1 in 20 and i purchase a fair amount.

I've never heard of anyone being banned for returning items on amazon?

[eropple]

I've heard of people getting banned for repeatedly buying and returning high value items. I have a video studio and while building it out I was going through a lot of returns of items that just didn't live up to their product pages' claims. As I was nervous about getting canceled I made sure to call Amazon and the CS rep put a note in my file about why I had a high (like 10%, but of relatively expensive stuff) return rate. She told me she gets asked to do that once in awhile and that she'd never heard of problems once somebody had done that.

[socialist_coder]

I did the same thing recently (bought a bunch of networking / wireless gear and only kept the best one) and I noticed that after the 3rd or 4th return they started charging me a small restocking fee. I think it was related to having too many returns in a short time period.

[pgayed]

Bezos talks about this in his talks (seen too many to remember which, but see his interview at the Economic Club with David Rubenstein); he mentioned "when you open up a buffet, at first you attract all the biggest eaters [high-order, high-return rates]!" By being generous, you surrender earnings but serve those patrons and build out the system.