UPDATE: Amazon just reinstated my account (with an equally impersonal email). I updated the post to reflect this.
A partial victory, but it's still not really satisfying. Had I not taken the effort to blog about this, and gotten lucky by hitting the top spot on Hacker News, I don't think Amazon would have reinstated my account.
"Further correspondence regarding the closure of your selling account may not be answered. The closure of this account is a permanent action. Any subsequent accounts that are opened will be closed as well."
I would still consider doing the PR angle with this ending as the story hook. You went to all the effort of doing a blog post and you got everyone talking about it here. It would be unfortunate if this wasn't able to result in some reasonable systemic change to the Amazon practice.
I have no experience doing a PR blitz as you've suggested in your other comment; it would be tough to fill in all the details you didn't spell out. Might be worth it, but it sounds like a lot of work.
It seems like public shaming is the only way to get auto-reply customer service companies to talk to you. See the Paypal/Regretsy fiasco. I never feel good about them because you just know for every Regretsy/HN vet who can get some swirl going, there are a thousand helpless users who can't, and thus get the full length of shaft.
Yeah, customer service is expensive, but automating it all and essentially saying "fuck 'em" unless the victim can get outrage built is incredibly shitty.
A partial victory, but it's still not really satisfying. Had I not taken the effort to blog about this, and gotten lucky by hitting the top spot on Hacker News, I don't think Amazon would have reinstated my account.