I bought an alternator for my wife's car. While replacing it, I discovered this:

https://imgur.com/a/E53NxjE

Prior customer bought, discovered the holes were machined incorrectly (part would not bolt up), clearly marked the part, returned it, and Amazon put it back on the shelf to send to the next buyer. With the car half torn apart, Amazon offered they could get me a replacement item in 8 calendar days. Yeah, that's not going to work, so I took it over to a milling machine and had it milled out to fit (first photo shows immediately after milling, second and third photo are before, third photo has the new part doweled to the old part to align one of the holes and show how far off the second hole is). Just like this case, Amazon A2Z was willing to accept the return and ship another one, but the real customer failure was during the previous return, not when I had the complaint.

There's a customer satisfaction angle that "Earth's most customer centric company" should probably be considering here.

Amazon hasn’t actually been a customer-centric company since they got big enough to run their own in-house delivery service.

If a customer has to physically punch a new hole in a product, I consider that a full refund without return :)

That’s what I’d have expected from 2010 Amazon. It’s not what I was offered by 2020 Amazon.

I have had luck having Amazon credit me back part of the purchase price when I need to repair what they sent me. Their chat agents have refunded me 20-30% of purchase price for keeping defective items like yours.

I got a hard-anodised aluminium oven tray which was bent at the corner. These things are solid, no way it was bent in transit unless it was by heavy machinery - if you slammed it in a van door I think you'd just break the door. Contacted seller and arranged a discount but it was a pain to do and going through the Amazon systems seemed janky. It was a case where the product worked, it was really just aesthetics, but I wasn't paying full price for a [factory] damaged item. Saved some product miles at least.

I’m kind of surprised they’ll even take open-box returns of hard drives that aren’t defective. How do you know the drive is safe to use?

It seems to me kind of like underwear: once you buy it, you keep it and in the unlikely event you need to return the item it goes right in the trash.

Because the dirty secret is that "new" does not mean you are the first customer to open the item.

When you return an item to Amazon, one of the reasons you can select in the dropdown menu is "received used item" (or something similar).

It's disappointing that this scam is so pervasive they added UI to handle it.

And for most items that’s not too big of a deal. A returned textbook or toaster can be re-sold after it’s been opened without much fear that it’s been tampered with but I’m not sure the same can be said for a hard drive.

Or maybe it’s more like a bottle of medicine. Even if it’s exceedingly unlikely that it’s been tampered with I’m not going to risk it if the manufacturer’s seal is broken. It’s just not worth it.

Textbooks are actually a bad example, now that an awful lot of them have one-time codes linked to online materials (homework, etc.). Sure, the contents of the book may not be "used up", but that doesn't mean it's necessarily "good-as-new".

Here is my most recent Amazon returns story.

I bought a $1200 commercial generator through Amazon. Delivered by truck about in about 10 days. It had several problems. Took it to the local authorized service center myself. They struggled with it for about a month.

Ultimately they had me call the manufacturer for a replacement. I tried but the manufacturer sent me to Amazon for a refund. I did so and Amazon refunded the full purchase price immediately.

The service center didn't care; they still had a defective generator on their hands and kept working on it with the manufacturer on my behalf despite the fact that I had gotten a full refund, which I made clear to them. Ultimately the manufacturer decided they wanted the unit returned for analysis by their engineers and drop shipped a replacement to me knowing perfectly well that I'd already received a refund.

The replacement works perfectly. I got a $1200 commercial generator for 'free.' I'd have rather just had the working product in the first place, and I still feel like I've cheated somehow despite the fact that I was entirely above board with everyone.

The problem is that cases where you get lucky like this are in the minority. In the majority of cases, the inconvenience caused by a defective/counterfeit/missing product thwarts whatever compensation they give you after the fact.