Because toxicity does not contain itself to Amazon's convenience. The same crap we have to deal with does trickle down to the customers, which is why they eventually start acting like this, because despite the "obsession with customers" Amazon fails to realize that the same things that cause sellers headaches, cause customers headaches too, we just know more whats causing the headaches, having access to a side of Amazon that most customers don't see. The fact that we are often disregarded as sellers is a pretty great tragedy in all of this, because we could be a really valuable tool to Amazons long term success if they listened just a little better (and made it a bit easier to talk to them).

As someone who was an Amazon customer for years before I sold here, and still one during my time as a seller, I can confirm this sort of thing first hand.

For starters, we are all familiar with the issues that cause so many 3p sellers to go private label, right? Well as a customer, having every search inundated with unfamiliar brands and copy-paste private label items that are nearly identical, is immensely frustrating and a massive waste of time. Every thing I want to purchase now I have to be 10 times more vigilant because I know just how poorly these items are made, and amazon's search features make it so difficult to avoid them. Some instances can get extreme, where you have full pages of the exact same item from 40 different brands and that doesn't help anyone. It wastes customers time and it creates this brutal competition that spurs so many to turn to blackhat tactics to gain advantages over each other since they are all selling cookie cutter duplicates of items.

2nd, we are also familiar with many issues with customer returns and A to Z guarantees for FBM sellers. Well that abuse by customers that is dumped onto sellers, has created an arms race mentality, where now FBM sellers will do underhanded things to make getting refunds more difficult. I personally experienced this myself recently, where I purchased a hoodie from an FBM seller that was poorly sized and had defective zippers. I returned the item, and the seller delayed refunding the item till I reached out directly to insit upon one, which then caused the seller to tell me that I had "returned the item used and unsellable" despite only briefly handling it, equivalent to or less than anyone who might handle a piece of clothing in a department store might handle said item. Now with my knowledge of the situation, it was clear to me that this was some attempt to cover losses on returns as a whole, but the seller decided to make it exponentially harder to get my refund, by actually granting me said refund, but charging the entire purchase price + tax as a restocking fee, which in turn forced me to waste several days and hours going through the process of forcing an A to Z claim on the return to get my money back. Initially I only got the tax back (whcih should have never been kept to begin with), and had to wait another several days to get the rest of the purchase price back.

Several buyers of my own have recently had problems with receiving the wrong item, because someone in an FBA warehouse decided to slap a different FNSKU label over the perfectly legible FNSKU labels already on my items, to make up for items briefly lost in another shipment, I assume done by an FC employee who was overworked, tired, exhausted and feeling treated like crap by Amazon, as we all know is a popular feeling amongst FC employees ala youtube and the internet and other word of mouth. This of course ends up frustrating me as a seller for the obvious reasons, but also screws over customers who were counting on the right items showing up on time.

You cant just poison one part of your business and hope it doesn't spread like this. It is inevitable, and in the end, Amazon is failing the customers and toxifying their behaviors. Just because people will still come here out of convenience or habits sake, does not mean that the way they interact with the site will not deteriorate as they find themselves more angry and frustrated with the site, evem if they spend more money now then before, and that behavior will mean more customers taking out their frustration on Amazon and the sellers which just perpetuates the cycles.

Its the same reason so many gaming communities are so vehemently toxic, because game developers have been abusing their player bases in other ways for the past 15 years or so, with using all these studies on behavior to get people to shell out more money without concern for their actual feelings about the mechanics implemented. This foments an ever increasing vindictive customer pool who will progressively go further out of their way to strike back at the thing they are interacting with because realistically, they don't have many better options out there.

Hell, even Amazon has admitted several times they risk running through the entire pool of US workers when it comes to FC staff because of the insane number of people they employ coupled with the high turnover rate. While a few of them might never purchase from Amazon again after their experiences working in an FC, many of them will still be customers, and how many of them do you think are going to be honest or play nice with Amazon and Amazon sellers when they were just so recently left with feelings of being abused? My guess would be very few, and there is plenty of evidence all over the internet of people who have been through these jobs finding ways of taking out their aggression on Amazon by using their knowledge of the site to get free stuff or cause general chaos and discord because it gives them some feeling of justice since there's no other realistic recourse for them to deal with the disparity in power between Amazon itself and them as a low wage employee.

In the end, if you have ever worked in any sort of customer service industry and hated when the district leaders came through your store because of how out of touch they were with the day to day reality of your store and would hear nothing that challenged their brilliant opinions of what would make things run better, then you know what I'm talking about.

I used to work at Blockbuster, and history has already proved me right.