The irony is that, historically, mail and courier services have different rates for different priorities of service for entirely legitimate reasons. It costs a lot more to ship an individual item ASAP than to batch it with a thousand others to the same destination and ship them all a week later. But that’s not how Amazon operates. The delay is always between placing the order and the shipping. Once the “shipped” email is sent, everything is on the same priority, at least around here where Amazon uses their own contracted delivery services. I can get a “shipped” email as late as the morning of the same day that it’s delivered.
But if you opt for “free shipping”, then by golly Jeff puts your order into a backroom queue where it will not see the light of day for several days or until you come to your senses and cough up either extra “shipping” fees (even though it has nothing to do with shipping) or, all the better for Jeff, the Prime membership that you always have to opt out of when placing an order. Because apparently Jeff doesn’t have enough money yet – or at any rate, no amount of money is too much, and we can always use more.
Not here, I often have an item “shipped” that takes days to arrive, and other times it arrives hours later.
Though I live not far from where Amazon was born (and funny enough, my oldest daughter was literally born in the same town as Amazon). There are fulfillment centers everywhere here. So much of the delay is due to where it’s coming from. I have one center in the next town over from where I live.
I went ahead and did the cancellation, as I was within the 48 hour cancel-for-free period. If I do NOT get all my money back, I’ll file a cc chargeback if necessary.
I rebooked another place - and just got declined by the host - likely due to eclipse parties. Ugh. Well, I found another spot that isn’t as nicely located (not on the water) for not THAT much more…
The UPS Store always gives me a receipt/stub thing when I drop off my Amazon returns. They litter up my passenger seat until I happen to have a passenger I have to clear the seat for. Maybe you have to ask for it at your store because they assume no one wants it?
Regarding my rant about Amazon, the fuckers finally sent the “shipped” email and it arrives tomorrow (well, I guess technically that’s today).
But this is how I imagine their timeline works, with the times here given as days:hours:minutes:seconds:
Time T+00:00:00:00: Wolfpup, in the effervescent thrall of too much rum in the middle of the night, orders stuff from Amazon.
Time T+00:00:00:02: Amazon sends confirmation email.
Time T+00:00:53:26: Amazon warehouse robots pick the requested items.
Time T+00:02:23:26: Amazon flunkies package the items, ready for shipment.
Time T+00:02:23:28: Package is flagged as “Wolfpup unwilling to pay for Prime or expedited delivery”. Amazon robot places package on the official Amazon “deadbeat” shelf for a proper 72 hours of aging.
Time T+03:01:15:24: The aging done, the Amazon robot throws the package on the ground a few times in a pre-programmed act of disgust, rolls over it, and finally submits it for shipping.
I order from Amazon fairly frequently and yet I’ve never returned an item. I’m curious why you return stuff.
The one time I attempted to return a purchase because Amazon/Worx made a mistake in the listing, Amazon agreed the error was on their end and told me to keep the $350 product and shipped the correct item.
Last day for August bitching, but I gotta vent. The state fair is a big deal in MN. I get it, okay? It’s 12 fucking days long and the news channels feel that they have to cover every goddamn second of it. They do onsite broadcasts on ever damn day, which means that, other than weather, you get no local news unless you want to stay up until zero dark thirty. School marching bands, touting really bad food that honestly looks inedible, covering the cow competition, just fucking shoot me now. Last night I switched to CNN, which is spending every spare second covering every wind gust and raindrop from hurricane-now-sea-breeze Idriselba. It’s Florida, folks. Fuck those assholes. Thank you for your inattention.
My Florida-dwelling MIL is always freaking out about the weather. I’m like don’t liiiiive there! But my SIL and her wife are also there (I can’t fathom why any non-straight person would want to live there, but she seems to love it.) They are always asking us to visit, and even if we wanted to put a three year old on a plane, no. Florida’s days are numbered due to climate change anyway. Let it sink into the sea. The weather is not that great. Before all this insanity I lived in Gainesville for a year. Sure, beautiful winters, but the humidity during the summer makes it impossible to do anything, so I don’t understand how that’s better than Michigan. While all y’all have been roasting, I think we’ve averaged 85 degrees this summer. Yeah it was hot last year, but not Florida hot.
We have good friends who retired there. The only possible reason I can fathom is that he’s retired AF, and wants to be near a military hospital. But the guy is 80+ and still goes fly fishing in Patagonia, for fuck’s sake. His wife freaks out about the weather, but he’s very sanguine about it all. Like you, we get invites all the time to come on down in March when there are three days when you don’t want to slit your wrists. But I choose not to donate one fucking dime to the Florida economy, so there’s that. I did go there way back in 1968 when my then-girlfriend suckered me into visiting her there. Took an interminable drive to Key West and drove through Ft. Meyer and part of the Everglades. All I remember is the oppressive heat. Well, that and the fact that she was living with some guy who wasn’t me.
Well, the last return was because they had inaccurate info on the product page. I did not get the item I thought I was getting. And no, they didn’t say I could just keep it, that’s extremely rare. They usually want it back.
I literally opened the box and realized the product was a lot bigger than they said on the page, and would be useless to me. I never even used it.
I come from a Disney Family. My parents have been to DizWorld probably a hundred times.
So I’ve gone with extended family a number of times, and way back in the day drove down through the Keys a couple of times … but I’d only been there in the dead of winter.
Was down there and visited friends who were building a house on Sanibel Island (bad timing… they got it done just before the island got scoured, and the bridge to the mainland washed out).
Anyhow, I’d enjoyed previous winter visits there, but April 1st came, and man, was it hot.
Walking on a waffle iron hot. And humid, like breathing through a dishcloth that you pulled out of boiling water.
I canNOT imagine living there year-round.
I attempted to visit Castillo de San Marcos National Monument in St. Augustine back in May of 2021 when they were requiring face masks. I say “attempted” because the combination of the mask and the humidity made it so hard to breathe I couldn’t handle it. I was in and out of there in less than 10 minutes.
Same with an Amazon Kindle that I returned. They were very good about taking it back and sent the appropriate return packaging (I think, but am not sure, that it was postage-paid) but they did definitely want it back. It’s nevertheless true that Amazon is notorious for throwing many returns straight into the garbage, but I imagine if they told everyone who wanted to return something to just keep it for free, they would suddenly have millions of “dissatisfied” customers asking to return stuff! In the case of the Kindle, it wasn’t a mistake on their part nor was it defective, I just wanted a different model, which I had already bought from a brick-and-mortar store.
I did, however, have that experience with a small battery supplier when I later ordered a replacement battery for the Kindle. Kindles come in confusing generations of variants even for any one specific model, and they had sent me the wrong battery due to their own lack of precision in describing compatibility. They sent me the right one and said just to keep the other.
I just got the Amazon delivery I was waiting for, containing my latest haul of toys. I have two comments:
It’s a miracle that it actually arrived, because their label printer was misaligned and the first digit of my address was cut off. The driver obviously has a different source of information about the address.
The delivery status says “package handed to resident”. This is a lie. I am the resident, and no one handed me anything. No one even rang the doorbell, as usual. I only knew the package was delivered by checking the online status. It bugs me that they lie with such impunity. They do have the option of at least honestly saying “package left on front porch”, but did not use the honest option here, nor was there the usual photo.
Yep, ever since it became a “thing” the news has increased coverage of fair. It’s all feel-good stuff about greasy food. Honestly, some of the food is fantastic but enough on the horrible Sweet Martha’s cookies. Turn off the TV, or watch a movie. No news is good news.
I got a package delivered by FedEx the other day. When I got up, I saw the notification that it had been delivered an hour earlier. I looked out on the porch and it was not there. I went outside and saw it in the front yard. I thought maybe a porch pirate had tried to take it but decided it was too heavy to carry. I checked the delivery photo. It was a closeup of a box that said Target. Nothing that indicated it was actually my box. And it said it had been left at the garage. I don’t have a garage. I guess they don’t have an option for “middle of the yard”.
In the case of the Kindle, it wasn’t a mistake on their part nor was it defective, I just wanted a different model, which I had already bought from a brick-and-mortar store.