I HATE Amazon
So I bought a backup drive for my Mac. I shopped around but the best price was Amazon. Now I try not to buy from Amazon, they do so many creepy, nasty things. From abusing their workers, to harming local retail, to trashing the environment they are just bad guys. I don’t like to buy from them. I tried shopping around for a drive, just a drive, nothing fancy, a 1TB USB drive. All the local places only had high end drives with software and four to six times the capacity I wanted, or RAID backup systems for hundreds of dollars. No I just want a drive, a simple drive. Online wasn’t any better. Finally, I found one at OWC that was in my price range and fit my needs. I was almost ready to order it, but then it hit me; They are in the US. The exchange rate, and the duties and taxes on imported high tech goods it would at least double the price. So, with a sigh, I held my nose and checked Amazon.ca.
There I found a basic drive. 1TB, no backup software, no fancy gimmicks, no RAID, nothing. Just a small plastic box with a USB cable to go into my computer. Easy peasy. So I ordered it. This was the drive I joked about a while ago that Amazon couldn’t tell me when it would arrive. I’d taken the cheapest ground shipping so I knew it was going to be slow.
Well, yesterday the drive got here. I plugged it in, opened Disk Utility and started to reformat it. (This is always a good thing to do. Cleans out any spyware, adware, or other nasties that they might have slipped in.) Within a few seconds I got an error. The drive could not be formatted, initialized, or mounted. Running a repair routine told me that the Boot Sector was corrupted beyond repair. Just to be sure, today I took it to work and tried to connect it to my Win10 machine there. Same result. The drive is unreadable and unrepairable.
Crap.
So tonight I went back onto Amazon to see about getting a replacement. And this is where Amazon went from being just annoying and obnoxious to being really despicable. It turns out that without my knowledge, or any indication on the page, Amazon was just acting as a storefront for some small company out of Shanghai. I didn’t actually buy it from Amazon so Amazon is just passing off my complaint and warranty request to the other company. Will I get my money back or a replacement drive? Possibly, but I kinda doubt it. Previous experience with Amazon suggests that they, or in this case Computer Company Run Out Of A Garage In Shanghai, will send me a return label and I’ll be responsible for postage back to Shanghai, which will be most of the cost of the drive.
So it looks like I got screwed by Amazon. Why did I fall for it? “Just this once. It’s really the only logical choice. Just hold your nose and get it because you need a new backup drive.” That was my thought.
God I hate Amazon
Never again.


















