I’m Breaking Up With Amazon.com!

Our relationship was short-lived, but rocky, and as soon as I can get my stuff from his warehouse, I’m outta there forever. The creep!

Having never ordered much from Amazon, I blithely drifted there one sleepy late May afternoon thinking that if so many people shop there, it must be good. (Fallacy #1) The prices looked OK, and they had all the stuff I wanted, and for Super Saver Shipping, I thought I could wait until July for a couple of things. (Fallacy #1.5 - I didn’t want to wait until July. Now, if things had actually come in July, I might have been reasonably happy.)

After my first order for 3 CDs, I placed a 2nd for a travel guidebook. The guidebook shipped right away, but never arrived. Lost in the mail or somesuch nonsense. Not good for a guidebook one needs BEFORE a trip. They sent another, but, y’know, it was late.

By mid-July I emailed to find out where those CDs to be delivered the week before were. Customer Service gave me a response equivalent to “Oops.” (Fallacy #2 - That Amazon might actually care about customer service.)

By late July, one of the CDs trickled out of the Amazon bunker and to my home. Today I was elated that another trickled my way (#2 of 3)–Matt Wilson’s Burnt, White and Blue. I ripped open the package to have HOBEX’ Back in the ‘90s fall in my lap. Not knowing a darn thing about these boys and really wanting to hear Matt, I wandered to their web site and learned they’re “a band of veteran North Carolina rockers melding classic funk'n'soul music with rock'n'roll.” Uh huh. Not the dulcet tones of Matt singing Sun is Coming.

Amazon’s web site has a time-consuming little option for sending them a message and finding a printer and stuffing the rogue CD back in the box and taping and cutting and noodling all their garbage onto and into the box. At this point, I should be invoicing them for the customer service time I’ve spent servicing my own orders. (Bad customer service = negative impact on an individual’s (MY) time.)

Now with 2 outstanding CDs and 3 outstanding books (Crafty Chica's Art de la Soul: Glittery Ideas to Liven Up Your Life; Slanky (poems by Mike Doughty); and So You Wanna Be a Rock & Roll Star: How I Machine-Gunned a Roomful Of Record Executives and Other True Tales from a Drummer's Life (by Jacob Slichter - a wonderful rollercoaster of Semisonic fame which I’ve already read), I’m asking, “IS ANYONE MINDING THE STORE?”

Update: Amazon corrected the error...by sending me ANOTHER COPY OF HOBEX BACK IN THE 90s! So after listening to "Thank you for calling. We'll be with you shortly." and "Your call is very important to us. We'll be with you shortly." EIGHT TIMES EACH, the representative said, "We'll need time to get this fixed. You can order it again in a week or two. Yeah, right, like I'm going to place an order from late May again. (Yep, breaking up was the right thing to do.)