The email arrived today.
Amazon’s Executive Customer Relations (ECR) team has formally responded to the Washington State Attorney General’s Consumer Protection Division—and copied me in, as if to say “see, we’re doing something!“
What they actually did was double down on denial.
Despite months of documented correspondence, Amazon’s “final” position is that their teams have made extensive efforts, but cannot proceed without me performing unpaid diagnostic work on their behalf. Again. The company that can deliver half the internet to your door in 48 hours somehow can’t replicate a reproducible backend fault in its own systems.
This is not a support process. It’s a containment strategy.
The letter they sent
In their response to the Attorney General, Amazon states that:
“Our teams have made extensive efforts to resolve this matter, but have encountered a technical limitation in our diagnostic process… accurate diagnosis requires step-by-step replication of the issue.”
They go on to say they’ll “reopen the case” if I once again record and document the exact steps their own engineers could reproduce internally in under a minute.
That’s not customer service. That’s deflection under corporate letterhead.
What this really says
When a billion-dollar company can’t (or won’t) admit a systems fault and instead requests the victim to keep proving it, you’re no longer in a support dialogue. You’re in a power exercise.
The subtext of Amazon’s response to the Attorney General is simple: “We control the definition of resolution.”
But leadership—real leadership, Andy Jassy—doesn’t hide behind process. It acknowledges pain, owns mistakes, and fixes them. Amazon’s choice to offload diagnostic responsibility onto customers isn’t just lazy, it’s ethically hollow. And it reveals how far even the most “customer-centric” company on earth can drift from its founding principle.
Lesson for leaders
If you manage teams, this is your cautionary tale.
When process becomes a substitute for responsibility, you’ve already lost trust. When you prioritise procedural defence over human resolution, your systems may survive, but your credibility won’t.
A leader’s job is not to avoid blame. It’s to absorb complexity so others don’t have to. Amazon’s ECR response is a masterclass in how NOT to lead: polished, procedural, and utterly devoid of accountability.
What’s next
The Washington State Attorney General’s office continues to monitor the complaint. And the lesson remains clear: power without integrity will always mistake process for progress.
If you’ve faced something similar, document everything.
Save timestamps, screenshots, and correspondence. Escalate early. And remember—accountability delayed is accountability denied.
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