[pjscott]

When I buy something from Amazon, typically what I get is exactly what I expected, at a good price, with quick delivery. I bought socks from my preferred brand and got them. I bought a pair of trail running shoes that someone recommended, and they're excellent -- I wore them just yesterday to run on trails. I bought AA batteries and got AA batteries. And so on. This, for me, is the standard Amazon experience. Why wouldn't I buy things from them?

(I admit that I haven't tried buying no-name brand smoke alarms, baby toys that weren't designed with Denmark's choking hazard standards in mind, or any other category cherry-picked by a consumer NGO trying to do an exposé. Maybe that's the secret to my success?)

[freehunter]

I've had this attitude in the past as well. I never believed people who said they got counterfeit items on Amazon, or blamed them for buying off-brand items. Until one day I got a counterfeit SanDisk SD card. Sold by SanDisk, shipped by Amazon, straight from SanDisk's merchant page. Then I got a counterfeit Swiss Gear backpack. A Xbox controller I bought from Microsoft, shipped from Amazon, and inside the package was a no-brand Xbox controller. It worked, but I paid for name brand and got an obvious knock-off.

You can keep blaming others like I used to do, but someday it might happen to you just like it happened to me. There is a very obvious problem at Amazon and you literally cannot be careful enough to avoid it. At some point, it will happen to you. I hope it's not something where safety is critical, like a smoke alarm. You might not get a chance to leave a negative review.