Not The Amazon just a sunny Yorkshire evening. A chilly evening. Autumn is definitely here.

Amazon. Oh what a fun shopping experience. Ok the buying bit isn’t that bad now. Usually they have what I need and it arrives in one piece. All except vinyl that seems to have been sat on by an elephant. Occasionally you get the delights of tracking a next day delivery as it slowly wander in and out of the country. On its very own magical mystery tour. Sometimes the wrong item arrives. Sometimes it’s delivered but not here…… But it’s generally ok.

Returns are another matter. Talk about pulling what’s left of my hair out. So last night with some trepidation I tried the Amazon Paperless Return process. An email was sent with a random ink stain image which was apparently all I needed. So with that image on my phone, the elephant warped LP in hand I headed to the nearest drop off location. A petrol station 5 miles away. A really really helpful young till assistant decided I had the face of someone who can’t even work a toaster never mind an online system. I should have whispered that I have a degree in computing….. Never really got the chance as she quickly took over with a smile. She was probably bored out of her mind and this at least broke the monotony of the evening shift. Ominously she warned that the easy and seamless return system was a ‘pigging nightmare’. The all knowing ink stain image was scanned after about 10 minutes of increasingly comical arm movements. Then the paperless system needed to print off a paper label……. It jammed. Then jammed again. Kept jamming and eating labels. An increasing pile of useless labels took over the floor. 30 minutes later we abandoned as we had used up the last label. The next batch of labels wouldn’t apparently arrive until next Thursday.

So today I will return to the petrol station with a label which I have printed out and will have another go at using this paperless Amazon system…..

That’s progress for you.

34 thoughts on “Amazon”

  5. When I worked for BA, we had a particularly bright spark who entered a baggage count into the system of 150 instead of 15 (which required confirmation, being already a high number) then she hit “print” and out came 150 baggage tags. It was a Concorde flight which was very weight sensitive so I suddenly got a very strange response at the weight and balance end. I tried to explain the significance of the error to the agent but I may as well have bashed my head against the wall. Long ago memory you sparked!

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      1. So, that is cool! I experienced that with a different company. They are also making efforts to protect the environment and did not want to cause shipments because of a small item. Maybe they have a limited amount up to which they won’t ask for returning items.

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  9. My Amazon packages have come in rough shape as well as my daughters. To the point it’s not usual le and such a pain is having to return and reorder then wait, especially if it’s something that is needed quickly. 😔

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  10. yes… they’re fun. LOL. Cos no-one can find where we lived, I routinely pick up parcels from half the street, get sent photographs of sheds I’ve never seen in my life before,=–no that is not my shed, I have taste, I assure them. But the best was when they put a book through downstair’s door. ‘Can’t you just go and ask them for it?’ said the helpful operator, on this occasion I was determined to speak to, having got sick of it all. ‘Well, no,’ I said, ‘She’s been dead for six months. What do you want me to do? Commit suicide?’

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      1. Yeah. I was just done on it all, I know we are hard to find but are you telling me that it’s okay to stick something in a door with the wrong number entirely? Our last house was epic too cos it was part of a terrace that ran along a road– duh, obvi. But the terrace had a separate street name, despite not being a sep street. So we used to get all manner of thing, pizzas, parcels, but the best one was when we started getting these big bags of organic veggies just left on the doorstep with no name or address. I honestly thought some start up co was giving local free samples, so I gave the ones we weren’t going to eat to next door who happily accepted them too.

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  12. Did you not know that nothing ever goes back to Amazon? At least not in Canada. It ends up in warehouses, then gets shipped to stores that sell unopened packages for something like $25 the day it arrives, $24 the second day, and so on. No one knows what they are getting, but people walk out of the Edmonton store all hours of the day with 3, 4, or even 5 packages. It’s like Xmas every day. Take it home and have a box opening party. If you are lucky you can get a $100 item for $2 or $3 if the box looks ugly and beat up. (Or if you stash it in a dark corner where no one else looks!)

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      1. Yup. They don’t have time or space to deal with all their mistakes. Just bitch to get your money back, or get the right thing you ordered sent out, and find someone who needs whatever it is you got, if it’s not broken. Otherwise it will end up in a garbage heap somewhere. Don’t even try to imagine how much garbage is generated by Amazon booboos in a year. You’ll wonder how climate change from garbage pollution hasn’t already passed us by.

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  13. I wonder if they are really saving paper from their old system of including a return label with the purchase. Probably works out that there’s no overall savings, just for Amazon

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