The right thing to do. But my time and sanity is valuable too.
They told you not to do it. You did it. Now you’re pissed that doing it wasn’t a smooth process. Ok.
Should Amazon just take it back?
Suppose I order a watering can from the garden supply store. When I get home from work, I discover that instead of a watering can, they've delivered 2 tons of mulch in a giant pile in my driveway.
I'm not sure how you could make the argument that it's now my responsibility to get rid of the mulch that I didn't want or ask for?
2 Get mulch in erroneous delivery
3 ... [0]
4 Profit!
[0] https://www.craigslist.org/ :-)
p.s. I actually agree with your point. Just occasionally you can turn a wrong into something good.
If they delivered, instead of two tons of mulch, a single unit of scotch tape, would you still give a shit about whose responsibility disposal is?
We can go ahead and treat these cases as distinct, because they're distinct. You recognize that implicitly, which is why you made your example two tons of mulch, and not 2 ounces of plastic.
It shouldn’t be on the customer to get rid of something sent in error even if other people might think it’s complaining over something petty.
Bare minimum effort:
1. Contact Amazon
2. a. Giving it back to a shipping carrier
b. Dispose of it
In the case of "2 tons of mulch", or by definition anything "bulky to store, impossible to sell and costly to dispose of", the amount of effort isn't the same at all between disposing of it and letting a shipping carrier dealing with it. This make it complaining about it, not something petty.
Thought experiment.
A billionaire sends you $12K in cash. You call her and offer to return it. She tells you sorry and to just keep it.
Should you be angry?
This is a little worse than cash, but not quite as bad a two tons of mulch.
IMO. You’re of course welcome to see the burden of throwing out a motherboard as higher than I do.
The customer asked for one thing but the company delivered something else. Don’t make your customers deal with your mistake.
You seem to have some concerns that being left with a $12K server to dispose of any way she pleases would be a burden.
I believe and her actual experience suggests that the rerun will be more trouble.
Ok same values, different views on likely outcomes, we disagree.
https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0181-unordered-merchan...
Yes, Amazon has the responsibility of return and disposal. But where disposal is a completely trivial "drop it in the trash can, forget it exists," let's not pretend that this ia Amazon doing him some kind of massive disservice.
https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0181-unordered-merchan...
It seems that if you made this mistake, it would ruin your own business, but it is not the case with them.
If you want to help Amazon get more money, let’s all order subj boxes, because for mass-enough wrong shipments they’ll take care and fix it. Someone could do a small short-lived business even, receiving these boxes, relabelling them correctly and reselling under the right markings. It is called arbitrage and there is nothing wrong with it. You take advantage of some inconsistency and make it so explicit that it either is fixed or left to you as a reward for fixing it.