another Amazon quirk

I do generally like dealing with Amazon as a company. They always trust me when I say a package didn’t show up, and send a replacement without further questions (and in fact, maybe 5% of their shipments to Egypt do get lost along the way, so I’ve had to request quite a number of replacements from them while there; they stopped shipments to Egypt during the revolution but have long since resumed). They’re also now, de facto, the World’s Card Catalog, and we all use their website more than just about any other.

On the downside, I’ve heard a few small publishers complain about Amazon having enough market leverage that they’re able to bully the small publishers into doing things they don’t really want to do. For instance, if a publisher decides on a release date for a book and Amazon has a stock of the books, they sometimes jump the gun and release it whenever they feel like it, or in some cases don’t even put the book on their website until the book has already been out for a few weeks.

But on the whole, I think we’re lucky that’s as well-run an operation as it is. It could be a lot worse.

That said, I agree with what this reader wrote to tell me:

“…I definitely sympathize with your take on the unwelcome weirdness in the Personalizing Tactic of various businesses, Amazon most pronounced. There’s one other odd thing about Amazon that has caught my eye over the years: You can’t just sign out. In order to get out of your Amazon account, you have to click a link that says ‘Not Charlie?’ or, in your case, ‘Not Graham?’ This is really a strange practice that I’ve seen nowhere else. In order to leave my account, I have to (pretend to?) renounce my identity. I have to self-de-personalize, which only heightens the issue you brought up in your post.”

That’s funny but true. You have to pretend not to be yourself in order to sign out. I’ve done that a couple of times myself.