3 cheers for OP, much more of an honest person than I!

Give them their $60 back... My goodness what kind of world it would have to be for me to offer that up.

I've had this happen numerous times with other merchants. Nothing as drastic as $60, but they told me to keep whatever I received nevertheless. Sometimes it was a screw up with pricing, other times a free item that I did not order.

I've ALWAYS had an amazing experience using Amazon. They routinely get my business just because of this, even though I might be able to get an item for a few dollars cheaper elsewhere.

I'm not surprised. Amazon still seems to get that occasionally eating a little cost can have a big impact on encouraging a shopper to return. I don't think they are doing anything out of the goodness of their hearts, but it is a good business decision. I'd say that a $60 loss in this situation is better than $6000 in advertising since we're reading it here.

Three cheers to Amazon. I like a company that is focused on what is most important, getting their customers to return with greater frequency!

I had ordered a Kitchen-Aid mixer from Amazon, only to have it showed as delivered online and not at my house. I called Amazon and they immediately shipped out a new one.

The next day I found a note in my mailbox. It turned out that UPS had switched the middle two numbers in my address and delivered it to a woman down the street. I now had two mixers for the price of one! But I knew that it would be wrong to keep both, so I called Amazon and arranged to ship the original one back (for some reason that was the one that I needed to return).

I was very impressed, both with Amazon's efficiency (the mixer arrived literally two days after I told them it was missing, and this was during the Christmas season) and the honesty of the woman down the street, who could have had a free mixer if she had just kept her mouth shut.

Yay, Amazon! I have had nothing but good experiences with them. I also have an Amazon Visa so I can get "free" $25 gift certificates when I spend so much on my card. I put almost everything on my card and pay it off at the end of the month and reap the rewards of free merchandise.

@Dunkelzahn: I would have returned (or tried to return) the money. Many years ago I received $5.00 extra in change from a grocery store. I didn't realize it until I had gotten home. Until I returned back to the store to try to retun the $5.00, I had so many things go wrong in my life it was unbelievable...Karma was working against me...kind of like NBC's "Earl" television show (without the El Camino and the double wide)

I accidentally bought some mp3 downloads from Amazon with an expired credit card. They sent me an e-mail asking me to update my credit card information, but not saying anything else. When I e-mailed them back to offer to pay for the mp3s, they also said to keep them as a gift.

I heart Amazon to the 3rd power. I've had only excellent customer experiences with them. When a package containing some dvds was delivered to the wrong address they sent me out replacement dvds right away. About a month later the original package was delivered and when I called to ask about shipping them back they gave me the extra set for dealing with the hassle. I promptly gifted them to a friend (who needs two sets of the same dvds). I buy as much as possible from Amazon and recommend them to everyone. If only they could get their packaging under control they'd be the most awesome company ever.

Last night the cashier at Target forgot to ring up a bottle of taco sauce, when I pointed that out she said, "just take it!" I think it was just mostly laziness on her part than customer service.

But YAY for Amazon. They've always been good to me.

It's somewhat heartwarming that Amazon seems to have sent a form letter for this: it must happen more often than you would think.

@tereckkincaid: Er, and by that I mean, that the customers offer to pay the money, not necessarily that Amazon doesn't shake them down for it.

See Hilton [consumerist.com] this is how a company should treat their customers. Do what's right, not what's within-your-rights.

I've had a similar situation with Amazon with shipping a book I ordered to the wrong address. When I called to let them know what I found out through the USPS tracking site, they put in a second order for the book at no cost and shipped it overnight.

Then a couple of weeks later, they went ahead and processed a refund for the original book anyway.

Hey! that's me, you printed my story! Thanks!

Darrell

They will fix the bug in their software when the cost of fixing it becomes less than the losses from all the people that discover from this article that they can reuse their gift cards.

A couple years ago a group of us were dining out and the waitress forgot to include one of the entrees on the bill. It was around $15 IIRC. I told her about it, she took it, then came back with the manager, who said he'd decided to forget about it in appreciation for our honesty. Later on I asked the waitress if she would get in trouble over it (I was thinking they'd make up that $15 out of her pay instead of from us) but she said no, that's just how they handle things there.

I've been shipped 2 of an item in multiple shipments before. I also had a box go missing once and they shipped the whole order again and I already had most of what was in the order to begin with.

Every time I tried to get a return label back, but they told me to keep it. Most of the time they are DVDs and Blu-rays which work good to give away as presents or sell on ebay. Other times, I get office supplies which is nice because it saves me from having to reorder so soon.

@tereckkincaid: As a previous employee of Amazon.com, that isn't a "blurb" (defined text) that I remember. Employee's don't always use the blurbs for every email. We get the option to use the text to make our answer more efficient but it is completely editable. Also, they train you on how they want the answer to appear and what content to have in it so more than likely this email was hand typed. :)

During a Costco shopping trip, I thought the cashier might have accidentally rung up the 4lbs of strawberries twice, so I glanced at the receipt as I pushed the cart out and saw that it hadn't been.

Then as I was driving home I started mentally reviewing the receipt and thought, "Wait a minute...was there a subtraction on there?" I figured that they had been rung up twice and then she took one off for the correction.

But when I got home and unpacked the stuff and the toddler and got the toddler her lunch and all of that frenetic nonsense, then I reviewed the receipt again and saw she'd put the strawberries on and then taken them off...so I think she also thought she'd done it twice and took it off but had only done it once, so I'd gotten $5.99 of strawberries for free.

Costco was all the way across town for us at the time so I couldn't just go back, especially with toddler nap time arriving fast. So I phoned and asked them if they could please charge my Amex, since I'd used that to pay, and I'd approve the transaction.

The Costco manager I spoke to was floored. She couldn't believe someone actually phoned for $5.99. She said, "Ma'am, you enjoy your strawberries on us. You are the most honest person I've ever met."

Then I got worried and asked that she please not get the cashier in trouble, and she said she wouldn't and that I shouldn't worry.

I ordered diapers and formula from Amazon, years ago when I had a baby, and they had a deal to get both for cheap. They sent me my order twice, but only charged me for one. I emailed them and asked for return authorization, but they told me to keep it.... then sent me a third box!! I love Amazon!

@ponycyndi: Speaking of diapers, I ordered a box for my cousin who just had a baby. They never received the box despite UPS showing "delivered." Amazon quickly sent a replacement box out without any problems.

I really like this company...I'm a total cheapskate so i'll take a chance on a shady company for small things < $25, but anything more, I'll use amazon, newegg, or buy.com.

A canned email for honesty? Is the world really a better place than I thought it was?

I had a situation occur with Staples.com where I had inadvertently ordered the wrong type of padded mailer envelopes, a whole big case of them (approx. 250 ct.). I contacted Staples and wanted to see if I could do a return/exchange for the correct ones and they simply asked me which ones I needed (which ended up being slightly more than the ones I had ordered the first time), told me I could keep the incorrect ones and to not worry about the difference in price.

That was some above and beyond service there.

That's really cool. I'd like to think I'd be as honest as the OP, but I don't know what I'd do if I were actually in that situation.

Just out of curiousity what would the tipping point be for Amazon to demand the money back instead? $100? $200? $1,000?

@davere: You'd best hope that there isn't an over-diligent receipt checker on duty when that happens...

Man, Amazon continues to embody everything that is still good about the retail shopping experience. There really is almost no point to shopping anywhere else IMHO - the customer service from Amazon is stellar, but it doesn't hurt that the prices are ultra-competitive too.

Hey Best Buy et al., I know you're all brick-and-mortar, but maybe you should take note and, y'know, not sell people empty laptop boxes filled with, well, bricks and mortar...

@ohnoes: I bought my Kitchenaid mixer on Amazon as well.. It's my favorite thing in my kitchen.

What color did you end up getting? I got one that is black, but has sparkely metal flecks in the paint.. I can't remember what they called the color exactly though.

Once I purchased a stuffed Grinch doll for my dad for Christmas, off of eBay. When I recieved the order, there were TWO Grinch dolls in the box.

I emailed the seller and told her that she must have made a mistake, and that if she wanted I could send her the extra doll back.

She replied with, "Merry Christmas!"

I still have that doll to this day, and it was really great because in reality I really wanted one for myself too.

You are certainly the type of customer that we would like to retain.

That about sums it up I think

@Rachacha: I had something like this happen to me, once. I bought a $70 item at Best Buy (which came to something like $74 after tax) and paid with a $100 bill. The cashier put the $100 in the register, and proceeded to give me back cash in the amount of the purchase price, rather than the amount of my change.

I didn't realize until I got to my car that I'd gotten three times as much change as I was supposed to. Had it been a couple of dollars, I might have said "cool" and kept it, but I didn't want the poor girl at the register to get fired for accidentally giving away $50.

I went back in and gave it back. I worked retail myself at the time, so I figured that was worth a little good karma.

@Rachacha: RIP, My Name Is Earl :(

@Kimaroo - No Stars Upon Thars: I don't know about mixers, but on cars they call that "pearlescent".

@kaceetheconsumer: 90% of the time it's the other way, though. Customer overcharged, doesn't notice or doesn't want the hassle of getting it fixed.

That's cool, I had shirt.woot do something similar with me once.

I ordered a shirt, it arrived, and a few days later a second one of the same shirt arrived.

I emailed their customer service, they assured me I wasn't being charged for the second one and told me to keep it anyways because it was their error.

I thought that was pretty cool of them!

@Dunkelzahn: Let's just hope that Amazon sticks by its word here. At some point in a couple of years, someone at Amazon will perform an audit and decide that this guy owes them $60. And then, let the games begin.

@kaceetheconsumer: The manager lied. I'm that cashier. I got pelted with strawberries by the manager as soon as I walked off the floor that day. Then she demoted me to shopping cart corraller. Eventually I had to quit because I couldn't take the harsh weather outside. My husband left me because I wasn't "contributing to the family" and got sole custody of our 4 children. Then I got addicted to painkillers.

Now I know who ruined my life.

@harvey_birdman: Can't imagine that there are many $1,000 gift cards. Wouldn't really matter to Amazon anyway. They eat millions in damaged shipments rather than spend more on careful packaging; and discovering an error in their processing system is actually of value to them.

Once again, Amazon FTW.

@West Coast Secessionist: Whoops, sorry.

Here...

*hands you a cupcake*

Better?

@Zorantor: Well you got me curious, so I looked it up (Suprisingly Amazon still has my order history from 2003!) and Kitchenaid called my paticular color Caviar.

Who knew? I remembered it being something weird, so I guess I was right.

My thought process was that I really wanted blue, because I love blue and everything in my kitchen is blue (dishes and whatnot.) but Kitchenaid mixers last forrreevvverrrr.. like 50+ years, and I couldn't depend on myself for liking blue THAT long. So I thought I should get something more neutral. But I didn't want it to be boring, so I noticed that they had this sparkley black one and I thought that would be perfect.

/Ramble

@pax: Same here. I downloaded close to 20 mp3s before I realized they didn't have my updated credit card and weren't charging me for them.

I didn't tell them about it though. I just updated my card and expected they would charge it for the previous downloads. They never did.

But now the IRS knows and will be expecting him to report the $60 as income. No good deed shall go unpunished!

@kaceetheconsumer: Lol.. Good one. And good for you : )

A couple of Christmas's ago I found a Best Buy gift card on the ground with about $120 credit on it. I called up and reported it lost. I didn't want to use it becasue of the irregular credit on the balance. That balance showed that someone had used it before, and I did not know if I could get in trouble for using the card even though it was under someone's name. Nothing came of it except my self satification of honesty.

@BuddyHinton:

I wonder if the IRS expects you to report any penny's you pick up off the ground???

@Kimaroo - No Stars Upon Thars: I have been trying to justify that kitchenaid mixer for approximately 6 years. I don't really bake though, so its use would be somewhat limited in my house, I realize this. But that doesn't make me want it any less. I can sit and drool over those color choices for hours.

@davere: she just lost her job.