[jefftk]

> firing at least two people involved in the debacle

The idea that after a mistake companies should fire people leads to company cultures that are overall worse for everyone, including customers/users. Demand that they apologize, even that they give compensation, but not firing.

[hef19898]

During my tike there, Amazon's failure culture, as in yes, mistakes and failures happen, and as long as don't happen twice and lessons are learned nobody gets blame or the axe, was one of the things I liked best.

This whole asking for punishment is what actually drives a culture in which these kinds of things do happen more frequently, because everyone involved just wants to cover their asses.

[NotTheDr01ds]

Okay, "firing" might be too strong, but that policy of "tolerating mistakes" (as long as it doesn't happen twice and lessons are learned) seems to have created a corporate culture where (if this story is true, and it seems to be confirmed):

- A customer can be mistakenly called a racist

- Their home automation systems they bought and paid for disabled

- Any digital content (Kindle books, Amazon Prime Video purchases, Audible books, etc.) they bought (sorry, "licensed") revoked.

- It takes more than a week to resolve after being provided with clear evidence of the company's mistake. I mean, good grief, at least the manager/executive should have reactivated the customer's account during the review process, but they opted for "guilty until we've taken our sweet time reviewing the evidence and make sure they're innocent".

- After all that, the customer isn't even offered an apology, much less compensation.

This isn't just a "mistakes and failures happen" situation. Failures and mistakes occurred at multiple points in this process and along the decision chain, and apparently no one involved had the common sense to break out of the resulting insanity-loop.

[eduction]

Yes and I find it similarly extreme that a company would disable someone's doorbell because one person claimed something racist was said through it (?!?!). Are they going to set up a little Amazon Ring court to adjudicate every claim??

If Amazon hadn't taken that extreme step in the first place, the stakes wouldn't be so high, and there would be less reason to discipline the employee (for the record I don't think they should be fired in any case).

[NotTheDr01ds]

Ironically, the doorbell was the thing that wasn't an Amazon product and wasn't disabled. ;-)

And yes, I recanted on the 'firing" part, but I still feel that Amazon's "resolution" here was weak-sauce compared to the "extreme" action taken in the first place. At this point, I'm guessing they wish they'd offered the customer some minor token (say 2 years of free Prime at a minimum) compensation in return for an NDA on the topic. 20/20 hindsight ;-)

[eduction]

Ahh sorry I incorrectly assumed an Amazon Ring doorbell. (If those even exist…)

[wahnfrieden]

Apologizing is useless when the power remains

[jefftk]

Amazon is a large entity with complex processes. Firing one of the people involved in implementing those processes does not make things better for users or affect how much power Amazon has in the situation.

[wahnfrieden]

Yeah that's already obvious

[CamperBob2]

Someone implemented this process, as well as the policies that drove it. They clearly needed an incentive to think through the PR consequences (if nothing else) before imposing their incompetence on a paying customer.

Firing people for negligence in similar situations would likely have had just such an effect.