[PaulAJ]

One thing to remember: Small Claims Court (or whatever it is called where you live). Most jurisdictions have something like this: a light-weight court system without lawyers for low-value cases. Pay a minimal fee, like 10% of your claim, up front, and your claim is in.

Just make sure you know exactly who your counterparty is. If the item is sold by someone else via Amazon then your first target is the seller, not Amazon. HOWEVER there may be the Amazon A-Z guarantee, which is part of their deal with you, and which you can sue them over.

I'm always amazed about how stories like this never seem to talk about "here is how you use the court system when MegaCorp stonewalls you".

[fbdab103]

Even if I am 100% completely in the right, I would be hesitant for fear of retaliation. The MegaCorporations are only getting bigger, and they can have an outsized impact on my life. If I bring a small claims issue to Amazon - will I ever be able to shop there again? Use AWS? That would be a huge burden to try and recover $50.

For similar reason, I can never issue a charge-back to Steam - they have a policy of blocking your account and that would result in losing access to thousands of dollars linked to my profile.

[pclmulqdq]

Many megacorps just straight up pay small claims court judgments and don't care. I have actually been told by an insurance company to do that before.

[gist]

Winning in small claims (or any court) and actually collecting the money are two different things.

I found a very interesting paradox from doing a fair amount of small claims cases many years ago.

Basically if we were right (we were the company making the claim and should have been paid) the defendant lied and we lost. However if we were wrong (ie the claimant was right had a valid defense to not paying) we typically won (because they were honest and we could exploit and dance around what they were saying.

[toast0]

Collecting the money is relatively simple if the loser has assets within the jurisdiction of the court. I've seen news stories about people lining up a sherrif to auction bank branches when BofA didn't pay their ordered damages.

Of course, the auction doesn't happen, but when the sherrif comes out, people start doing the things they need to.

Now, if there's no amazon physically in your locality, it would be harder.

[tyingq]

For larger companies, they may offer to settle before the court case to avoid the cost of sending a lawyer.

[gist]

Well maybe. But also consider that a company large or small may want to pay to send a lawyer (not to mention many companies obviously have attorneys on staff) to fight, extend, whatever simply to send a message. This would in theory be even more today with social media then pre-internet say 30 years ago (or pre social media). Why? Well it certainly pays to fight otherwise you will have all sorts of people filing claims knowing that you 'don't send a lawyer to fight it'. Because everyone typically talks and brags about what they were able to do after the fact.

Even if they don't show up and get a judgement they can then appeal or do many things to stop the enforcement process.

Also nothing to prevent an opponent for whatever reason finding a way to file a counterclaim to which you would then need to defend against and probably pay a lawyer to handle. (Meaning not in small claims court or above your knowledge level). Related note also that LLC's and Inc. must typically be represented by an attorney in court.

[derefr]

Journalists covering news stories about companies, don't tend to think much in the mode of "the person reading is a consumer, who may have been wronged by this company, and wants actionable information to better their own life."

Rather, journalists covering news stories about companies seem to write in one of two major modes:

1. Business journalism, i.e. "Hello investors, please use this to make decisions on which stocks to buy/sell today. And hello, competitors of this company; please take this as an object lesson."

2. Implicit "let's highlight yet another example of the lousy state of the world today" editorialization, pretending to be journalism. Where the suggested action is "get angry"; but the intended target of your anger isn't the company itself, but rather "society", in some ill-defined way.

Note that mode #2 does literally report on the company's failures, but does so while deflecting blame from the company itself; and so may actually be crafted by the company being reported on as a clever form of "spin" on what would otherwise be bad press if they left it up to the media to report.

[RHSeeger]

For a lot of people the filing fee plus the cost of an entire day off work (for court) is pretty steep.

Honestly, for anything expensive, I tend to use Amazon as part of the "greater source of reviews", but I order it as close to direct from the manufacturer as possible.

[eastbound]

I stopped ordering from manufacturers, even like Dell, because you won’t reliably find the invoice and get decent shipping. I’ve just made a CC refund on Xiaomi for example, I thought it was a well-enough established company, I’m still waiting for the package.