>True but generally speaking American companies usually have much better customer service and better refund policies than European ones. The issues usually stem when a company corners the market or has no viable alternatives.
>Any examples of American company having worse customer experience than European ones?
I would say things like cable and internet companies, as well as airlines. They are similarly frustrating in Europe but not to the extent that they are in the US and the difference comes down to better regulation.
For that matter I would say the tech regulation environment probably benefits European consumers with stronger data privacy rights, and a 14-day right to withdraw from digital contracts.
To be honest I don't think they do "no question asked refunds" for the consumer's benefit -- probably more so that they don't have to devote customer support resources to handling all the return requests they get.
I'm sure you'd soon find it's not quite a guaranteed "no questions asked" process if you repeatedly return large expensive items.
Sure, but just because it's also pleasant for the consumer as a byproduct doesn't mean you can attribute their actions to that cause, e.g. this doesn't make them altruistic.
I think it's more about the type of store. I was with acquaintances returning clothes at high end stores (meaning: expensive) and service was great. I would not try that at a low end store (meaning: cheap).
From my point of view processing a return costs the store money. If they don't make a high margin they will (try to) discourage it. If in US everywhere they are fine with it for me it means they make higher margins everywhere.
Exactly. Europe’s regulations are about the absolute bottom, not intended to be taken as the average experience.
On average US companies are much better with customer experience. Of course until they corner you, then they may choose not to and then you have it worse than Europeans.
In the Netherlands literally every single store has no questions asked refunds for up to a month. Not that I have to do it often, but for example Coolblue and Bol both offer free returns within a month. Pretty much any webstore I have literally ever used has the same refund policies. Not to mention that the topic of this thread is already in-place EU wide, so there's an obvious win there too.
The same is true for Europe. I've never had an issue returning items on Amazon, whether they're for personal or business use (where you don't have the right to return items). The same goes for local and European chains.
> Amazon and Apple do no question asked refunds all the time
I'm not sure where you're getting your information about the EU from, but I can return any item I order online within 14 days, and then I have another 14 days to send it back, no questions asked, no need to give any reason. Some companies even offer 30 to 90 days, but the 14 + 14 days is the legal minimum.
>Any examples of American company having worse customer experience than European ones?
Xfinity comes to mind. The last time I bought a new modem, I had to basically yell 'cancel my account' over and over again until I finally got to speak to a living, breathing human, who could provision the modem for me.
I'm trying to be charitable but I really don't understand your line of reasoning. To me it seems like their hand is being forced by the UK Government. They don't want to introduce a backdoor for global users by complying so they are simply disabling the feature for users in the UK. If the feature does not exist then there is no need to comply. That seems... reasonable?
The blame squarely lies with the government in the UK and that is correctly where it seems like most of the anger is being directed.
The UK government is not a dictatorship. Bad policies like this should be pushed back against by both corporations and individuals or things will get worse. Easier said than done, I know, but Apple instantly rolling over is not a good sign for a company supposedly big on privacy.
It is the nature of the UK Parliamentary system, that when the party in power has a large majority, it is essentially an elective dictatorship. Then 5 years later we may get a different dictator.
This is a well known issue with the system. There are few checks and balances, it rather depends upon honourable behaviour by the participants.
That honourable behaviour ceased to be practiced from around 2000 onwards, and so things have been deteriorating.
paying up front when offered an interest free loan, especially in a high interest rate environment is not really rational though. i have excellent credit but klarna doesn't offer its services to me, i suspect because they expect i will make the payments on time and become unprofitable.
I suspect that whatever transaction Klarna did not offer its services to you during was an outlier.
Klarna is paid by the merchant when you select them as a payment method. They definitely want people with excellent credit, because people with excellent credit are low-risk.
While Herb uses modest language when describing his project, my take is that's because it's a huge effort that might fail, but it does not indicate lack of ambition. If anything, I think this is hugely ambitious. The work in the standards committee provides the necessary infrastructure to make this feasible in the first place. On his Github he lists the changes that went into C++ over the last years that enable this prototype.
It's pretty clever really, and dare I say, it seems feasible. This essentially creates syntax bubbles inside the language where there are different defaults, and then transpiles those bubbles to regular C++ while copying the rest verbatim. See this https://godbolt.org/z/nPPMYM3Yj as an example how array accesses are transpiled to do bounds checking.
i think to expect a multi-billion dollar organisation to make consequential decisions like this based on anything other than cold calculation is naive at best and enormously stupid at the very worst.
The sea change in chicken production demonstrated it was possible to quickly scale down antibiotics in farming, but it didn’t do much to reduce overall use, as the chicken industry only used 6 percent of antibiotics in agriculture in 2016. And the momentum didn’t spread to other parts of the meat business, like beef and pork, which together account for over 80 percent of medically important antibiotics fed to farmed animals.
consider that the goal of facebook is not to build a 'good product for the world'. facebook exists to 1) keep your attention 2) extract as much data as it can 3) make inferences where necessary/possible 4) sell targeted ads.
facebook is an ad business. to that end, they do try to improve the user experience wherever necessary to advance the goals stated above, but that's it.
one piece of advice for anyone about to read war and peace: the number of chracters are vast and you'll find that the names used to refer to each can often change with no warning. different names can be used interchangeably, even in the same piece of dialogue. it can get very confusing. best to have a map of character names before you start.
this does not track with my experience