In case you were hoping to see such a list, I want to make sure the first line tells you that you won’t find one in this post. Legal reasons. However, don’t fret; on the worst one, I’ll drop enough clues.

There was once an aspiring writer who sent his ms to a famous literary personage for comment. The cunning aspirant pasted a couple of his pages together, so that when he got his ms back (children, we used to create these things on typewriters, and copying was so expensive that we sent our originals out to publishers, accompanied by return postage since we did want them back once inevitably rejected), he could see if the personage had finished it. The pasted pages had not been separated, the personage panned the ms, and the aspirant wrote in to complain. “You don’t have to eat a whole egg to know if it’s rotten,” answered the literary personage.

On this philosophy I base a good deal of my life. If something is bad, it is not necessary to continue suffering with it. One ought to be shut of it without remorse. Be it a Facebook moron, a mediocre restaurant, or a crappy Amazon vendor, one may dismiss it. If one can, one probably should.

Amazon does not offer a feature to block or flag a bad seller. One can write a nasty review (and watch the bad seller get it removed), but might someday forget that seller’s name. In such a case, one might send that seller repeat business. We wouldn’t want to do that, would we?

What makes a bad seller? From my standpoint, it’s poor handling when something goes awry. I have learned that there is almost a small industry that rips sellers off: it requests returns and refunds for items where the shipping cost is rather expensive, and it becomes cheaper for the seller to refund the money and not ask for the item back. Disgusting that anyone would do business that way, but this is humanity, and in humanity, if there is a way to do something dishonestly, it will be discovered within seconds of the honest method’s invention.

What it means is that many sellers start out with chips on shoulders. They come to assume that anyone with an issue is angling for something free. Some have procedures they demand be followed, which may or may not be reasonable. They all know that you have them over a barrel, if you want to roll out said barrel, but they try to steer you away from that.

I decided not to make the same mistakes twice (although an infuriating one, noticed this very day, somehow got past me), so I created an Amazon blacklist. It’s a Word table listing the vendor’s name and why I placed them on a no-buy list. Since I try hard to shop with independent vendors rather than accept a 2¢ discount to get it from Amazon’s undercut pricing (yeah, they do that), I’m not the kind of customer the indies should mess with. Yet a few do, and they end up on my blacklist.

In one case, I learned that a whole bunch of idealistic-sounding book vendors were in fact branches of one larger book vendor. It took me some time to find and blacklist them all. Not only have they been jackasses both times something went wrong with an order, but they have the maddening habit of using barcode stickers on the exterior spine. These are usually very difficult to remove without damaging the dust jacket spine or actual spine. Their labels are so fiercely adhesive and persistent that it can take an hour’s soak with Googone to loosen them, and because they are on the spine, that is harder than it would otherwise be. All dozen-odd of their locations are blacklisted. I see them very often when book shopping, and I get a little bit of joy every time I cheerfully pay someone else fifty cents more.

Until Amazon comes up with a blacklisting system for us, I guess it’ll have to do.