I hope to God I didn’t watch the commercial possibilities of the Internet die before my eyes today. I also hope my resurrection of Eugene Delacroix for the second time in as many months is not too much of a stretch. I’m sure that most of you have an academic familiarity with Delacroix’s painting Greece Dying on the Ruins of Missolonghi and the story behind it. You may recall that the people in Missolonghi destroyed their own town. Like those nineteenth century Greeks, I’m afraid that certain internet retailers may have inflicted wounds upon themselves.
I remember back to the mid-1990s and my first windows-based computer. I bought it for the spreadsheets and the word processing program, but it had a phone cord which I plugged it into the wall jack when I was assembling the machine and connecting all the wires. A free trial subscription to an internet service came with the computer, so I logged on. It was pretty neat and it changed my mind about the internet.
Prior to that, my vision of the World Wide Web was a couple of geeks typing code into their computers tied together with 9600 baud modems and talking geek talk to each other. I was favorably impressed with the internet during my first venture inside, even though I was only surfing around inside my internet service provider’s pages. When I finally figured there was a bigger world out there and wandered into it, I was even more impressed. Still, I thought, this is just some fancy toy, useless for anything practical, but fun to explore.
It was about that time I saw some guy on television—Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com—talking about the commercial possibilities of this new medium. Yeah, I thought, nice going, geek. You are using the internet to sell, of all things, books. Won’t people start reading things on line and won’t that hurt the sales of traditional print media? Books, for example? What a dork! Now, there was a guy who wasn’t looking very far down the road. The guy that was interviewing him had the same thought I did and asked if there was a future in his business. Bezos said there was. Then he said he could use the Internet to sell other things, too, besides books. All of a sudden the dork on the television metamorphosed into a genius before my eyes.
Oh, my God! A light went off.
It was like the first time I saw a woman naked. I spent the next few years piling money into the stocks of e-commerce companies with some successes and some failures. I was only disappointed that the Internet never seemed to gain the level of acceptance as a commercial tool as quickly and universally as I expected it would.
Anyway, it is ten years later and my zany kid sister told me she tried to buy some things on line and had trouble and was not able to complete her transaction. Ironically enough, she was shopping at Mr. Bezos’ store. She asked me if I would order an item for her and I said I would. The purchase went as smoothly as imaginable. A couple of clicks and the order was placed; the next day I received confirmation of shipment. After getting the confirmation, I dropped by the website of Best Buy, where I have made scads of Internet purchases and I bought a Christmas present. It was smooth as silk. I received confirmation that my order shipped the next day. Oh, my silly younger sister! Had she only put a little more effort into her shopping it would have been as easy as my own.
My sister’s present arrived by US Mail, and Saturday morning; there it was in the mailbox. Unfortunately, that happy moment was the last. I reached into the mailbox and removed all the other mail and then tugged at the package. It would not come out. We have one of those community mailboxes where everyone has their individual box with a locking door on the front. While the postman had no trouble fitting it diagonally into our box from the back side through a door that opened to expose all of the individual boxes, the package was more than one inch too big to fit through the framework on the customer side. If I could have bent the package in half, I could have gotten it out. However, knowing what it was and that bending it would be synonymous with breaking it, I had to leave it there. I put a note on the package (reaching through and putting the note on the postman’s side for legibility and easy notice) asking the postman to put the package in the door of our house. It was not read or it was ignored and the package was still there the next afternoon. I took off work early the next day and went to the delivering post office to explain the problem. The following afternoon the box was in our door. I figured this was one rare setback, and one could blame the postal service. This could have happened to a mail-order order from Sears fifty years ago, so it could be argued that it was not necessarily related to the Internet.
On that same day, there was a sticky note on the door from UPS, in addition to the Amazon package being inside the door. The note from UPS said that someone over twenty-one needed to be home to sign for the package before they could deliver the Best Buy parcel. I wrote a message on the sticky note, telling the UPS man to put the package in the door (as he had lo those many previous deliveries), as there would not be anyone home to sign for it. Then, I sent an e-mail to Best Buy telling them of the problem. I’ve ordered dozens of things via Internet from Best Buy. Never before have the shipments come with the prerequisite that I had to stay home from work in order to receive them.
The next day, there was another note on the door from UPS. It had a phone number to call. I called the number and they advised me that I could pick up the package at a local UPS warehouse. While there was a time I would have embraced going to the area where the UPS warehouse is, and bragging afterward how I had gone in and come back out alive, from where I live and work, that trip would be a major inconvenience. Earlier in my life I would have welcomed the opportunity to chat with the whores who troll the corner where the UPS warehouse stands. At one time I would have enjoyed trying to guess which of them were actually men in drag and speculating on what sort of weaponry both the males and females were sporting. At this point of my life, such danger holds no appeal.
When I opened the response to my e-mail from Best Buy, their non-answer was for me to contact UPS. Here is what I responded.
The story goes that the management at Archer Daniels Midland had an organizational mantra that the customer was the enemy. Obviously one or more of them who escaped prison must have found a job in management at Best Buy.
Picking this package up at the UPS terminal is going to be a wasted couple of hours for me and the irony is that had I picked up this item at one of your stores, it would have taken less time and been more convenient.
Thanks for nothing.
So much for the convenience of Internet shopping. I’ll be taking the day off work on Friday and going down there to get my package. I heard last week on the news in a story about cyber shopping that it is safer to use your credit card to buy something on line than it is to use it to purchase something at the mall. It may be safe and it may be easy, but we still have some kinks to work out.
It could be easily argued that the problem in both cases rested with the traditional media of delivery rather than with the on-line merchants. However, having had some experience in supply chain management I contend that the deal is not done until the purchased item is resting comfortably in the hands of the purchaser. While many other of the supply chain managers out there are wanting to remind me at this point that settling up the money is usually the final step, in a internet transaction, the money changes hand prior to shipment. No matter how good of a product you have and no matter how much I want it, the marriage of supply and demand doesn’t consummate until you have my money and I have your product. The online retailers, in order to achieve that nirvanic state of excellence, must guarantee all the links in their supply chain are in place to do that.
Thank all of you for listening to me bitch, which is something we do well and often here in Jimbo’s world.
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