Amazon’s Transition to Annoying EVERYONE
Here we go again.
Suddenly, a line item on your Amazon checkout can spark a political firestorm. I know, I know. 2025 is the gift that keeps giving for The Secret Developer blog.
This time Amazon aren’t simply wiping out local Mom and Pop businesses, underpaying warehouse workers or overworking software developers.
This time, they’re listing the specific impact of Trump’s tariffs.
Reasonable?
Amazon told the Washington Post (who else?) it had simply looked into itemising the costs for customers using Amazon Haul. Not the main Amazon site, a low-cost competitor to Shein and Temu.
Sounds reasonable, right?
In software development, we’re used to detailing costs. Technical debt, feature creep, that plugin dependency from 2014 nobody has time to update. Transparency is good. Transparency helps you make better decisions. Transparency stops your manager asking why your three-line PR took three days (“because you only saw the three lines, not the three days of debugging someone else’s code, James”).
Like an argument at home about who should clean the dishes, full transparency isn’t always welcome. It makes everyone look and feel bad.
Amazon have pulled a snafu here where politicians are made to look bad. It won’t end well; it’s not ending well.
The Response
When an engineering lead finds out that you hardcoded a time zone into your production app. They behave like the White House, discovering Amazon’s behavior here.
That is hostile and aggressive. In this case, Amazon
The White House’s response? Screeching like an engineering lead who just found out you hardcoded a time zone into the production app (“HOSTILE! POLITICAL! HOW DARE YOU!”). They accused Amazon of performing a “hostile act” because — brace yourself — telling customers why prices are going up might hurt the administration’s narrative.
Sounds like how in tech, no one wants to admit that their decision to add six redundant microservices last year is why you’re spending your evenings fighting YAML demons today. Never attribute to malice what can be explained by protecting fragile egos.
Of course, Amazon denied they ever considered doing this on their main site. Probably because they realized that openly listing every political price hike would turn checkout pages into the next big flamewar on X (or whatever we’re pretending Twitter is called today).
Let’s be honest: transparency usually backfires in both politics and software development. Customers don’t want to hear that your app crashes because backend services are fighting each other like toddlers in a ball pit. They want the app to work. Politicians don’t want customers to know tariffs are taxes by another name. They want voters to believe inflation just magically appears from nowhere, like surprise bugs during UAT.
And guess what? Developers, you’re stuck between them. Because when prices rise, customers are going to complain about your platform’s “greed” and not about someone’s 145% tariff on Chinese umbrellas.
m.