Bitchy McBitcherson's Blog

Category: shopping

  • Ways to thrill a first time customer – Not

    I placed a first time order with a company (a fairly high end company at that) for a total of 26 items. Today it arrived. The ‘quantity shipped’ on my packing slip shows all of the items listed and marked as shipped, nothing is marked on back order.

    How many items are missing?

    7

    That is a lot. That happens to be more than a quarter of them. How much did that bother me? So much that I called. I actually called. I hate to call. I don’t want to talk to somebody on the phone. I would much rather handle such things by email, but I wanted rapid assurances that this was going to be fixed, as well as an explaination of how such an error could be made.

    Their customer service number is only available until 5:30 PM Eastern time. I was unable to reach them. I’ve sent an email. Let’s see if how rapidly they respond.

  • Useful Things

    MSN displays local gas prices. They are not the only site that does it, but I do find the ones that get updates from the gas stations to be more reliable than the user reported sites. Unfortunately they do not cover the membership gas stations (like Costco, at least not in my area). I still find them very useful.

    When it comes to shopping, I prefer to shop online. When you go to shop at a store, there are people there. I don’t like that. There are people online too, but they interfere with my shopping somewhat less. I am also cheap. Therefore I like things which make it easier to get what I want for less. Froogle is some help there.

    I use fatwallet to look for deals and coupons and to get rebates.

    I also shop at bookcloseouts. It is like browsing through the bargain tables in a bookstore, but with a much better search feature.

    DVDpricesearch was a big favorite because the shopping cart features allow me to figure out the best place overall to get things, and also keep track of things I want to purchase when they finally get cheap enough. I don’t use them as much anymore because I was able to get a bit of a handle on my DVD purchasing addicition by using Netflix. They let me take coupons into account too. gamepricezone by the same guy is also useful, but now we almost always just “keep it” from gamefly, which tends to be cheaper. Gamefly is terrific, it lets us play a lot more games while spending a lot less on games that turn out to not be enjoyable to us.

    Of course ebay is good for locating deals or unusual things online. I like using jbidwatcher. Unfortunately due to some assholes he might quite working on the project. I’ve donated to him in the past.

  • reply from Costco

    Thank you for your email to Costco Wholesale.

    Legacy items are PRE-new policy. Members who purchased prior to the new policy are grandfathered in, so the new limits do not affect them. The revised policy only applies to purchases after the policy change date.

    Thank you,

    Costco Wholesale Corporation

  • Costco’s New Return Policy

    We guarantee your satisfaction on every product we sell, with a full refund. Exceptions: Televisions, computers, cameras, camcorders, iPOD / MP3 players and cellular phones must be returned within 90 days of purchase for a refund.

    Now, I did not use Costco’s return policy as a way to get free upgrades. However the policy was part of the reason I shopped at Costco. It was not about cheap prices. The prices were decent, but usually I could find things for cheaper elsewhere. I spent the extra amount at Costco because it was like buying an extended warranty. I have returned a few expensive items because they quit working in an amount of time that was not acceptable for an item of that price point. I’ve also just tossed out cheap items which quit working. I have also bought plenty of things on impulse because “I can always return them if I change my mind.” Most of those never found their way back either, even if the box was never opened. Obviously their policy quit working for them, and I am aware of many people who routinely abused it. It is no doubt easier overall for them to change it across the board than to limit certain customers (although since they keep track of all purchases by account they could easily see who the abusers are.

    Anyhow since I have often been known for pimping Costco, I thought I’d point out the change. I’ve sent them an email to verify that purchases under the old policy would still be honored under that return policy. It is why we just spent more to purchase an MP3 player at Costco than we could have gotten it for at Amazon.

  • I have an idea.

    When I order something from you online, do not sign me up to receive your dumbass paper catalog. I do not want your catalog. I will not shop from your catalog. It is going to clutter up my mailbox, my house, and my recycling bin. It will aggravate me.

    I shop online. I proved to you that I shop online by placing an order online. That is where you got it into your fool head that I was interested in your products. I found you online. I found the product online. I purchased from you online. I gave you my address so you could send me what I wanted, not so that you could harass me forever with pounds of paper. Yes the catalog has instructions on how to stop the mailings. That takes up my time and effort. I need that for other things. I do not want to jump through hoops to cancel your catalog, only to have you sign me up again if I am stupid enough to ever buy something from you again online.

    Guess what? I know how to request your catalog should I want a catalog for some reason.

    Stop the waste. It wastes your money, paying for the catalog, paying to ship the catalog… Who pays for all that bullshit in the end? That would be your customers, assuming you know anything about business, which is somewhat questionable to me since you are making the mistake of targeting me as a catalog customer. I do not want to pay extra for your crappy items because you don’t know how to spend your advertising dollars correctly. If you piss your advertising dollars away, next thing you know you need to throw more money into that budget and you raise your prices. Also a good way to keep me from buying. Plus, paper is a resource. It does not appear by magic. It does not simply vanish the second I do not want it.

    You want to drive me really crazy? Send me things that look like catalogs, when you don’t even do mail and phone orders. (What is with Amazon sending me multipage advertisements of the crap they only sell online? Do they think I might forget how to type a m a z o n . c o m if they don’t send it to me? They would be wrong.)

    I have too much to do already, I do not want to be dealing with a mountain of your catalogs that will do me no good ever. They are printed on glossy paper, so they aren’t even good for absorbing pet piss and shit.

  • Aggravation, mental wiitardation, aggravation, a game we used to play

    I do my best to avoid going into any store that isn’t a grocery store from Thanksgiving until mid-January. Holiday crowds and holiday shopping irritate the shit out of me.

    When Nintendo announced the Revolution, I wanted one. When they announced that the official name would be Wii, I still wanted one, although I was not impressed by the name. The thing is, I wanted the console. I wanted Zelda. I wanted to rent other Wii games to play. What I really wanted was to preorder the fucking thing online from a retailer I actually have heard of, when it was convenient for me, and I was at the computer. Then I wanted that retailer to ship it to me as soon as possible, in a fair fashion based on when the order was made. If it got was sent out on launch day, great. If they fairly were not able to provide my order until January, fine. I just wanted it ordered and taken care of.

    Instead, even to get a preorder, one needed to wait in line, or hope to get it during the hour a place might accept preorders online. In many cases one was expected to preorder in offensive ways, “You have to agree to buy a bundle, but we don’t know what the bundle will consist of.” So preorders came and went and went and went, and I had no preorder.

    Now, if it were just me, I would be done. Whatfuckingever. My husband really really really wanted one. Being in the video game business, one would fantasize that it would be easier to get new consoles, and in some cases it is, but the timing of his recent job change kept him from getting one from his old company, and it was too late to arrange to get one through the new company. He really wanted a Wii, and I really like to provide him what he wants.

    Now, we might not see eye to eye on the exact point of when we get so annoyed with the whole purchasing process that it is time to simply say fuck it and wait until they are available everywhere easily, much less when to get so irritated that we wait until the fucking things can be found on clearance. However, we at least agree that we should not need to buy bundles that include shit that we don’t want. We should not have to wait out overnight, and we sure as fucking hell should not pay over retail.

    The night prior to launch found me, disturbingly, teaching my daughter how to purchase something online so that she could man Amazon.com at midnight while we went out to a 24 hour Walmart. No joy. Launch morning saw me hitting Target, TRU, Best Buy and Circuit City as well as continuing to try to order from Amazon and trying to get a Costco.com order. Nothing anywhere except an increasingly pissed off me.

    Now if everybody was buying one for themselves, it would be one thing, but the whole purchasing them to make a profit on ebay, while taking them away from people that just want to play, gets on my fucking nerves. I am even further fucking irritated by the dumbfuck parents who are so worried about putting what their spoiled brat wants under the tree for the dumbass holiday, that they will pay above retail on ebay. Not only do they encourage the asshole ebay hoarding behavior, but they just add to the fuckedupedness of their kids. This wouldn’t be so bad if they would just keep the kids in their basement forever, but they insist on letting them out of the house.

    So a couple of weeks have been spent, checking online multiple times a day, stopping by stores, making phone calls, and with each bit of effort expended my interest in the Wii has further waned. It is not a unique piece of artwork, or even a limited edition print. It is a consumer electronics item. I don’t like Nintendo fucking around with availability and I dislike the retailers fucking around with it even more. Get a shipment in and put it on sale, don’t hold it over for a certain date so you can create buzz and lines. Nothing like launching a product and quickly leading me to dislike all the companies involved within a short amount of time. Impressive.

    The online reports told me to once again expect limited quantities available this morning, so once again we woke up early and headed out into the foul holiday shopping world. The first store at 10 minutes before opening, the line outside was too long to even bother stopping. The second we drove past wasn’t opening for 2 hours and we were not going to wait that long. The third place we got to 15 minutes after opening, so we parked and went inside to see what was up. In the electronics department there was a line. They had 33 units and had handed out 33 tickets. We decided to lurk. A couple had 2 tickets but one of them had to leave for work and it was taking them forbloodyever to check people out, so the man had to bail and gave me his ticket. Another couple had seen the line and hopped in, they had no idea what for. When they finally got close enough that they saw what it was for, they didn’t want it. They gave one ticket to a lady who was there with her boyfriend. The other they gave to our friend. Our third friend did not luck out. We waited through all 33 sales in case somebody had a bad credit card situation.

    So now we have a Wii. My husband is happy. My daughter is happy. I am relieved to be done looking, but I am not happy. I am still irritated.

    On the PS3 he is just going to have to wait. I don’t want to set foot in a store until after the holidays are over.