As sustainable - and unsustainable! - consumption becomes increasingly topical in consumer law and policy, news from the UK suggest Amazon is not ready to change their game to face their responsibility viz the climate emergency. Incidentally, in doing so they also provide quite bad consumer service.
What is the story? According to reporting by the Guardian, Amazon uk has more than once been in controversies with customers over unsolicited deliveries. While some mistakes can happen when a company arranges millions of shipments per year, several customers have been met by refusal when asking Amazon to take back what had been wrongly delivered - with the company suggesting that the consumers simply dispose of the (new, perfectly functioning) goods.
In the latest news item, the mistaken delivery concerned an excercise bike weighting 28 kilos. An elderly customer from Bristol received the bike after having ordered a completely different product.
"After finding his way through the maze of the Amazon website he says he eventually found a number to call where a very helpful person agreed to replace his missing logs. But when these arrived the second driver also refused to take the bike away."
When Amazon instructed him to dispose of the particularly bulky good as he liked, the customer approached the Guardian. Amazon changed their mind after the newspaper got involved, accepting to take back the bike and sending amenities to the puzzled customer.
The company's original reply is broadly in line with article 28 of the Consumer Rights Directive - providing that in case of unsolicited supply of goods or services consumers are not required to pay (but, the rule implies, may keep what has been delivered). However, in case of numerous wrong deliveries or bulky items such as a training bike, inviting consumers to dispose of the good is both highly questionable in terms of sustainability and oblivious of consumer interest. As the Bristol consumer observes in the Guardian article, if he was instructed to keep the bike, this likely means that another customer, who had originally ordered the bike, was probably delivered another widget.
Can we really not do better than this?
