Recently, when I’ve ordered things from Amazon.com, I find that they’ve been using a bait-and-switch tactic.
For example, yesterday I ordered two items (for the curious, they were a DVD set of “Are You Being Served? Again” and “Dr. Who Lost in Time Collection”) which both indicated “ships within 24 hours.”
When I ordered them, I got a confirmation e-mail which says that they will ship on November 17. That’s hardly within 24 hours, it’s within 120 hours.
I placed an order on October 18 for a RAM upgrade for a friend’s computer. I could have just gone down to the Apple store and picked one up, but I was lazy. Again, it indicated 2-5 days for shipment.
On November 9, I received an email telling me that (duh) there was a delay. I went to cancel the order, and couldn’t because it said it was “prepping for shipment.” Why, then, didn’t they send the email sooner?
Finally, it shipped November 10. For those of you keeping track, that was 23 days to ship an item that I should have just bought down the street.
Is this a new Amazon business tactic? Having burned out from shipping things the same day, they’re now taking their sweet time but still claiming fast shipping?
I think that’s happened to me once, and I order from Amazon 2-3x a month at least. I always choose the free shipping and it always gets hre before they say it will (though that is usually because of the conservative shipping transit times).
I got Voyager Season V (along with Latter Days *sniff*) the day after it was released.
It might not be so much the ‘man’ bringing you down with his lies… just facilities getting a little crunched in what is now the start of the busy season.
Most everything you order, web wise, from circuitcity.com comes from my dist. center. When we have a web order that for whatever reason (usually bad inventory) that does not get filled, all hell breaks loose and there’s a mad scramble to 1) get it from somewhere else so the customer doesn’t have to wait TOO long and 2) find out where the breakdown was so it doesn’t happen again.
But then again, Amazon should be a little better than us at all this.