in defense of Amazon

Since I was recently critical of the means by which Amzon.com allowed the price of my first three books to rise to laughable levels, for the sake of fairness I should acknowledge two very good things about Amazon (and there may even be others).

1. We all use them as a free research tool now, I think. Where is the first place you go to look up a book and get information about it? 90% of us would probably answer “Amazon” these days.

2. About 3 or 4 times over the years, I have ordered something from Amazon and found that it never showed up. In all of those cases, following an inquiry/complaint, they trusted me without question and simply sent the order again. No hassle, no suspicion. It happened once with Amazon.de with a German book too, and they trusted me as well.

The reason Point 2 matters to me at the moment is because my Cairo bank still hasn’t refunded me the money that the ATM simply never gave me two weeks ago. First time that ever happened in my life. Those machines have always been about as close to foolproof as any piece of automation I have ever encountered.

When I was in graduate school I had a couple of Italian friends, and one of them was initially reluctant to put deposits in ATM’s for fear the machine wouldn’t credit the deposit. We laughed it off at the time as a quaint regional phobia, and reassured her about the general infallibility of ATM’s. But it’ll be a long time before I make a large withdrawal from one of these machines in Cairo again. (The other point is that there is no daily withdrawal limit here. Well, on second thought I think there is a limit, but it’s so outrageously high that you would never want to withdraw that much; you’d go to a human teller instead if you wanted that much for some reason. In Egypt, if someone were to steal your card and PIN they could clear out your account in a couple of days at most.)