"They are beginning to refuse to ship some Prime items to Hawaii."
I have in the past contacted customer support (via chat) and in some instances they have instructed me to place the order from another seller on Amazon that will ship to me and they refund the difference in price + shipping. About 3/4 the time the refund never materializes but they have always fixed it after a second contact. It's a PITA but I could tell the customer service reps were getting creative. In one instance they said because of a "policy violation" they had to attribute the refund to a different order. I don't care how we get from A to B so long as we get there.
There are some things they just won't ship to Hawaii under any circumstance because it's not worth the money they lose in shipping it. Some examples are greenhouses and certain server racks. For both commodities the work around was to order from "Amazon Warehouse Deals" which although part of Amazon is run like a separate company with different policies and I've rarely found an item they won't ship here (though they do frequently require a UPS capable address, no PO Boxes unless it's the post office street address). Warehouse deals are items that have been damaged, returned, or are very close to their expiration date and are usually priced quite attractively. Often times the description will say something like the exterior box is damaged but the product appears brand new. For the server rack, I couldn't find anything wrong with it. It had a minor scratch but it appeared to be from it's shipment to me. For the greenhouse it was obvious it was a return and it was because it was missing hardware required for it's assembly. I contacted customer service and they instructed me to buy the hardware locally and that they would reimburse me. I got the refund the same day. I had to email copy of receipt. We buy "warehouse deals" all the time for years and in the time I believe we have only received 3 items we had to ship back. One was a power strip that didn't work, another was supposed to be a livestock waterer but they sent the top to a grain feeder and the bottom of the waterer (two components of different products that don't go together, not even from same manufacturer). The other one was a chicken feeder that was leaking rusty parts through a hole in the box, I just taped up the hole and sent it back without bothering to inspect it.
Unrelated but relevant- I recently bought a "refurbished" desktop computer for about $150. A comparable new computer would have been about $500. From the other customer reviews I gathered that they were lease returns and part of the lease deal is that the original hard drives are destroyed so they put new or used hard drives in with a licensed copy of Windows 10 installed. The unit showed up looking brand new but running diagnostics I was able to determine the hard drive had about 6 years of use on it and the 16GB of RAM were from a company called "Sesame" (bland Chinese crap) I had never heard of. Also the RAM was installed in incorrect configuration (single channel instead of dual channel) meaning it was running slower than it was designed to. Too amateur a mistake for a computer refurbisher to do so I speculated that they did it on purpose. I reinstalled memory in correct configuration and after a few weeks one of the memory modules failed. The company that sold the computers was based in Canada and said their warranty was only valid in the 48 states (not stipulated anywhere in listing). I contacted Amazon customer service, it took a few times actually, because they were at first trying to get seller to make good on their warranty, and then they only wanted to replace the defective module. I had to get somebody in their "tech support" to agree/understand that you can't mix modules that way and that I would need two identical modules from the same manufacturer. Eventually they agreed to refund me $80, the cost of two name-brand Crucial memory modules. They didn't want either one of the Sesame modules sent back. As for the 6-year old hard drive, it was a legitimate component being that it was a refurbished system, but the computer was a replacement for my computer that died and I didn't want the hard drive anyway, I just wanted a new computer to put my old hard drive in. Fortunately with Windows 10 you can move a hard drive from any Windows 10 machine to another and it will boot up and run without any grief. Not like previous versions where you had to reinstall the OS from scratch and manually re-add everything from your old machine. I could have skipped the extra steps and just had a different computer shipped to me which is what Amazon originally wanted to do but I didn't want crap memory modules that only work long term when installed in wrong/slow configuration. Also the CPU in the machine I received was faster than the one advertised in the listing.
I have in the past contacted customer support (via chat) and in some instances they have instructed me to place the order from another seller on Amazon that will ship to me and they refund the difference in price + shipping. About 3/4 the time the refund never materializes but they have always fixed it after a second contact. It's a PITA but I could tell the customer service reps were getting creative. In one instance they said because of a "policy violation" they had to attribute the refund to a different order. I don't care how we get from A to B so long as we get there.
There are some things they just won't ship to Hawaii under any circumstance because it's not worth the money they lose in shipping it. Some examples are greenhouses and certain server racks. For both commodities the work around was to order from "Amazon Warehouse Deals" which although part of Amazon is run like a separate company with different policies and I've rarely found an item they won't ship here (though they do frequently require a UPS capable address, no PO Boxes unless it's the post office street address). Warehouse deals are items that have been damaged, returned, or are very close to their expiration date and are usually priced quite attractively. Often times the description will say something like the exterior box is damaged but the product appears brand new. For the server rack, I couldn't find anything wrong with it. It had a minor scratch but it appeared to be from it's shipment to me. For the greenhouse it was obvious it was a return and it was because it was missing hardware required for it's assembly. I contacted customer service and they instructed me to buy the hardware locally and that they would reimburse me. I got the refund the same day. I had to email copy of receipt. We buy "warehouse deals" all the time for years and in the time I believe we have only received 3 items we had to ship back. One was a power strip that didn't work, another was supposed to be a livestock waterer but they sent the top to a grain feeder and the bottom of the waterer (two components of different products that don't go together, not even from same manufacturer). The other one was a chicken feeder that was leaking rusty parts through a hole in the box, I just taped up the hole and sent it back without bothering to inspect it.
Unrelated but relevant- I recently bought a "refurbished" desktop computer for about $150. A comparable new computer would have been about $500. From the other customer reviews I gathered that they were lease returns and part of the lease deal is that the original hard drives are destroyed so they put new or used hard drives in with a licensed copy of Windows 10 installed. The unit showed up looking brand new but running diagnostics I was able to determine the hard drive had about 6 years of use on it and the 16GB of RAM were from a company called "Sesame" (bland Chinese crap) I had never heard of. Also the RAM was installed in incorrect configuration (single channel instead of dual channel) meaning it was running slower than it was designed to. Too amateur a mistake for a computer refurbisher to do so I speculated that they did it on purpose. I reinstalled memory in correct configuration and after a few weeks one of the memory modules failed. The company that sold the computers was based in Canada and said their warranty was only valid in the 48 states (not stipulated anywhere in listing). I contacted Amazon customer service, it took a few times actually, because they were at first trying to get seller to make good on their warranty, and then they only wanted to replace the defective module. I had to get somebody in their "tech support" to agree/understand that you can't mix modules that way and that I would need two identical modules from the same manufacturer. Eventually they agreed to refund me $80, the cost of two name-brand Crucial memory modules. They didn't want either one of the Sesame modules sent back. As for the 6-year old hard drive, it was a legitimate component being that it was a refurbished system, but the computer was a replacement for my computer that died and I didn't want the hard drive anyway, I just wanted a new computer to put my old hard drive in. Fortunately with Windows 10 you can move a hard drive from any Windows 10 machine to another and it will boot up and run without any grief. Not like previous versions where you had to reinstall the OS from scratch and manually re-add everything from your old machine. I could have skipped the extra steps and just had a different computer shipped to me which is what Amazon originally wanted to do but I didn't want crap memory modules that only work long term when installed in wrong/slow configuration. Also the CPU in the machine I received was faster than the one advertised in the listing.