Amazon reliability cutoff point

Posted on by

posts about a bad experience with an Amazon vendor who had a 95% reliability rating and says she will never again buy from anyone with less than a 98% rating. I suspect she is in the right ballpark for what the safe cutoff should be. I also placed a fairly large order with an Amazon vendor with a 95% rating before Christmas, and not only did it never arrive but there was no response to my polite email enquiries asking if the order had ever been dispatched. Needless to say I’ve applied for a full refund from Amazon, and expect to get it. Looking through the Amazon feedback pages for Wessex Books Ltd / The Book Cupboard of Bristol, I find that their failure to reply to emails about disappearing orders is a recurrent theme (and in one or two cases the shop has actually posted grumpy responses to complaints from thwarted buyers, which would be amusing if they weren’t so unprofessional).

So I reckon ‘s cutoff point of 98% rather than 95% is about right. If they can’t deliver a satisfactory service forty-nine times out of fifty, just don’t risk your money with them.

One thought on “Amazon reliability cutoff point”

  1. AYKB, ‘praesidens’ is a medieval Latin word for ‘chairman’, and ‘president’ its standard English transliteration.

    Of the sources already quoted, the earliest that I think would be in English is the Bible translation referred to by , presumably Wycliffe’s. It looks to me as if Wycliffe probably just transliterated the word from Latin, as the word ‘chairman’ didn’t exist at the time (it is apparently first attested in the 1650s). The DNB references, in particular, look to me as if they are based on Latin documents.

    Looking at them, all the pre-Elizabethan sources quoted can easily be interpreted as referring to a person whose authority comes from chairing a committee (taken in the general sense of any specified group of people agreeing decisions in a series of meetings). But, of course, the chair of any committee with significant responsibilities is likely to have delegated powers to exercise the responsibilities between meetings. And, from ‘s earliest examples, it looks as if this was the case from the early 13th century or before. And then the word’s meaning slowly drifted.

    But actually this doesn’t seem to be the full explanation. The usual classical word for ‘chairman’ seems to have been ‘praeses’ and, at least according to Wikipedia, this was being used for Roman provincial governors by the 3rd century at the latest.

Comments are closed.