From: bjs@uts.amdahl.com (Barry Sherman)
Newsgroups: rec.photo
Subject: Mail order expectations (Was Re: bad experience with FotoCell)
Date: 29 Jul 92 19:05:05 GMT
Distribution: na
Organization: Amdahl Corporation, Sunnyvale CA

>For those of you who do mail order from the photo magazines, I thought
>I'd just warn you of my bad experience with FotoCell recently.

Get a copy of the mail order survery posted here frequently by,
I believe, Doug Blondin.  It'll help you choose the more reputable
companies.

[ Deleted unfortunate but, apparently, typical experiences with run-around
about shipping of item ... ]

>Late the next week I called the
>customer service number (a frustration in and of itself, unless you
>enjoy busy signals and/or have a heady affair going with your redial
>button).  

Wow!  I can't believe how nice it would be to *have* a redial button 
here at work.  I recently expended > 40 calls over a two day period
trying to get through on Adorama's Customer Service Number.  And I was
charging them to my calling card number - much more dialing.  I was just
about ready to bite someone's head off when I finally got through.

Anyway, I've been re-thinking my expectations in mail order.  This is a result
of a conversation with a friend who is something of an expert at doing
mail ordering.  She's a semi-invalid (three herniated disks in her spine,
two of which have been removed) who uses mail order as a way of life.  She
orders from the "quality" companies like Eddie Bauer, Spiegal (sp?), etc.
She is also the best person I've ever known at "getting things done" when
dealing with recalcitrant beaurocrats, managers, etc.  Given her experiences
with the health care/insurance/corporate communities she's had to be.

So I had a problem with Adorama.  I cancelled a part of an order which had
been back-ordered even though they told me that it was in stock.  $290 +
shipping.  The credit appeared on my card promptly, but was for $46.  Getting
it fixed involved four calls over a 4 week period.  

Now, in the middle of all of this I was getting pretty hot under the collar.
I prepared letters to the president of the company, the director of customer
relations and my credit card company threatening 1) contesting the matter 
with my credit card company, 2)  exposure of their practices on USENET and
Compuserve - on a weekly, auto-posted, basis until the matter was resolved :-) 
3) loss of lots of business from me.

My point:  when I showed these letters to my friend, she said that they were
drastic overkill.  She said that she has similar screw-ups all the time, even
dealing with Eddie Bauer, Speigle, etc.  She also said that she doesn't even
figure that there's anything unusual if it takes them 2 months to get 
things straightened out.  After 2 months she starts to pursue the matter
in a diplomatic manner.

So I'm maybe rethinking my expectations from discount mail order.  There are 
many out-and-out sleaze operations out there.  I will not order from discount
houses other than B & H or Adorama Even here, mistakes will happen.  These
people are running what have to be immense operations.  And they have to 
be doing so with minimal overhead or their prices wouldn't be so low.  This
means that their people are going to be overworked, probably under-paid, and 
problems are going to take a while to fix.  

Now, what Margaret described in her original posting sounded pretty well
without excuse.  But screw-ups like the one that I just described are
probably just going to happen and I don't think that it's reasonable to
expect from a discount house the level of service that I expect from 
a full-price local store or a higher priced mail order store.  If I buy
from Los Gatos Camera I expect lots and lots of service.  If I buy from
Calumet I expect a pleasant experience with lots of chit-chat with the
order taker and "How's your day going" and all that good warm-fuzzy stuff.  
Problems will rarely arise and will be fixed immediately
if they do.  

But with B & H and Adorama, I just expect minimum of problems and to not be 
lied to.  So far they've lived up to this expectation.  Sure, the one I talked
about here was fairly serious but I've made lots and lots and lots of orders 
with them with no problems at all.  And it would appear that my phone calls 
were probably not necessary.  Without going into details (for a change ;-) the 
indications were that the problem was wending its way through their sluggish 
system regardless of all of my frantic calling and letter preparation.

Ya wants good service, ya pays for it.  Ya wants good prices, ya still pays
for it.

Barry

-- 


|----------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| Barry Sherman, Amdahl Corp.       | "Any fool can face a crisis - it's     | 
| bjs@ruts.ccc.amdahl.com           |  this day-to-day living that wears you |
|                                   |  out." - Anton Chekhov                 |
|----------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| Amdahl, being a corporation, is a legal fiction.  Therefore it is incapable|
| of holding, let alone expressing, opinions.  Unfortunately, this has been  |
| said of me as well.                                                        |
|----------------------------------------------------------------------------|