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Amazon to Pay $8.25 Million to Resolve Discrimination Lawsuit Over Slow Delivery to Majority-Black D.C. Neighborhood While Charging Residents The Full Prime Subscription Price (oag.dc.gov)
submitted 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by [M] to c/tech@piefed.world
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Attorney General Brian L. Schwalb today announced that Amazon.com, Inc. (Amazon) will pay $8.25 million in refunds and penalties and change its business practices to resolve the District’s lawsuit alleging that Amazon deceived tens of thousands of DC residents by failing to inform them that their ZIP codes were excluded from Amazon’s in-house delivery services and misleading Prime members about the true cause of shipping delays.

OAG sued Amazon in 2024, alleging that the company had violated DC consumer protection law by secretly excluding two DC ZIP codes east of the Anacostia River (20019 and 20020) from Amazon’s in-house, Amazon-branded delivery services— significantly slowing Prime deliveries to those areas—while continuing to charge tens of thousands of DC residents living there the full Prime subscription price. Now, under the terms of a settlement agreement, impacted District residents will get back nearly half of their total membership fee that they paid during the exclusion period. Amazon will pay back $7.25 million in Prime membership fees and pay $1 million in penalties to the District. Amazon stopped excluding Ward 7 and 8 consumers from full delivery services in April 2026, and this settlement puts safeguards in place to ensure DC customers can make informed decisions about their Prime memberships if Amazon chooses to implement delivery exclusions in the future.

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[–] 5 points 2 weeks ago

That fine is literally NOTHING to Amazon. if they were doing it in DC, they are almost certainly doing it in cities all over America. For a company like Amazon, it's just the price of doing business, and won't change their behavior on the slightest.

Billionaires and their corporations need to be hit with $1 Billion fines for EACH infraction. The fines need to be large enough to HURT, large enough that they have to sell off a division or two, large enough that it tanks their stock by 33%, large enough that it takes a few years to recover, large enough that they'll say, we're never going to try that again.

And especially, large enough that every other CEO who sees it, thinks "I don't want that to happen to me, let's stop doing all that bad shit, and stay honest for now."

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    [–] 2 points 2 weeks ago

    I can't wait for the district to disperse the money accordingly.

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