An Amazon delivery driver took a Washington family’s cat and drove away with her on July 21.
Since then, Amazon has admitted its driver has the cat, but has offered little more than carefully-worded customer service responses mixed with boilerplate language about valuing the family’s business and feedback.
Ray and Karin Ishak have video of the driver petting and playing with 13-year-old Feefee in the family’s driveway during the delivery. The motion-activated camera timed out, according to a report by Seattle ABC affiliate KING5-TV, but when the camera began recording again, triggered by the driver pulling away, Feefee was gone.
“The driver [was] driving away and there’s not a cat in sight. It’s pretty obvious the cat disappeared in those seconds,” Ray Ishak told the station, adding he filed a report with the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office.
Amazon has chosen to deal with the incident via email, as if it’s a dispute over a returned item rather than a living being who is valued as a family member by her people.
A company customer service representative told the Ishaks that the driver said she contacted the police to return Feefee, but the family called the sheriff’s office and the police in Everett, Washington, where they live, and both agencies told them they hadn’t heard from the driver or from Amazon.
The Ishaks asked Amazon if the company could at least tell them the town or city where the driver lives, figuring the driver may have contacted police there instead of the departments that have jurisdiction over their hometown. Amazon declined to provide that information.
When the Ishaks followed up with Amazon again, a customer service representative said she’d be happy to help — if the police approach Amazon. She provided an email address for law enforcement use only, said Amazon will cooperate if the police contact them, and ended the reply with a request to “vote about your experience today.”
This is an awful response by Amazon, and the company deserves any bad PR it gets as a result. The very first thing the company should have done was escalate the ticket to a manager empowered to take care of the case directly, and that manager should have picked up the phone, called the family and promised to get their cat back immediately.
If the company doesn’t have anyone in its customer care hierarchy who understands why it’s important to make that kind of judgment call, then it’s done a poor job of hiring and training its employees.
Alternately, Amazon’s known for keeping its employees on an extremely short leash — the company is notorious for watching its employees via cameras, has been fined tens of millions of dollars for “excessive surveillance” of its own workers, has forced employees to “justify” things like bathroom breaks, and operates on founder Jeff Bezos’ belief that employees are “inherently lazy” — so if the email-only response was due to strict company policy, that’s another negative that can be chalked up to a toxic corporate culture.
Treating this like a routine complaint only exacerbated the Ishak family’s stress and uncertainty regarding the fate of their beloved cat. Putting the onus on the family and the police to sort out of the problem makes things worse, and you’d think any halfway competent customer service rep would skip the “rate your service” pitch, at least until after the problem is solved and Feefee is back with her family.
It doesn’t matter how massive and successful the company is, there has to be a better way to handle issues like this without requiring even the police to approach Amazon like customers dialing a service line, or supplicants petitioning a king to turn his gaze toward a situation that normally falls beneath his notice. There’s also no recognition of the impact on Feefee, who is almost certainly confused and stressed at being separated from the only home and family she’s known for her entire life.
Lastly, Amazon missed an opportunity to respond with compassion and earn the gratitude of a family whose members are obviously very concerned about their cat. A PR win like that is worth a thousand commercials, and can earn enormous good will with customers. Instead, people will hear about how the company treats a problem like this as if a customer is returning a shirt that’s too small.
As for the Ishak family, they say they’re giving the driver the benefit of the doubt. Maybe she thought Feefee was a stray. But, as Ray Isha told KING5, it’s been made abundantly clear that Feefee is a beloved member of the family, and she needs to be returned.
“Maybe you did this out of the kindness of your heart,” Ray Ishak said. “I appreciate it, but bring me my cat back.”
Top image of Feefee as a kitten with one of Ray Ishak’s grandchildren courtesy of Ray Ishak, via KING5.
Pain In The Bud 
Shocking in all honesty. The perpetrator has immeasuable rights compared to the victim(s) and the real victim has no rights at all. Whilst I am no great supporter of vigilante justice its not difficult to understand that when the law becomes a wall of “rights” and bureaucracy to hide behind rather than an agreed rule for us all to live by with defined consequences and a clear simple process to go through that actually works for the victim then we have no laws, only resentment and anger. This is true in the UK as well. Amazon – Bring FeeFee home NOW
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Shocking!! And i do not use Amazon. They think it is ok to sell books by KKK members. Several reasons NOT to use Amazon.
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This is outrageous. Get a lawyer and take Bezos to the cleaners. And get your cat back. Also, hire someone to beat the shit out of the thief.
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Amazon is an awful greedy company anyway. To not assist in returning this beloved family member is deplorable!
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I can’t think of anything more heart-breaking that somebody stealing a well-loved cat.
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Indeed, for the cat and the family. Poor Feefee is probably freaked out and has no idea what’s happening. I know Bud would lose his $#!& if someone took him from me.
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I guess that is a good thing that Buddy would bite and scratch. When my cat escaped to garden by accident he bit and scratched when i picked him up. He dropped to the ground. I waited 8 hours until he was hungry and he pranced right in the house like nothing happened. I was sitting outside in the freezing cold like an imbecile most of the time.
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Buddy would bite and scratch a stranger who tried to pick him up, for sure.
Although he was a very good boy this weekend when my nieces were here for three days. I’m proud of him. He not only tolerated them, he played with them a bit. I gave my nieces catnip to give to him and taught them how to manipulate the wand toys like prey, and they loved seeing Buddy respond and having interactive play time with him.
As for your cat, that’s exactly what a cat would do. They pretend like nothing happened, the little gaslighters!
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Prayers go out to the family and the cat. May Feefee be reunited with them post haste. (Just another reason why it’s safer to keep your cat indoors – like we do.)
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I have been boycotting Amazon forever. My reasons are:
They have stated that their goal is to shut down mom and pop, brick-and-mortar stores.
Jeff Bezos is obscenely wealthy.
They treat their employees like shit.
Apparently they treat their customers like shit as well.
If you read the book Fulfillment, you will learn how Amazon destroys any city where it locates, and contributes to the local homeless population.
Jeff Bezos organized the businesses in Seattle to resist a 1-2% tax to help with the homeless problem in Seattle, which has the third highest homeless population in the US.
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These are all good reasons, especially the fact that Amazon, like Walmart, has destroyed American retail to the point where entire categories of jobs are gone and you literally cannot get certain things locally because the stores no longer exist.
Most of the stuff on Amazon is low quality junk manufactured in China and sold by Chinese companies that use shady methods to inflate review scores. Years ago I got a note in a box (can’t remember what I bought) saying I’d get a free something or other for a 5-star review, and I’ve heard from people who were threatened for leaving negative reviews on items. Bezos just doesn’t care, as long as he makes his money.
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I WOULD SUE AMAZON IF I WERE THIS FAMILY!!
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Outrageous response by Amazon. Cats are indeed safer indoors, but many owned cats are indoor/outdoor. Those who can’t tell if a friendly cat is stray, outdoor, or two-timing (they excel at that) should ASK the locals.
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Great point. Especially if the cat is on someone’s porch or in their driveway.
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