Also, one time the courier did come during the day, but our office was closed as it is small and we were elsewhere. The courier called me on my cellphone to yell at me.
My wife buys some stuff from Amazon, and has Prime. But I’m not sure I ever have myself.
I love it. Where else would I be able to get all kinds of machinist tooling within a few days? Need a 5/32" reamer? Amazon. 1/2" carbide ball end mill? Amazon. Mitutoyo dial test indicator? Amazon.
Those just aren’t the kinds of things one finds at Home Depot.
a) Even though I work for them I still mostly shop local Mom&Pops. Nothing against us; I just feel the very little extra I usually pay is worth it for me.
b) Contract agency driver probably given the number of packages; those dudes are the ninja assassins of our world. We refer to failed deliveries like yours as AMZ-Hell and the drivers AMZ-Holes (pronounced to sound like assholes). I’ve been caught in all that a couple times. My favorite was when the one driver kept screwing up deliveries for our former building-boss. The contractor who actually does the hiring and such got a few ear-fulls for that one. The flex-drivers we have more control over. Those are more normal people using their own cars always and doing like 40-80 packages per route over 3-4 hours. But in defense of the contract drivers ----- do 200 and often more deliveries over 8-10 hours 4 days a week and sometimes more -------- and you get a little slap-happy.
I do not know your location but if you are a commercial business address your label should have a fairly bold “C” usually around the upper third and it should be held on a Saturday or Sunday and routed to arrive between 10 and 3. “Should” being the operative word. It doesn’t always happen like that.
Also because you didn’t ask -------- the upper right corner indicates the designation of the center that actually had your stuff and filled the box. The letters are an airport code (such as PHL or EWR) and the number is the exact building within our system. The black bar across the bottom with the white letters are the center that sorted and arranged your delivery; again an airport code. The first can vary depending on what you bought; the bottom should always be the same except for a few rare places where we have centers with overlapping zones.
The return address is meaningless; almost everything this side of the Mississippi is Trade Street Lexington; I forget the other address or two we use. But that basically says nothing.
NOTE – all that is only true for AMZL labels. The ones for packages done through the USPS are different and more of that data does not appear. The bottom bar is the same and the return address but everything else is different to make it more compatible with the Post Offices tracking system.
Thanks for the helpful information. I will check again to see if we are designated a commercial destination.
I live in Alberta, so I don’t know if a Canadian destination makes a difference, and usually order from amazon.ca, although sometimes amazon.com has a better offer.
Last Saturday morning, I stripped the sheets off of our bed, and dropped them in a pile to take downstairs to the washing machine. After I put the clean set on, I discovered that our dog had chewed a good sized hole in the fitted sheet. Crap.
I went online, found a decent set of king-size sheets (with 4 pillow cases) for a reasonable price and free shipping. I placed the order, and they were waiting for us when we arrived home after our Sunday morning outing. About 26 hours from order to delivery, in a rural area.
Yeah, I love Amazon.
Amazon is almost always outstanding. Two examples:
a) I ordered a $2000+ printer and it didn’t show by the promised delivery date. They overnighted a replacement and asked, very nicely, if it wouldn’t be too much of an imposition to refuse delivery of whichever one arrived second. The implication was, I didn’t have to.
b) Another order was for 4 2-gallon jugs of laundry detergent. UPS reported them “damaged and destroyed”. I contacted Amazon, and they said they would overnight 4 replacements for delivery by 10:30 AM the next day. I told them that wasn’t necessary, and regular “slow boat” delivery would be fine. They insisted on giving me a $50 credit. The 4 replacements as well as 3 of the 4 originals (I guess only one broke but UPS marked the whole package as destroyed). Amazon said to just keep all of them when I contacted them to return the 3 extras.
On the other hand, sometimes you can get real Bozos (which is different than real Bezos, see below). I had an Optima battery I’d ordered from Amazon that failed around 11 months in. They said they would gladly replace it, except that they didn’t have any in stock (they did, but under a different ASIN for a few bucks more) so they would refund me, and to just mention this when I had an order number after placing an order for the replacement and they would refund the shipping plus the price difference. I did that and they said “request for price match denied”. I responded that I wasn’t requesting a price match, and linked my earlier conversation. Denied. I figured I’d just gotten a clueless customer service person and gave it a day and opened a new request. Denied (I don’t know if the second person was just parroting notes from the first or not). A subsequent email arrived saying that they don’t do returns after 30 days (completely missing the point that this was a warranty return, not an “I changed my mind” one). This infuriated me and I sent an email to jeff@ with the subject “Is Amazon willing to lose a 19-year customer for <trivial amount>?” I got a response from Executive Customer Relations the next day with the refund.
I don’t know what happened there, but my positive experiences massively outnumber my negative ones, for all except shipping. Amazon [used to?] use 2 companies for local deliveries, which we referred to as “the homeless shipping people” and “the clueless shipping people”. The homeless ones arrive in beater cars or vans at odd times, and you can always see their vehicle overflowing with packages, sometimes piled on the roof as well. The clueless ones apparently work for a company that hires them to deliver after whatever their real day job ends. They pick up packages on the way to work using their personal vehicle, then drop them off after work until they either get bored or run out of time. Then everything left in their vehicle suddenly turns into “delivery attempted - nobody home” simultaneously. After lots of complaints from me (and apparently LOTS of other people) they now use their own delivery people instead of those cut-rate companies. The “order tracking” on the Amazon web site for these orders shows a real-time GPS map of the driver’s location, as well as “driver has N more deliveries before you”. This apparently is only available in some parts of the country, from what I hear from other people.
One thing I love about Amazon is that they don’t give me shit for delivering to my PO Box. I have a PO Box because the mailbox in front of my building is not secure and can not be made secure. Also, any package dropped in front of the building WILL be stolen within an hour (or less) if no one is home. So I have a PO Box so I will get my stuff. An amazing number of business refuse to ship to my box. One even called the post office to get my street address instead of delivering to my PO Box. Said package was, of course, stolen from in front of my door. When I called the company the “customer service” guy said “Of course we changed it to your street address so it would be more convenient for you!” And I explained, once again, that “most convenient” is actually getting my stuff. No, sending it to my residence when no one is home is not at all convenient. Sending it to the UPS depot is NOT convenient, because I have to go out of my way to a dodgy neighborhood to get my package. Sending it to my PO box, which is two miles from my home at a post office with pleasant personnel is convenient. That’s why I got the PO Box No, I’m not bitter, why do you ask…?
(Here in Gary, IN, thieves have been known to follow UPS, FedEX, and other delivery trucks, trailing them by about half a block, scooping up the deliveries almost as fast as they’re made. Porch pirating is actually an organized operation. The police do make arrests, but it’s whack-a-mole.)
Anyhow, Amazon is wonderful about sending stuff where I ask them to send it. Which means I actually get my stuff - when it’s fulfilled by Amazon, third parties are a bit hit or miss.
I did recently join prime, but that was for the videos and music, which privileges I use several times a week. Free shipping is a nice extra from my viewpoint, but not the main appeal.
Oh, come now, isn’t this more than a little species-ist??
I say, if Lizard People want to launch global, multi-category-dominating companies with excellent customer service, product range, and pricing, the more the merrier!
Frankly, if more of them can do that, they probably DESERVE the world domination!
I’m firmly in the “if Bezos turns out to be a Lizard Person, my high opinion of him and Amazon will remain unchanged” camp, cause we’re all about equality here at the Dope!
We had this one address that used to get 3-8 pallets of 400+ packages each a day from us; all these odd apartment numbers at this warehouse looking building in the middle of a corn field in Ohio ---- and not the one disappeared threads and posters get sent to. After filling it time and time again day after day curiosity finally overcame me and I rode the Road Kow out that direction and stopped at a near-bye garage with a couple bikes parked in front of it. Talked to the locals and found out the deal; it was a drop-ship business that would send things to PO boxes from places that won’t send to POs and things overseas to places that just ship “48”. Some people just never seem to have caught on that we’ll send anything damn near anywhere and I guess with the amount of business he got from us the drop-shipper wasn’t about to complain.
I haven’t tried ordering at Amazon but with the good reviews you have here then I might be liking Amazon soon. Try to check some pillowcases and bed sheets later. Thanks for the info!
No, probably not only you.
When I called my credit card company to get them to kill off the monthly Amazon Prime charges, I expected to have to go through a long explanation about it (especially as I had missed it for 2-3 months before noticing it). But the moment I mentioned Amazon Prime, the clerk knew all about the problem. She even knew how to look for previous charges, and could do something to catch any ones that might come in the next billing cycle. And she told me how to contact Amazon to shut off future charges.
She mentioned that this was a frequent chargeback procedure. So it seems like quite a few others besides you got tricked into Amazon Prime.
I quit Amazon a little while back after getting stonewalled trying to return a cheap toaster that was unusable after 5 weeks, was listed as “ships from and sold by Amazon.com” and had a 1-year warranty. I’d only ever tried to return something once before in 20 years as a customer, and had no problems that time.
This time I noticed that the online return process deliberately doesn’t give you any option of saying you want to return an item because it doesn’t work. I tried multiple times with their limited online form and kept getting denied. Tried by phone, was told it would be taken care of, then more email saying no, and ultimately saying I should try contacting TJMaxx, who they said shipped it; it was not their problem. Yet my paperwork says Amazon. I’m not a Prime customer and wonder if that made me a second-class citizen and my little claim ignorable.
I ended up going through the chargeback process with my credit card and won. I just don’t understand how they could trumpet “A to Z guarantee” and keep denying my claim without any real explanation. It’s like they were a health insurance company or something.
Since then I have had to work a little harder to find other online sellers of products (though often enough their price is cheaper). It just seems like quality control in manufacturing today accepts a built-in low level of defective pieces, and you have to believe in the seller to take care of you on those occasions when you inevitably get a dud. I get that most everyone else has had great experiences, but being treated like I was by Amazon for a lousy toaster means I can’t trust them to ever do the right thing in the future.
Not necessarily only through Amazon. I wanted to get a CD of Neil Diamond’s Hot August Night for kaylasmom, and the only one available was used, and fulfilled through a third party seller. When it arrived, there was only one disc (it comes on two), so I called Amazon’s customer service to look into returning it. They refunded me and told me not to bother returning it.
I bought a new Kindle Paperwhite on Prime Day last year because I’d mysteriously lost my old Paperwhite. It came, I set it up and was happily using it for a couple months. Then my new rescue dog chewed the corner, so it would no longer charge. I contacted CS, hoping with my sob story of rescued animals they’d let me buy another one with the Prime Day price. I fully admitted it was my fault, my dog shouldn’t have gotten hold of it, etc. The guy said, we’ll just send you a new one. No problem.
Then a few weeks later I found the lost Kindle. So now I have 2. Well, 3 if you count the Fire, but I never use that.
StG
I agree. I have had a couple of bad encounters with Amazon delivery service, and I would pay a bit more, if I could pick to have all of my deliveries made by the USPS.
I’ve had nothing but good experiences with Amazon, the last dozen or items I’ve had delivered placed inside the gate but also included a picture attached to the text notice.
I’ve also been told to keep items that I needed replaced or returned for whatever reason.
I think I only once had to actually send back something that I needed to return. Can’t remember what it was, but it was a long time ago. Most of the things I end up returning are small, so I never really had an “OMG, I can’t believe they’re letting me keep it!” kind of moment. For example, I ordered flip flops for my daughter when she was 3. The picture had a back strap on the flip flops (important for a young walker), but the pair I received did not have the back strap. They told me to keep them and that they’d refund the money. She ended up using the flip flops next year; surprisingly, they still fit. So… win!
So the most recent 3 items I’ve ordered from Amazon have come really fast. It’s true that two of them were delivered to an Amazon locker nearby, and maybe that speeds up delivery? I don’t know. But the other weird thing is that all the packages had Prime markings on them.
I’ve checked my account several times, and I did not sign up (accidentally or on purpose) for Prime. I keep getting prompted at every turn to sign up for Prime. I’m pretty sure Amazon does not think that I have Prime.
But, as I mentioned earlier in this thread, for the 3rd most recent item I clicked on the “free delivery with Prime” button by mistake, and then went to the next screen before I discovered it. So I backed up 2 screens and started the checkout process over, and picked the lowest cost regular delivery. Every time since then I have picked the lowest cost regular delivery. But I seem to be getting Prime service. I’m not complaining. But I am suspicious that this is some devilish new scheme for getting me into Prime against my will.