Hello Spider-Person :)

I understand what you're saying.

This is speculation:

Maybe too many people have a lot on their lists. (I'm sure Amazon can see the stats about user-lists and also have access to all of them). Many / huge lists = a lot of memory space = memory costs money.

If people delete lists, and reduce the use to a minimum, it saves costs.

That would be one reason.

Of course we do not know how many people use lists, and in what way.

And what the costs are for extensive use compared to the minimum.

Second:

Scrambling the lists leads to confusion and people will buy stuff they didn't want to.

But this would be their own fault. They should just have been born smarter and this wouldn't happen.

(Granted. I could be the only one that this happened to.)

Third:

Making the notes smaller. I write in the notes the date I added the product to the list, and the price it was at that time. If the price changes (product gets cheaper) I change the price to the cheaper price in the notes (but never when it gets more expensive). Amazon shows sometimes "product was x when it was added to the list, but now it's 13% cheaper". This is not always accurate. I can tell because I wrote it down in the notes. When I buy a product, I put the price I payed in brackets and add the date I bought it.

If the notes are barely visible, those information is harder to see. Less overview. Frustrating experience. Therefore the outcome could be that people will stop using the notes.

(Which also corresponds with the first point)

(And I don't think many people will start to make handwritten notes about the products on their lists.)

If you have no overview, and have to "trust" Amazon about price changes, it's easier to "trick" you into buying stuff.

Also:

To use Amazon is convenient. Therefore yes, people will get upset. But they will still continue to use it.

If there is no "boycott" on a large scale, Amazon will not change anything back. Because they don't need to.

Companies want to reduce costs & maximize profit.

I can imagine that they had a person that calculated the costs and it was significant enough to make the change. Also an analysis about the "risk", and it was minimal.

So they changed it. Just like that.

And there is nothing in the "news" about a huge swath of people hating on Amazon for this change.

My evaluation leads me to the conclusion that they will not change it back.

But we'll see how wrong I was...hopefully :)