Because of my very lean body style, I’m not able to purchase clothing in a majority of regular stores. Instead, I get a majority of my shirts online on Amazon, where I browse from Korean retailers and pick out shirts that are specifically designed for Asian-style bodies. As a matter of fact, every single shirt that I bought for myself (that is, every single shirt that I did not receive as a gift) happens to be purchased on Amazon from an Asian retailer.

A strange thing happened very recently. I bought six slim-fit button-down dress shirts at $24.50 each, which is already a pretty good price, considering the quality of the shirts (I had bought the same brand of shirt in the past). But, for some otherworldly reason, just a few days after my purchase, the price of each shirt fell to $14.50 each – a discount of $10.00 per shirt, for a total savings of US$60.00.

Seeing as, not only does Amazon have free returns on clothing, but also because I’m an Amazon Prime member, I figured they would just credit my account with the $60, and to avoid having an excessively long conversation with Amazon’s support team, I explained the situation and just asked for the $60.

I ended up going through three people – Jerryl, someone outside of Amazon’s Pricing team, even though I had specifically requested that department; Mohammed, someone who only knew how to answer my questions with canned responses; and Raghu, a manager who answered my questions like a politician (as in, he refused to actually answer with any statements of value).

Nobody granted me a price adjustment.

Apparently, Amazon has a policy that only televisions can be price matched. All other products are not eligible for price matching or purchase protection because Amazon “already thrives to have best pricing,” so they don’t grant partial refunds for price differences. What “thriving to have the best pricing” has to do with Amazon dropping the cost of their own item by 41% and screwing over people who already purchased it in the past, I have no idea.

Am I just going to accept the loss of $60? Absolutely not.

Apparently Amazon thinks it is worth it to have me return the six shirts and repurchase them all at the lower price. The silly thing is that this clothing has free returns, and I have Amazon Prime so I have free shipping, so they are literally just wasting money on shipping on six items in two directions.

You would think that, maybe, the customer service representatives would be intelligent and intuitive enough to realize that this would happen, save Amazon some money on shipping, not make one of their several-year Prime customers go through this hassle, and make a case-by-case exception?

At least I got a story out of it.