I had one bad experience, and it was so bad I nearly stopped buying from Amazon.

Product did not arrive on time, spoke to support rep.

Rep said that it was delayed because it was coming from overseas, which the tracking information easily disproved - it was coming from Illinois. Illinois is not overseas. When told this, the rep accused me of making things up, despite having the link.

The rep then said that it had been delayed because of weather in my town. I live in this town. It was sunny the entire day in question, and the day before. When I pointed this out, he flat out called me a liar.

I then asked to speak to a supervisor, because I had been lied to twice at this point. The rep immediately began stonewalling me, and for the next 45 minutes, I became increasingly impatient with his behavior, and told him that if I did not have a supervisor in the next 5 minutes, I would be ending the chat and sending the transcripts to someone else at Amazon and following up.

At this point, he made a thinly veiled threat to ban me (I have thousands of dollars of digital content tied to my account), and I immediately ended the chat and sent the entire log to anyone and everyone associated with Amazon that I could think of.

Just contact HN support about the downvote.

I kid.

I’ve emailed HN support about comments that were showdead because they were new accounts or once a comment I made that was flagged, I felt, unfairly[1], and gotten actual support from real people who can make decisions and fix problems in under 12 hours.

HN does actually have better customer support than Google.

[1] If you find yourself doing this you are taking arguing on the internet entirely too seriously.

I have had exactly the same experience with the HN staff up to and including [1], and you are completely right about the comparison to Google. In Google‘s defense, I had a decent experience with support for my paid GSuite about 5 years ago.

I didn't downvote you, but as a small-scale seller on Amazon, I received absolutely terrible support when they froze my account over a 12-cent fee that was added retroactively and therefore "past due" before I ever heard about it. They were going to pretty much keep my money and my merchandise and ignore me until I got an AWS rep to get involved.

As a customer, on the other hand, Amazon has among the best service I've ever received.

why act surprised? HN's voting system is broken, and anyone talking about it gets downvoted!

The main problem with their stupid voting system is that they let humans press the buttons.