It’s in the post …

Apr 2

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You have a good friend who’s retiring.  You think we all owe him something, so you help organise a presentation.  You get a nice card, get mutual friends to sign and to contribute to a present.  You discuss a few ideas with your co-conspirators, and decide that an e-book reader will be appreciated, and matches the money collected.

I ordered a Kindle from Amazon last Saturday.  Because the presentation was due on Thursday evening, I didn’t take free delivery, but paid a fiver extra for the fastest possible delivery, which the ordering system told me I could be sure of receiving by Wednesday.

On Monday I get email telling me it’s been dispatched and I can expect delivery on Tuesday.  Great.

I stay in all day Tuesday.  Nothing arrives.

Ditto Wednesday.  By this time I’m getting concerned, and I contact Amazon using their online chat facility to complain: if delivery time wasn’t important, I’d’ve gone for free delivery.  They stonewalled my complaint: nothing they could do before April 6th, a full week after the ordering system had promised.  I complained that we can’t just move our friend’s retirement, and I had paid good money for better than this, but no joy.

Thursday, still no delivery.  We ended up having to present him the card (a lovely card which my co-conspirator had commissioned from a local artist) but apologise lamely that the present was in the post.  Aaargh!

When the package from Amazon finally arrived early on Friday morning, I was sorely tempted to send it right back.  Bah, Humbug.

Just to cap it all, today I got spam from Amazon.  At least I’d taken the precaution (as I generally do when I give my address to anyone commercial) of giving them a unique amazon@[my.domain] email address, so deleting it was clean and easy.

Posted on April 2, 2011, in amazon. Bookmark the permalink. 1 Comment.

  1. vet | April 4, 2011 at 1:20 am

    Been looking at Amazon’s website. It’s noticeable that there is *no* option that actually “guarantees” delivery.

    You can pay nine quid for something called “express delivery”, which “guarantees” to deliver the following day (provided a whole list of conditions are met, which is unknowable until you finalise your order) – but if they don’t deliver on time, your only recompense is that you get your nine quid back. That’s not much of a “guarantee”.

    Amazon customer service used to be pretty good, but everything I see suggests it’s going downhill faster than the Grand Old Duke of York’s segway.

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