![]() Jones had unwittingly collided with one of e-commerce’s strangest and most vexing truths: In the massive global network of manufacturers, distributors, sellers, and resellers, it can be nearly impossible to tell who’s actually responsible for getting any given product into your living room. What did I really expect? It is a big company, and they treated me like a big company.” (Amazon declined to answer specific questions about Jones’s allegations.) I thought, This billion-dollar entity-they’ll at least cover my losses. “It was, ‘We’ll put you on hold for 45 minutes until you get annoyed and hang up.’” He eventually stopped trying for a response he was in the middle of an exam period and had other things on his mind. ![]() “They weren’t even like, ‘We’ll get to the bottom of it,’” he told me. Amazon would not put him in touch with the seller and never assumed blame for the fire. ![]() But Amazon seemed unconcerned, he told me: Customer-service representatives treated his report like a new one each time he called, asking for his name, the order number, and the story of what had happened over and over again. Scrolling through reviews, he realized other buyers were reporting fires from the same item. His computer and hardwood floor were destroyed.Ĭurious about what had happened, Jones went back online to try to contact the seller and alert Amazon to the problem. Later, he was treated for first-degree and chemical burns. Battery cells were flying all over the living room, leaking acid. The lithium-ion battery in the laptop sitting next to him had ignited, setting his couch on fire. So when his laptop’s battery stopped working, Jones, then a graduate student, went online, found a replacement HP battery for about $15, and bought it.Ī few nights later, he was sitting on the couch in his Buffalo, New York, apartment when he heard a sound like a gunshot. Like most Americans, he was used to ordering whatever he needed on the site and having it show up at his front door days later. ![]() Nicholas Jones didn’t think twice about purchasing a lithium-ion battery from Amazon in 2016. ![]()
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