28 January 2009

High fructose corn syrup is really bad for you!

As if the buzz about high fructose corn syrup weren’t bad enough already, it turns out that a lot of it contains mercury. Heckuva job, FDA!

22 January 2009

Zora, who’s the President?”

OBAMA!”

11 January 2009

Jeff Bezos

Dear Mr. Bezos,

If you like to search for your own name, I hope you find this. I’ve been a pretty loyal customer of Amazon for over a decade. But your company’s behavior regarding my attempt to sell books on Amazon is as unbelievable as it is inexplicable.

You’ve closed down my seller account with no valid justification. I have attempted to resolve this issue, and your “support” people have been worse than unresponsive. Even if my account is somehow unfrozen, you are unlikely to get any more money from me; and I’ll discourage anyone who asks from purchasing anything from you.

But what’s a little negative publicity, right? Let’s find out.

Sincerely,
Erik Vorhes

8 January 2009

Bad Amazon

January 11, 2009: Updated below

Erica and I have been getting rid of some of our excess book inventory via Amazon’s “Seller Central.” Since I’m no longer doing the academic thing and we don’t have infinite space, it seemed the prudent thing to do (and at least a few of my books were too valuable to simply give away).

About an hour ago, their “Seller Performance Team” sent us an email notification that our seller account had been suspended, because they had “significant evidence” that our account was associated with a previously-suspended account. I’m not sure what kind of evidence they have—we’ve never opened a seller account before this one.

I hope whatever “evidence” was a false positive. If not, someone’s using our information illegally. Or it’s that Amazon didn’t like that we finally associated a bank account with our seller profile a mere five hours before they suspended our account. This way they’ll get to collect interest on our seller account balance for an additional 76 days.

Overall I’ve liked the service that Amazon provides—and I like ordering things through them. If there isn’t a positive outcome from this situation, I don’t relish boycotting Amazon; I’ve been a pretty loyal customer for over a decade. But that’s what I most certainly will do. (I’ll also do everything I can to dissuade others from using their service.)

As it stands, they’re banning us on false grounds. I don’t like doing business with organizations that operate that way.

Update: This is quite possibly the worst customer service experience I have had from Amazon. Their response boiled down to: “Thanks for contacting us! Your account is closed. We won’t tell you why. Have a nice day!” Awesome.

This is the archive for commonplace book entries that I published in January 2009.