Packages are insured so, unless they suspect fraud, they will let insurance cover it.
Consumers usually pay FedEx for insurance when we need a package but I bet Amazon self insures, given their size. Either way, money is set aside to cover situations like this.
I know insurance covers it; I'm wondering how they determine what situations are likely to be fraudulent. Is customer history involved? My parents have never ordered from Amazon; if the same thing happens to them on their first purchase, what would the resolution be?
They probably give users the benefit of the doubt the first time, then flag them if they do it too much. At the scale of amazon, the cost of a product is less then the cost of the time to chase up every single report of theft.
"10,000 hours of training, according to Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers. Gladwell based this assertion on the work of Anders Ericsson, who studied classical violinists and found that, in every case, it had taken a regimen of 2-3 hours a day for 10 years to develop their abilities. Later research by Ericsson and others confirmed similar results in other fields."
I don't think it is as straightforward as that. Imagine you're learning chess and you have a chess master as your teacher, you are going to annihilate someone who has putted the same amount of time, even more, but who doesn't have such a good teacher.
And that little side-note unravels the whole argument: how much better can practice be? Can it be so focused that one reaches mastery in 5k hours? 1k? To what degree is being a fast learner in a field a talent?
The problem is that Amazon doesn't want to set a precedent by paying him. They want to be able make these mistakes in the future and be free to screw over another author without any previous settlement mucking things up.
That's not the problem here. The author presumably found the price change rather quickly. It was Amazon that took a long time to respond to the error that's at issue.
Consumers usually pay FedEx for insurance when we need a package but I bet Amazon self insures, given their size. Either way, money is set aside to cover situations like this.