Tyler (Everything)

Good Day, Amazon.com

Last afternoon I felt sick -still do. I went home early, if you consider 4:30pm early, and was disappointed that my Amazon.com order hadn't arrived. After about 20 minutes of watching the X-Games big air comp, the door bell goes.

What arrives? My new coaching boots:

As well my Amazon.com order arrived (the same day that BHD became available from the BestBuy warehouse -I definitely won that battle). So I spent last night watching The Rock on Blu-Ray. I must say, the transfer looked better than I expected from a 17 year old movie. As well as I had said earlier Amazon.com does ship from within Canada -c/o DHL-  so it will never be susceptible for taxes/duties, assuming that you are ordering DVDs or Books. I think Amazon.com will be my new shipper of choice.

I'm still feeling kinda sick, so I'm not sure I will make it through the day.

The Last Angry BestBuy.ca Shopper

I'm like that wife on Jerry Springer... I keep getting the crap kicked out of me and I keep coming back!

BestBuy (bricks and mortar and dotCa) have terrible service. There is no denying it. Quite possibly the worst service I have ever encountered, especially when you consider the general price of the items. As bad as the customer service is at the store it is even worse online.

This is the latest situation. Two weeks ago BestBuy -both in store and online- had Black Hawk Down on Blu-Ray -my favourite movie- on sale for $19.99. Of course as the -somewhat- proud owner of a now victorious Blu-Ray player, I went out to get it. Hmmm... Sold out. No problem, I went home to check the remaining stock in other stores. Sold out at both the Kanata store and Ottawa East store. After checking around it was sold out at every store.

No problem, I will order it online and just mark it for store pick-up, to get the price. No dice, for store pick-up it must be in stock. No problem, I will just have it delivered, surely like Amazon.ca it must be free. Nope. $2.98. No problem, that isn't a huge amount to pay. So I ordered it as well as T-2 on Blu-Ray.

So last week I go to check the order, T-2 is in stock, but BHD is still not. I check the website, Kanata has it in stock, the other stores do not. No problem, I wait patiently.

This week I check, all stores have it in stock, online shopping still marked as not in stock. Hmmm... not only that but the price has increased to $28.99. I start to check other stores in Ontario and other provinces. They all have it in stock!

I start to get angry, as only someone as anal retentive as myself can. I email customer service. They respond:

Currently, Black Hawk Down (Bilingual) (2001) (Blu-ray) is on special order at our central warehouse. As our store inventory is separate from the inventory at our web store, sometimes a product may be in stock in your local Best Buy Canada retail store, and out of stock on our web store, or vice versa. We understand your frustration, and apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you.

This doesn't sound right to me, so I ask about converting the order to a store pick-up, since its now in stock. The response:

Once an order is placed for shipment, it cannot be changed to in-store pickup. For an in-store pickup, the product must be in-stock and available in the retail store at the time the order was placed. If you place an in-store pickup order now for this product, it will not be for the sale price. We do not match prices on any past sales, however, the price on your online order number 7073635 will remain at the discounted price when it ships.

I get ever more angry. I question whether it will ship, and point out that I have had other bad experiences, including waiting 3 months for a DVD to ship. I mention that I believe that they are holding up the online orders in hopes that customers who purchased the item at the lower price would get frustrated and cancel their orders. This is not what I believe, but I figured it was the best way to get someone with more authority into the situation.

Cory is replaced with Kris:

We apologize for any inconvenience that you may have experienced and we thank you for your e-mail.

The item in question, Black Hawk Down on Blu-ray DVD, is currently Out of Stock. We are awaiting a shipment of this item from the manufacturer, once we've received this shipment your item will be shipped.

Delivery is subject to warehouse availability. Out of stock items will be shipped as soon as possible, upon arrival from the manufacturer/publisher. Please take shipping time into consideration.

For more information please view the following:

http://www.bestbuy.ca/helpsection/EN/online_policies.asp?onlinepoliciesID=1&logon=&langid=EN#delivery

At this point I angrily point out that I am taking availability into account. The exact item is available at every single store in Canada and it should not be a problem to either have one shipped to me, or made available for me to pick it up. I suspect that they can not accommodate this as the online store is operated separately from the bricks and mortar locations. Regardless the fact that their ordering service would let things get into such a situation is simply appalling. I will keep pursuing this to see if I can get something out of the situation. Regardless, I would sincerely advise against shopping at BestBuy.ca

Enjoying Others’ Stupidity

One of my guilty pleasures is to go to Amazon.com and start browsing movies or books that I have really enjoyed. Then I got to the 1/5 star reviews and read people shitting all over them. It is quite entertaining to see what some moron who thought that Independence Day was the best movie ever made thought of A History of Violence.

After a while of doing this I am starting to realize that you may be able to tell more about a movie from reading the 1/5 then from reading the 5/5. Real morons seem to be able to out themselves pretty quickly when their medium is the written word. It is quite amazing really, but it seems that stupidity is doubled when they put pen to paper, and it only goes up from there when the internet is involved. Of course this does assume that I will enjoy movies that idiots hate.

Oh well, its always entertaining seeing people continually misspell the most simple words. Once again the internet does seem to bring out all the crazies, that must be why I'm writing this blog.

Amazon.com vs. Amazon.ca

So for a second I am going to forget that Amazon.com has a gamut of great products at very competitive prices, products that dotCa just doesn't carry. For the moment I am going to focus on the fact that the identical items are frequently at very different prices.

I recently placed an order from dotCom and I will use that as a comparison. For the comparison I will take USD and CAD to identical, as at the moment there is almost no difference. For the comparison I ordered 3 blu-ray discs:

• Rescue Dawn [Blu-ray]
• The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford [Blu-ray]
• Planet Earth - The Complete BBC Series [Blu-ray]

The total from Amazon.com with shipping is: $121.81

Now that may not be the actual total as it is possible that I may be charged tax plus a handling fee at the border. Tax would be 13% of $121.81 = $15.84. The handling fee from Canada Customs is $5. How they can charge you a handling fee to charge you money is beyond me, and should be saved for another entry.

That would bring the total to $142.65, although its not guaranteed that I will be charged customs.

Now to have a look at the same 3 item total (with free shipping) from dotCa: $169.35

That is a difference of $26.70 if you get charged duty/taxes.

Amazon.ca really needs to get their act together and bring their prices more closely inline with the dotCom prices. I will note that it is not always such a large discrepancy, so it is worthwhile checking. Getting the items through customs is also more of a challenge and will take longer. So if there is something that you are anxious for -No Country For Old Men perhaps- then it may be worthwhile to order -or preorder in my case- from dotCa.