Two Amazon support staff members have managed to annoy thousands of Scottish people at once after a screengrab of a frustrating conversation between them and a Prime Video customer was shared to online.
The customer – who goes by @janthemanwlj – explained that they were chatting to an Amazon support representitive online in an attempt to solve an issue they were having. They couldn’t watch Prime Video through the Amazon Household service, which allows people to share their Amazon benefits with up to six members.
When asked what country they live in, the customer replied: “Scotland, UK.” The rep then said that: “Household is not eligible for Scotland customers.” This is despite the fact that Amazon’s website says Household is available in all of the United Kingdom.
The rep then tripled the potential offence they were causing, by going on to say: “In other parts of the UK like Scotland, Ireland and Wales, Household is not included.”
The saga then continued as a supervisor joined the chat, only to also tell the customer: “I see you are currently in Scotland. In order to share the Prime Video benefit you are required to be physically located in UK,” to which the aggravated customer replied: “A simple Wikipedia article can tell you that Scotland is a key part of the UK.”
They added: “It’s like saying Texas is not in the USA.”
It appears that nothing ended up being resolved, so the disgruntled Prime Video fan uploaded screenshots of the entire conversation to Reddit, where it got nearly 6000 upvotes and over 800 furious comments.
Quite a few people joked that maybe they missed the news that Scotland has become an independent country, with one person writing: “Think your web chat is being directed through a wormhole to a parallel universe where something else happened in 2014.”
Someone else claimed Amazon had made similar mistakes before, saying: “During the pandemic, one of their customers in NI complained on Twitter that they couldn’t get the rugby, and Amazon replied that they only had the rights for the UK and not other countries. As you can imagine, the internet took it calmly and rationally.”
Others said they’d faced similar problems when ordering things online: “Try living in the Highlands and being frequently told that you’re not part of mainland UK. Sorry, I didn’t realise Inverness was a f**king island.”
An unfortunate sofa buyer from Edinburgh also shared their pain, saying: “I had this issue with a sofa company that told me Edinburgh wasn’t in mainland UK, was absolutely raging.”
Someone else compared the problem to a similar one – trying to use Scottish banknotes in England: “This makes me feel like you need a big burly Scotsman to appear on the chat shouting “that’s f***ing legal tender pal, get it sorted pronto!”
Some people got quite philosophical about it all: “Where do they understand Scotland to be, if not within the United Kingdom, and which kingdoms do they believe have been ‘united’ to form the aforementioned ‘United Kingdom?'”
The person replying channeled the confused Amazon customer service reps, and said: “The countries of Kingdom and United, and England of course.”
A day or so later, @janthemanwlj replied in the thread, thanking everyone for their replies, but saying they still can’t watch Prime Video – specifically, excellent medical drama House starring Hugh Laurie – and that they’ve posted on Twitter/X about the problem too.
“Regarding the issue, I still can’t watch House… I spoke to someone on the phone again, not mentioning anything regional except UK, but they couldn’t help me except the same troubleshooting script the previous ones gave me. I’ll look into escalating in some way if Twitter/X doesn’t help.
“Might do it anyway because of the not being fully in UK statements Ireland thingy honestly they should provide at least some basic knowledge training to support staff.”
A spokesperson for Amazon commented: “I can confirm this was an error and Amazon Household is available across the UK including Scotland.”
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