That's Amazon Seller customer service. You sell a product with a 5x markup, so when your crap build quality and nonexistent QA end up shipping bricked devices or they die prematurely, you replace it for free no questions asked. People are so surprised by it that they leave glowing reviews, and that sells more product.
You must not be from a former communist country. The system worked for two-three decades during the initial industrialization phase. When that phase ended growth was hard to find (the whole system was based around factories and moving villagers to cities). That's when the numbers started going down and the system started faking numbers to give the appearance that all is well and nobody could disagree with them.
At a country level (not talking about Amazon) these systems are fragile and don't handle volatility well.
Re: Amazon - you can't compare countries with private corporations.
Amazon has competitors, a central government do not. If the central planning fails to deliver a product then there is nobody there to deliver the product, if that product was food then people starve. This lack of competition is both bad for robustness as I described, and bad for efficiency since it means that people has to get their goods from the government and can't choose to get it somewhere else, so there is no selective pressure to keep the government deliver goods people want. You could say that other countries pressured them via war, but the people couldn't choose to buy American, the competition happened at a way too high level to matter.
Or rather, ultimately the people made their choice, central planning was scrapped and people could but American goods. So in a way the competition helped, people ultimately picked the superior option and the inferior option went under. But it took a very long time for that to happen, capitalism is way faster.
The control group could use a different set of lifestyle changes. Changing something always has an effect. You need to somehow figure out whether the changes you propose are better than just doing anything.
"Such theoretical shifts set the stage, for Berlin, for the ideologies of the totalitarian movements of the twentieth century, both Communist and Fascist–Nazi, which claimed to liberate people by subjecting – and often sacrificing – them to larger groups or principles. To do this was the greatest of political evils; and to do it in the name of freedom, a political principle that Berlin, as a genuine liberal, especially cherished, struck him as a ‘strange […] reversal’ or ‘monstrous impersonation’ (2002b, 198, 180). Against this, Berlin championed, as ‘truer and more humane’, negative liberty and an empirical view of the self."
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/berlin/
The idea of positive liberty is that you are free to become the best man you can be, but there is someone or a group who defines what 'best' is. And that inevitably ends in dictatorships or similar types of abuse.
One of them broke, and there was a button in the app to report it. I kid you not, a replacement arrived the second day, free of charge.