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Comment by spaced-out | Hacker News Reader

All corporations in the US act like mini-dictatorships/oligarchies.

Comcast was always terrible, but at least I could call up their support desk and make someone answer for their bad service. Sometimes they even fix the problem!

You can't call anyone at these new companies.

Not true, I've dealt with Amazon support and I thought it was better than dealing with my bank or cable company.

As a product buyer? AWS customer? Or vendor?

As an S3 customer for web hosting, I couldn’t understand why I was paying 10 cents a month for EC2 charges since I don’t use it. They just refunded me an entire month, but I really wanted to know what was happening!

As a product buyer. I complained and they gave me a refund without any hassle.

It's not that I think Amazon is wonderful, I just don't think they're worse than any other giant corporation I've dealt with. Which is why I don't understand jdsully's comment.

I suspect that on Amazon's scale, it's probably cheaper for them to toss refunds at customers than to actually fix problems.

Having a first-tier CSR click a dashboard button costs them the 10 cents per month plus 25 cents of labour to pay the guy to read the complaint, find the button, and press it.

Opening a ticket for a well-paid engineer to actually dissect the billing system and figure out where the 10 cent charge comes from, develop a fix, push it through validation and deploy it, probably costs $300.

Oh, I’m sure. It worked out great for me, but it probably affected all S3 public web hosting users.

Though i’d Estimate a fix costs at least 10x $300, if not 100-1000x.

Someone once tried to steal my account and they would not help me unless I gave them the attackers email (they changed it on the account). This despite using the same email for 10 years with them. Luckily amazon auto-filled it on one of their sign in forms so I was able to repeat it back to the customer service agent.

Even then they were non-committal about fixing it despite the person making multiple fraudulent purchases.

They are making it harder and harder to find their support page though, and as stellar as customer support is once I get hold of them... everything else about Amazon is going customer-hostile.

Google’s Fiber support line is great! Knowledgeable technical reps and I’ve never had a hold time. Unfortunately it’s only in a few cities and they’ve largely abandoned the effort.

With AT&T I tried for over a month to get internet installed and after hours of phone calls and them telling me a technician was coming they eventually revealed the billing department had flagged us and wanted a larger deposit for some reason. The two systems seemed totally separate.

that's by definition, worldwide. other forms of business are co-operatives, or collectively owned companies in communist countries.

You could have a closely or publicly held company with democratic governance. It's rare and I don't know of any examples, but it could happen.

Companies don't have to be feudalism in microcosm by definition, it just so happens that aristocratic ownership tends towards oligarchic governance.

or just tightly controlled companies fail less often than cooperatives

Or it could be that private companies are more likely to care more about profit for shareholders than the health of the market and their own workers, so they deploy unfair employment practices and anticompetitive market behavior to cut corners, destroy the competition, and monopolize for even more profit.

A corporation is just a group that's recognized as a separate entity by the government. There's nothing that says the governance of a corporation has to be dictatorial. Many cooperatives are corporations.

What a nonsense blanket statement.

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