We are contacting you regarding a past Prime Video purchase(s). The below content is no longer playable on Prime Video.
In an effort to compensate you for the inconvenience, we have applied a £5.99 Amazon Gift Card to your account. The Gift Card amount is equal to the amount you paid for the Prime Video purchase(s). To apologize for the inconvenience, we've also added an Amazon Gift Certificate of £5 to your account. Your Gift Card balance will be automatically applied to your next eligible order. You can view your balance and usage history in Your Account here:
We've taken away this thing you've bought, here's a gift card so you can give us that money back again later.
strictly speaking it's
Gift cards and store credit = "we keep your money."
The reality is that they didn't give the customer back anything. It's the usual corporate sales speak.
"50% off" and "Save $10" aren't actually real either. $10 doesn't appear in customer's bank accounts after a purchase and customers often have no concept of what the item originally cost before it was marked up and brought to market by the the corporation. It's sales and marketing psychological games that many people can't see through. $9.99/$59.99 is cheaper than $10.00/$60.00 true and people somehow feel better buying the former versus the latter as though that penny isn't only a penny and they didn't give the corporation the 99.99% of the money they wanted.
Explain this to my wife please... "I saved so much money today!" Plunks down several bags of crap that will end up being thrown away eventually...
I didn't understand this for a long time myself. And I can't rightly remember when I first learned about this sort of thing. But once I did, information just seemed to flow to me from multiple directions. Maybe look up classic tactics around sales and marketing, then deceptive, yet typical, psychological sales and marketing practices. There's a book on credit cards I enjoyed years ago "How to Take Advantage of the People Who Are Trying to Take Advantage of You: 50 Ways to Capitalize on the System" by JSB Morse (Though long story short, avoid debt and credit cards). One video on YouTube turned me off of buying ink cartridges once I found out what they truly cost versus the exorbitant amount they sell them for. Capital rip offs.
That's fine. Always need to purchase more storage devices.
It’s more like: we took it away and gave you a ~100% ROI by adding a $5 gift card to your “refund”. Still sucks though.
Not really. The subjective monetary value of whatever you might spend that money on is most likely going to be less than the store's listed price. To give a more obvious (extreme) example, imagine if you got a $30 gift card to a store that sells individual grapes for $2 each. You can buy $30 worth of grapes from them, but 15 grapes are not worth $30 to any sane person. Hell, maybe you don't even like grapes and they're completely worthless!
It's Amazon, dude. You may not like their business practices but it's a fair bet they're going to have something you want at a decent price.
It's true that this exchange in this particular instance is a net gain for like 99.9% of the victims. Hell, most people were probably never even gonna watch the movie again anyway. However, using that to justify this practice opens the door for abuse down the line. Store credit is not an acceptable form of compensation. Imagine if you totaled someone's car and then offered them $10k credit at a junkyard you own. It would be unacceptable! Why give large corporations an exception?
In your example you wreck someone’s car which they didn’t buy at your junkyard. It’d be to think of it like this: you own a car dealership. You wreck your clients car worth 10K. You tell them to pick any car worth 20K off of your lot. Sure, the 20K includes your profit margins, but your client still gets $10K worth of car for free.
Cars all serve the same purpose. They get you where you want to go. Some are worse than others, but they're all kind of the same thing. Movies are all individual and unique. You can't just take one, drop in a replacement, and call it a day. Movies are a form of artwork. I think a better analogy would be if you trashed some art that someone bought and then offered them some other art from different artist(s).
Idunno what's going on here but I've got a burning curiosity as to whether this grape store has any lemonade.
I'm sad that someone down voted you because they didn't get the reference.
Joke's on them, I don't even see it :D Here, have an upvote!
Unless you brought glue, in which case I'd best waddle away...
Yeah, just like with the original purchase. They made money on that too, but returned the full amount, including their margin. Amazon loses money on this compensation. They don’t sell stuff with a 10x margin.
Step 1: OP bought a video for $5.99 Step 2: he gets a refund + $5 gift card Step 3: OP can buy a video for $10.99 or whatever else he wants for $10.99
Ultimately, OP wins a $5 gift card and saw a free movie.
I get what you're saying and I already said that 99% of people would be happy with it, but my other comment details how that form of compensation fails to cover everyone.
After they clawed back the royalties they paid on the original content, I assume (based on their practices around ebooks and audiobook).
This is news to me (but not surprising), what do you mean?
https://writersweekly.com/angela-desk/amazon-is-screwing-over-authors-and-publishers-once-again