We are contacting you regarding a past Prime Video purchase(s). The below content is no longer playable on Prime Video.
In an effort to compensate you for the inconvenience, we have applied a £5.99 Amazon Gift Card to your account. The Gift Card amount is equal to the amount you paid for the Prime Video purchase(s). To apologize for the inconvenience, we’ve also added an Amazon Gift Certificate of £5 to your account. Your Gift Card balance will be automatically applied to your next eligible order. You can view your balance and usage history in Your Account here:
We’ve taken away this thing you’ve bought, here’s a gift card so you can give us that money back again later.
strictly speaking it’s
Gift cards and store credit = “we keep your money.”
The reality is that they didn’t give the customer back anything. It’s the usual corporate sales speak.
“50% off” and “Save $10” aren’t actually real either. $10 doesn’t appear in customer’s bank accounts after a purchase and customers often have no concept of what the item originally cost before it was marked up and brought to market by the the corporation. It’s sales and marketing psychological games that many people can’t see through. $9.99/$59.99 is cheaper than $10.00/$60.00 true and people somehow feel better buying the former versus the latter as though that penny isn’t only a penny and they didn’t give the corporation the 99.99% of the money they wanted.
Explain this to my wife please… “I saved so much money today!” Plunks down several bags of crap that will end up being thrown away eventually…
I didn’t understand this for a long time myself. And I can’t rightly remember when I first learned about this sort of thing. But once I did, information just seemed to flow to me from multiple directions. Maybe look up classic tactics around sales and marketing, then deceptive, yet typical, psychological sales and marketing practices. There’s a book on credit cards I enjoyed years ago “How to Take Advantage of the People Who Are Trying to Take Advantage of You: 50 Ways to Capitalize on the System” by JSB Morse (Though long story short, avoid debt and credit cards). One video on YouTube turned me off of buying ink cartridges once I found out what they truly cost versus the exorbitant amount they sell them for. Capital rip offs.
It’s more like: we took it away and gave you a ~100% ROI by adding a $5 gift card to your “refund”. Still sucks though.
Not really. The subjective monetary value of whatever you might spend that money on is most likely going to be less than the store’s listed price. To give a more obvious (extreme) example, imagine if you got a $30 gift card to a store that sells individual grapes for $2 each. You can buy $30 worth of grapes from them, but 15 grapes are not worth $30 to any sane person. Hell, maybe you don’t even like grapes and they’re completely worthless!
Idunno what’s going on here but I’ve got a burning curiosity as to whether this grape store has any lemonade.
I’m sad that someone down voted you because they didn’t get the reference.
Joke’s on them, I don’t even see it :D Here, have an upvote!
Unless you brought glue, in which case I’d best waddle away…
After they clawed back the royalties they paid on the original content, I assume (based on their practices around ebooks and audiobook).
This is news to me (but not surprising), what do you mean?