Yes, I often reflect on this "Amazon effect" on this little shadow industry. Amazon has a seemingly great CRM system but it is automated and standardized, and they are not shipping illegal goods across difficult customs barriers from out of a country with very strict penalties for counterfeiting. Plus, does Amazon issue QC photos and selectively pick the best quality goods from their bins? I would have liked that level of service when Amazon shipped my last Vitamix--thing broke within a day. What people seem to be expecting more and more from TDs is Amazon-level speed in execution of orders, faultless product, and continual human communication before, during and after purchase, with assistance in tracking, customs clearance, and also after-sale perks, ie. the total service package for the paying (and highly detail-oriented) "customer is king." That is alot more than even Amazon provides, even if you pay extra for Prime. If you are combining highly stressful, concentrated, detailed work on watches alongside receiving and sending packages of goods, you can pretty much expect to see the time you have for actual watch work eaten up progressively by continual visits to logistics offices, customs offices, postal offices, and answering countless PMs about package status, alongside the continual impatient PMs which basically say "Is it finished yet?"
I do not want to make people feel bad for rejecting QC photos: if a TD will put up with it , you can reject QC photos. Just means probably the defective watch will be shown and maybe accepted by another customer. This is the reason more defects show up late in batches. If you abuse this right to reject QC photos, a TD will eventually refund your money and tell you to go elsewhere. Their margins do not justify the time investment in picky customers. TD margins are not as large as you think: for the most part, the higher quality watches that are sold by TDs are not even available at most backstreet or mall rep markets, which are much lower quality. No doubt, little mistakes in assembly are irritating, but it is par for the course: the Chinese rep factories will never have rigorous QC systems, let alone anything resembling CRM. The TDs try to make up for these missing factory services, but you have to wonder, more and more, if the factories are even providing anything like TDRM (trusted dealer relationship management) today.
The defects shown in this thread (misaligned marker or logo) are very common for this particular model (AP RO), and, if you reject this model watch on this basis, you will probably reject quite a few of them, especially if you start drawing lines on the photos to check alignment like some do. This painstaking QC photo checking might not even be worth it as some of these photos TDs send have surface distortions in them which exaggerate or even create alignment problems in the representation of the watch. Many times the "problem" will not even be a "problem" once the watch is received, or can be easily corrected by a modder, as the case is here. Whatever the case, I think most people can agree: checking other people's QC photos for little micro faults is not why we come here to RWI. I know there might be people who find checking other people's QC photos fun or instructive, but the currently allowed practice of posting QC photos on this website and asking for help based on the suspicion of one micro fault has to be reviewed. You will have some who say "reject!" some who say "accept!" and some who say "accept but send it to a modder," that is about it: the level of public discourse will remain pretty much at a somewhat binary and uninteresting level, which, in the end, despite the working out of the conflicts between opposite parties, makes website content unattractive. Unless, of course, providing QC assistance to buyers is part of RWI's mandate, in which case, OK, but maybe set up a separate section for it, and assign somebody who likes doing these QC checks to help these buyers as a moderator. Call that lucky person "QC assistance moderator" or something.