In recent months Amazon has become quite a controversial topic in Germany.

It all started with an “undercover” documentation for one of our TV stations. I watched the docu online after everyone and their dog wrote about it and the first “Boycott!” outcries were made.

I don’t know if what the docu claimed was actually true because I found it to be severely lacking in the objective journalism department. If you understand German, you can read my commentary here: ARD vs. Amazon.

The general gist of the controversy is that Amazon hires seasonal workers for the Christmas time and then fires the workers around New Year’s. And they also pay according to the union labour contracts for the logistics trade and not the retail trade where the workers would get higher salaries. They can do that because the retailer Amazon EU is based in Luxembourg (mainly for tax avoidance reasons) and what is called Amazon Deutschland is just the fulfiller that operates the deployment centers.

Anyway, two recent events have once again proven to me that Amazon is a great business partner:

#1)
A few months ago I wanted to order the first season of The Newsroom at Amazon.com. Usually the shipping costs for a season are $6.48. For some reason the system charged me $29.52 for a season that only cost $17.99.

It happens, even computers have hiccups from time to time. I contacted the support, they gave me a refund, end of story.

Now it happened again, this time with the sixth season of Burn Notice ($17.11 shipping for a $11.98 product). I contacted the support again and got this reply:

Quote:

Hello,
I sorry[sic!] to hear that you’ve been charged an incorrect shipping charge.
To make this right for you, I’ve waived the total shipping cost of $17.11 for your order.

What can I say except “Thanks”?

#2)
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