Amazon Customer Reviews

I'm not so sure I'm too fond of this Amazon.com thing. After all, it's a website that floods you with some truly barbaric and deranged reading material known as Amazon customer reviews. Who the heck wants to read that kind of stuff?! I mean, all Amazon customer reviews are written by people who are mentally unstable. Each one should make you feel compelled to head on over to a Zoloft bottle and ingest several hundred milligrams. 

No one has ever said anything remotely sane in an Amazon customer review. The site has been around for two and a half decades, it's attracted hundreds of millions of reviews, and we're all just sitting in front of our computers with our popcorn, waiting to encounter one review that shows some semblance of rational thought.

Here's an Amazon review for Dixon-Ticonderoga pencils. "I'm a teacher, and so I know first hand the important quality difference between good pencils (like Ticonderoga) and cheap knock-offs. Although the graphic on this page shows actual Ticonderoga pencils, THAT IS NOT WHAT THEY SENT. What I received was a box of 144 #2 Dixon pencils--not TICONDEROGA."

What the pencil picking pecan is that person talking about? That review emphasizes the distinction between Dixon and Ticonderoga! Have you ever heard anyone emphasize that distinction? Have you ever heard anyone make that distinction? No! The company is Dixon-Ticonderoga. They make Dixon-Ticonderoga pencils. End of story. Distinguishing between Dixon and Ticonderoga would be like distinguishing between Louis and Vuitton, or Mountain and Dew, or Ben and Jerry. Imagine a review that says, "I tried one spoonful of this ice cream, and I immediately spit it out and washed my mouth for 200 seconds with industrial strength Listerine. This ice cream does not taste like Ben & Jerry's. It tastes like Ben's--with no Jerry involved whatsoever! I don't trust that Ben character to concoct any of my frozen treats on his own, without the guidance of Jerry. I mean, we all know about Ben and his unsuccessful stint in rehab. We know how he goes about his business when Jerry is not there to keep him off of drugs. The way Ben does things, the man is liable to start putting ketchup and mustard in the chunky monkey."

Amazon is chock full of reviews comparable to that. Furthermore, the site has tons of reviews that carry a central theme of "I want to give this zero stars, but Amazon is making me give it one star." There are literally over one million Amazon reviews that send that message. They typically say something like this. "If I could give this book zero stars, I would. If I could put six steak knives through the author's liver, I would. If I could open the passenger door of the author's Maserati and urinate in the glove compartment, I would. If I could play Duck Duck Goose with the author's sister and put her in the mosh pit and taze her with 53,000 volts of electricity, I would."

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