The employees, as people, probably do want to provide good customer service!
There are other good points in this thread about PayPal's risk mitigation model. I think that this basically deepens the parallel to Google. When the service works, it's genuinely great - that's part of why they're such a dominant force. The problem is that when it breaks, generally it breaks in horrid ways. People like the HN crowd, who are strongly disposed towards trying to do new things that previous models may not account for, are the most likely to find cases where the system breaks, and to suffer the effects of the breakage.
There are other good points in this thread about PayPal's risk mitigation model. I think that this basically deepens the parallel to Google. When the service works, it's genuinely great - that's part of why they're such a dominant force. The problem is that when it breaks, generally it breaks in horrid ways. People like the HN crowd, who are strongly disposed towards trying to do new things that previous models may not account for, are the most likely to find cases where the system breaks, and to suffer the effects of the breakage.