Online Retail Will One Day Rule the World
Ah, Christmas: the season of cheer, goodwill, and surly salespeople.
Before Thanksgiving this year, I went into the gift room and took stock of the Christmas presents I had already purchased. As I surveyed the pile of packages, most of them wrapped, I felt good.
The first year that Chris and I were together was a disaster, as far as the members of our families were concerned. We floated along in the bliss of our new relationship before it finally occurred to us that now we had twice as many people to shop for. And the closer it got to Christmas, the more relatives Chris remembered.
By the time we realized how much shopping we had left, the malls were packed and the lines were frightening. Everything was on sale, but only if you could it find it among the rejects tossed to the floor by panicked shoppers. Stunned by the mob at the mall, we gave up on buying nice gifts and retreated to the Christmas Tree Shops with all the other desperate losers who had no taste. We bought cheap gifts for everyone and cheap bags with which to “wrap” them. Some of the bags even made it as far as the car before they split open.
Shamed by that memory, I’d spent every following year improving my technique. This year I was doing well and my stress level was at an all-time holiday low. And then the email came — the one in which my cousin Diana mentioned that her family was coming for Christmas. Now I had five more people on my list, and as I looked around my gift room, I suddenly realized there was almost nothing for Chris’s family in there.
“Chris!” I bellowed. “What the heck does your family want for Christmas?”
“I don’t know!” he yelled back.
“Maybe you should start thinking about what to get them!”
“Maybe you’re right!”
After some thought, we ordered more presents online at Amazon.com and Bestbuy.com, which was currently offering free shipping. Amazon also offered free shipping, but in their case free shipping meant that they wouldn’t start assembling your order until 10 days after you placed it. A day or two after that, they shipped it out to you via sick elephants with sore toes. If you were lucky, you received your items a month after you actually requested them. Sick elephants or not, this method still meant I didn’t have to waste my time trying to find the books in a store.
Then my sister called. The back massager we wanted to purchase for my aunt was on sale at Macy’s, but only for two days. Despite my best efforts, I was heading back to the mall. I briefly considered ordering the massager online, but when I found a 20% off coupon* for Macy’s, I figured going to the store wouldn’t be that bad. After all, I knew exactly what I wanted, so the whole transaction would take…what, five minutes at most?
When I got into Macy’s, I circled the outer aisles for twenty minutes before I managed to penetrate the interior and hack my way through the clothing racks and baby carriages to the escalators. Apparently everyone and their elderly grandmother had trooped in to take advantage of the coupon sale, and unlike me, had already begun working on their post-holiday bulk to form the necessary layers of fat required to push through the crowds.
Trapped by the solid wall of people around me, I found myself being carried along with the crowd as they got off the escalator. By the time I managed to escape the Borg, I was in the Juniors department. I decided I might as well look for some shirts for my cousins, but as I made my way to the shirts, I got trapped among several racks of jeans and nearly had a panic attack from the claustrophobia. The racks were placed so closely together that I had difficulty finding my way out and wondered if I should have brought my flashlight to signal an SOS on the ceiling. Luckily, I heard another customer’s shopping bag rustling nearby, and followed the noise out to the aisle. Forget the shirts; I needed to get the back massager and get out.
When I got to the home department, I stumbled across a display of back massagers. There were about six different types, all in identical-looking boxes, and none with a price tag. I selected a box at random, and hauled it to the cash register.
There were two women and one man working at the registers, and about ten people waiting in line. The most promising line had only two women in it, so I got into that one. The woman in front of me seemed to have only a small fluffy item to purchase, so I figured I would be out of the store in about ten minutes. By now I should have realized that my time estimation skills were about as good as my gift selection abilities.
As I waited in line, I overheard a woman ask my cash register woman if it was possible to get some help on the floor.
“No, it’s just the three of us here today,” the cash register woman said. “If you get in line, one of us will help you.”
The customer got in line by slowly edging over in front of the woman in front of me. When her turn came, we had to wait ten minutes for the cash register woman to go into the storeroom and find more of the glassware on sale that had run out on the floor. The other woman at the cash register followed her into the storeroom, evidently to also fetch more boxes of the glasses. When both women returned, they spend a few minutes leafing through the sale flyer in an effort to find the ad for the “buy 1, get 1 free” offer.
“It’s right here,” the customer said, holding out her own flyer. The woman at the cash register took the flyer and scrutinized it carefully, before moving to consult with the other cash register woman. The two of them stood by the register for a while, talking about the glasses (”I should get some of these for my daughter” “I know, they’re so cheap”) before the woman at my register remembered she had her own line to deal with, and came back to ring up the customer.
During this time, the man at the register had gone through about five customers and the line in front of him was only growing larger as customers realized he was their only chance to get home before dinnertime.
As the clerk scanned the box of glassware, the customer made the mistake of thinking her purchase was nearly complete. She held out a twenty dollar bill toward the cash register woman, then waved it at her, but the clerk was staring at the computer in front of her. The customer eventually dropped her money onto the boxes and went to look at another item on display. A few minutes later, the woman at the cash register looked up and announced “Total is 15.85″, in the triumphant tones of someone who had just completed a marathon. Now she’ll take the money, I thought. But no, it was time to look for a bag to fit the boxes.
Finally, only one customer remained in front of me. To my horror, the fluffy thing she’d been carrying was a Christmas tree ornament with a feather on it, and was one of 25 ornaments in a bag clutched to her stomach. One by one, the customer brought out each ornament and handed it to the cash register woman, who scanned the price tag.
By ornament number three, I could see that the process would be much faster if the woman simply scanned and dropped each ornament into an open bag, instead of placing them on the counter, but the clerk seemed determined to proceed in the most inefficient manner possible. It wasn’t until the customer had spent sixty-five dollars on ornaments that the cash register woman started to wrap each one. In tissue paper. Individually. One slow ornament at a time. And then the customer put each one, individually, into a plastic bag. They finished just as I was about to give in to the urge to snatch up all the ornaments, jam them in a bag, and tell the lady to buy herself a pre-decorated tree next time.
At last it was my turn. I held out the back massager box with the bar code conveniently facing the cash register woman. Instead of just reaching out with the scanner, she wasted another 2 minutes taking the box from my hands and putting it onto the counter. Then she saw the coupon in my hand.
“Oh, you can’t use that on this,” she said.
“Why not?” I said. I looked down at the coupon. 20% off everything*, 10% off home items.
“This is an electric,” she said.
I looked back at her. “In that case,” I said, speaking slowly and clearly, “FORGET IT!”
I threw my coupon on the counter and stalked out. An hour of my life had been taken forever from me, and I was damned if I was going to pay them for that loss. As I jumped into my car, my only regret was that the back massagers weren’t located further away from the cash registers, so that the clerk would have to walk a long way to put my reject away.
Posted by: ssjane | December 26, 2002 | 5:01 pm
Posted in: Rants