First World Problems: My Unsolvable Amazon Account Issue
I live in a more rural area. The closest bookstore, for example, is an hour away. We also don’t’ have Target or Walmart, or any large chain grocery store in the town I live in. We don’t even have a bakery, or a coffee shop you can sit inside of. To get anywhere, or get anything, you have to make a plan and drive there. In my current season of life, time isn’t a currency I have much of. As much as I hate everything Amazon stands for, if you’re someone like me, who doesn’t have easy access to things, it has brought convenience to rural living that I can’t deny I’ve enjoyed.
Despite all that, I’ve recently learned that a company can be worth 1.6 trillion dollars and still have unsolvable technical support issues. For 10+ weeks now, I’ve been at the whim of Amazon’s “customer support” team, without access to my account.
I had called customer service in December of 2023 because I was attempting to log into Amazon.com, the Alexa App, the Prime Video app, etc. and I kept getting a prompt that I had to approve the log-in’s in my Amazon shopping app. Easy enough, right? Wrong. The problem was that the notification to approve the log in’s were not showing up in the shopping app. Though I never set up this 2-factor authorization, it had been a default setting on my account, I figured there was some sort of glitch or user error on my end and called customer service to troubleshoot and help me to find where these notifications were going, or use my email or phone number to approve the log-in instead.
I was on the phone for 2 hours troubleshooting, I was transferred to 5 different agents. They had me verifying purchases, “unlocked” my account a half-dozen times, had me clear cookies and then finally, they had me uninstall and reinstall my Amazon shopping app. As I attempted to log back into my shopping app that they had me log of out of I got the message that I needed to approve the log in within the shopping app I was attempting to log into.
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At this point, Amazon customer service transferred me to a man who told me I would receive an email for next steps and hung up on me.
An email never came and I kept calling back, going through the same steps over and over again, nothing new was ever attempted and I had to repeatedly explain the notification I was getting and send emails providing screenshots. I felt like I was going crazy. In desperation, I was googling the issue and came across a Reddit thread that suggested sending an email to jeff@amazon.com and andy@amazon.com. I did that, and the next day a woman named Julie from Amazon’s Executive Customer Relations reached out to me and set up a time to chat on the phone.
Throughout this ordeal, I was assured that they would regain access to my account. They removed every device, minus two televisions that can access the prime video channel. I have no way to cancel or edit Subscribe and Save orders (I’ve had 2 process since I was locked out), I can’t make any orders or take advantage of my prime membership, yet I keep getting charged monthly for it all. It makes absolutely no sense to me that a company this big, who has my phone number, drivers license, has verified my identity countless times, can’t just reroute an approval log in. How is there no fail safe? And how does your “customer service” team operate with so little knowledge?
When I suggested that my membership and digital library be reimbursed (the accumulation of movies and TV shows I’ve bought over the nearly 15 years I have had this account) so that I can just close the account and open a new one, they ghosted me. I still can’t log into Amazon anywhere and they are still charging me money. You’d think that it would make sense for a company worth as much as Amazon is, to just reimburse me the just under $1k, as it is an internal issue and not my fault, that I can’t access my account. But their greed, despite their incompetency far surpasses anything else. There’s a reason they say that no one can make a Billion dollars ethically, nevermind a trillion.
I have realized that I don’t need Amazon after being without it for nearly 11 weeks. And I am so annoyed that I’m dealing with such a stupid first world problem. But ethically, I know I should be reimbursed. So I will keep at it. I will not give up. And if you or anyone you know has dealt with this, please send them my way.
