Before I am verbally beaten up for using this unethical company, I live in the place I was born (an old mining community). I have watched the infrastructure, including the range of local shops, crumble over recent decades - the bus service is terrible and I am a carer who cannot easily travel. So, that is the sorry backstory to me becoming hooked on the Amazon package of promised convenience and cheap delivery!
As Amazon's service has become more patchy, it has become more difficult to contact customer service to resolve issues. In the past couple of weeks, I have received two lots of Amazon parcels belonging to other people - I have had to track them down on foot (not immediate neighbours) - no easy way to contact Amazon when they are not items that you have ordered! Now, for the umpteenth time, I have had two more orders of my own delivered elsewhere - the proof that I have actually received my deliveries consists of photographs of somebody else's doorstep! Amazon has no option (in its automatic, deliberately artificially ignorant hamster wheel of hellish cyber-circularity) to report that an entire order is missing in this way (multiple items in order - but have to click on individual items and track these - only to be informed by a hard-of-thinking chatbot that this appears to have been delivered yesterday - with a picture of the unknown doorstep!).
I am then instructed to go hunting around my neighbourhood! What form should that mission take, please, Amazon? Should I take a systematic approach to the investigation? Divide the locality into grid squares for a methodologically rigorous survey? Shall I politely knock at every door that approximates to that shown in the blurry photographic 'proof of delivery'? What happens if I wander onto the property with a hostile occupant, or meet with a ferocious guard dog, or something worse?
This is starting to feel as risky as an expedition to the Amazon basin - stripped of the joys of the Brazilian rainforest!
Amazon, you are a false economy! My New Year's resolution is to ditch you...I will roll up my digital sleeves and make a concerted effort to reform my online shopping behaviour and seek out an alternative for each and every purchase (even if it means I have to rummage harder in my sorry little threadbare purse for the little copper coins that have become lodged at the bottom!)