hnthrow234

True, gift cards can be scammy, but in this case, Amazon calls it "gift card" but it is basically just Amazon credit I have loaded onto my own account with my own credit card that I've already used on tons of prior orders. So it's a known entity.

That's true. Though there's probably only one or two other options in any given area. Like you might have the Whole Foods, the regional Safeway/Kroger/Publix type of store, and a Costco maybe. And among those stores the product selection actually can differ a lot.

Any anecdotes? Or just generally it has been good?

Do you get groceries from Walmart+?

Absolutely an algorithmic issue and your comment about edge cases is spot on. But when the algorithm flags an edge case, whatever happened to manual review by a human? In this case, any human looking at this transaction would have found nothing unusual.

I'm pretty sure there is a Black Mirror episode where someone ends up becoming an "edge case" and it all goes downhill from there. I haven't actually watched it but have read about it referenced in many similar contexts so maybe someone knows the actual episode.

> they just don't care about you

That's probably true, and it is a deeply unpleasant feeling. It seems like a binary customer experience: everything goes swimmingly, and that's great and you happily ingratiate yourself to the company, and then it doesn't, and it's very bad, but the company now has all the leverage and they can do whatever they want. The customer has no recourse, on an individual basis, with no collective power. Who is going to help, the regulator? Probably not in any impactful or timely fashion. At least with financial entities, the CFPB actually has teeth.

When things like this happen it is a wake-up call to diversify which companies you patronize. But the sheer scale of some like Amazon makes that difficult. For instance, if you buy groceries from Amazon-owned Whole Foods, to order for pickup or delivery, you need to do so through your Amazon account. So if something happens to that account, you would have to scramble and find a new solution for a basic necessity like groceries. Back in the days of the corner store merchant, they weren't going to just ban you arbitrarily from the store. And if even they did, you could just go to the next corner. What we're dealing with today is a much different reality.