How hard should you work to give a company your money?

In My Humble Opinion
1

About 2 weeks ago, I ordered a keyboard (music, not computer) from Amazon for my daughter’s birthday. On the scheduled delivery day, tracking showed it was out for delivery, but around 4 PM I got an email that it was “Undeliverable” and was being returned to Amazon, and I’d get the amount credited back to my card. This pissed me off no end, because my address is easy to find and I’ve never had a delivery problem before, and I was home at the time so they couldn’t even claim no one was there to receive it. But when I went outside, there was a keyboard sized box right by my mailbox, and everything was in it and in working order. Note that the tracking page said it was being delivered by “AMZL_US”, which is apparently Amazon Logistics, Amazon’s new in-house delivery service.

I assumed the delivery guy had just entered the wrong status when he dropped it off, and it would be corrected shortly. But 3 days later, it was still showing as “Undeliverable - Refund will be issued.” I checked my credit card account, and they had indeed credited me for the full amount.

I called Amazon, explained everything that had happened, that I had received the package and they should be billing me for it, not refunding me. The agent seemed to understand, thanked me for my honesty, and said she’d fix it and I’d receive an email showing the charge going in again.

It’s been over a week since that, and nothing has happened - it’s still showing up as “Refund issued”, I haven’t received any emails, and my credit card is still showing the refund.

So what would you do at this point? I’m of the opinion that I did my due diligence - I called them, explained everything, and gave them permission to charge my card again. If they fail to follow through on that, I’m not inclined to continue trying to give them my money. Your opinion? The amount is in the $100 range if that makes a difference to your answer.

BTW, my daughter loves the keyboard. Thankfully it came with headphones…

2

You did your part. Its on them. Forget about it.

3

Amazon is a bazillion dollar company. They have written this situation in to their budget tenfold. They do appreciate your honesty and you are now the owner of a free keyboard.

4

You made a phone call. That’s far more effort than I could ever do.

5

Give your delivery person a tip.

6

If you want to do a final step of due diligence, I would send them an email. That way, you have a record of your attempts. Put the info about your phone call and everything in it as well.

This is more CYA, as that way, you have a written record if it ever comes back on you, but as is, I’d say you are more or less in the clear.

7

Yikes, and I freaked when I ordered a $5 DVD and had the same situation, maybe I felt bad because I bought it from Goodwill Industries, sent them a check though, even though they told me not to worry about it.

8

And now your watch has ended. You got a free keyboard, and any additional effort you expend will absolutely not work.

I ordered a bunch of stuff on Amazon. Then they sent me a second copy of some of it. I contacted them in plain English what happened, like if they wanted it back. The response looked like they didn’t read it properly, and were sending a replacement. So I got 2-3 copies of everything. I didn’t want to press it further.

Makes me think of this Simpsons clip.

9

There was also this old urban legend about a hotel guest who left a note asking the maid not to leave the little bars of soap, but instead ended up with dozens of bars of soap throughout the room.

10

I ended up with a free 55" tv several years ago through a crazy delivery mixup from Amazon. I spent hours on the phone dealing with them - they had shipped a defective unit then the new one was lost in shipment or something (don’t recall the exact details) and it was insane trying to get it figured out. When they refunded my money twice, i was so sick of dealing with them that I was not going to spend more of my time on the phone with them. It was entirely their fault, and I figured they’d eventually find the double refund and fix it.

They didn’t.

:smiley:

11

As the first responder, I assumed I was going to get lit up as a thief and all-around horrible bad person. Glad that didn’t pan out. :smiley:

12

I work in corporate-level finance for another large retail company, and yeah, we have this sort of thing built in. We don’t so much want to end up here, but we have a good idea of how often (statistically) it’s going to end up here. Hooray customer service. Enjoy it and write it off as a beneficial experience.

13

Is this like when you go to the market at night and no one is at the register? How long do I have to holler for a checker before I walk out with my beer?

14

When dealing with a large company, I just assume that they have an internal process that will ultimately take care of the situation. When you call and interrupt that process, all that usually happens is that you throw a wrench in the works and ensure that the process goes off the rails. Which is why when the error is in my favor, I simply inform them once and then let it drop.

15

The rules or ethics may be different for dealing with a smaller business, and perhaps depending on whether you bought a product or a service, and how much you might care to deal with them again.

My fairly recent (and still unresolved) story: I went to a sailplane regatta in May (details here). Not being a pilot myself (yet), I flew with someone else who is, both on Saturday and Sunday. The company that operated the tow plane billed all the dual flights half to each occupant, at least when they knew who the occupants were. (I had taken it upon myself to keep a record of that for the event except when I myself was up flying, which they found useful.)

Well, to this day, they haven’t billed me for my 50% of one of those flights. I’ve e-mailed the boss once or twice, and mentioned it to the tow pilot (who says it’s no skin off his nose).

Now, these are people I’ve dealt with before (having taken some lessons there) and will probably deal with again. I figure I owe them about $40. And it’s only fair to the pilot I flew with, since he was billed, and paid, his half. So, I’m still waiting for my bill to come in!

16

More like the beer was delivered to your home and put in the fridge, and the delivery company won’t take the payment.

17

I had a problem with an eBay seller several years back.

Got sent the wrong version of the item. Seller gladly took it back, reimbursed me for shipping, sent the right item, and then refunded my money. Didn’t understand at all when I wanted to undo the refund. Took a while but got straightened out. I could have gotten the item for free but I liked the seller’s practices and wanted to ensure he had an incentive to keep it up.

But it was weird there for a bit having to explain thru eBay messages what I was trying to do.

At the local retail level it is remarkable how many stores make it difficult to impossible to sell us something and take our money. How hard is it to understand: We have money. You want money. You (supposedly) sell item. We want item.

18

I’d leave the empties and a coupla bucks on the counter.

19

Every step of the process from ordering to shipping to processing the payment cost them money. Even you calling them to try to fix the issue cost them money. If they were to try to process a reversal of the refund, that would cost them money too. So, even though that might cost less than the money you are wanting to give them in real dollars, it’s still cheaper for them OVERALL to just do nothing in these situations. (Averaging out the hundreds of thousands of low dollar transactions with the fewer high dollar transactions.)

Also, there could be some esoteric rules in the credit card bible that says once you issue a refund, you are not allowed to charge again (don’t know, I used to work in that field and it’s been a while since I used the credit card bible.)

20

Welcome to what we who work in Da Jungle call AMZL-Hell — whose workers we generally call AMZHoles (pronounced the way its spelled). They screwed up a delivery to our site boss and they delivered my package to the clearly abandoned house next door. If you know anyone who works for Amazon near you I would reach out to them or use the company message board

https://www.amazon.com/forum/amazon%20discussions%20feedback?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=FxLCMW9UN2N6QR&cdThread=Tx32SBFTZ3LMIAV

or just forget about it and consider yourself a winner.