Amazon Prime Video is able to remove a video from your library after purchase.

szlwzl@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 1691 points –

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:

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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

here’s a gift card so you can give us that money back again we can keep your money but give you something for free later.

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...

That's fine. Always need to purchase more storage devices.

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...

It's Amazon, dude. You may not like their business practices but it's a fair bet they're going to have something you want at a decent price.

It's true that this exchange in this particular instance is a net gain for like 99.9% of the victims. Hell, most people were probably never even gonna watch the movie again anyway. However, using that to justify this practice opens the door for abuse down the line. Store credit is not an acceptable form of compensation. Imagine if you totaled someone's car and then offered them $10k credit at a junkyard you own. It would be unacceptable! Why give large corporations an exception?