I chose to pre-order my latest video game fascination, Kingdom Hearts III, from Amazon. Like most games these days, there were competing pre-order bonuses from various retailers, and the Amazon bonus wasn’t that impressive, but I had no real desire for any of the others, either. So I chose the convenience of direct shipping to my house on release day, price match guarantee, and free shipping thanks to my Prime membership. Those benefits still remained for me, and since I was going to buy the Collector’s Edition, it was going to be a physical copy, as opposed to just going with the digital version.
On January 29th, my highly anticipated package arrived. It even arrived on time, which is something of a miracle these days. As the Amazon push to reduce shipping costs has put a lot of pressure on the last-mile men I’ve often had Amazon packages arrive well after the scheduled window. The package was on my doorstep before I made it home from work that afternoon. Due to family, and other obligations, I couldn’t open it immediately, but once those were done, I dove in, as eager as a kid on Christmas. What I found was distressing.
I hadn’t given it any thought when I first saw the package, but the game had shipped in a blue and white plastic shipping bag, with built-in bubble wrap. Inside of that was… nothing, just the packaging of the Collectors Edition of the game itself. That is, the box and some shrink-wrap. This should have tipped me off right at the start, but it wasn’t until I opened the bag to look at my prize that it became apparent to me.
The outer box is severely dented. I’m already upset and thinking about demanding a refund/exchange. This is a collector’s edition, after all. Collector’s Editions need to be in pristine condition to be worthy of being collectible. However, my wife urged me to open the container and see if the contents had been damaged at all, or if it was just this dent.
The damage went far beyond that dent. I’m extremely upset at this point. The shipping was inadequate, and now I’m going to be out, because I have to ship the game back. So I will not have access to my brand new game while the refund/exchange process takes place.
It’s worth taking a moment to check out the extent of the damage here. Yes, the outer box, which as a Collector’s Edition should have been pristine, was dented and damaged, but this interior damage was even more distressing. The plastic case which contained the actual game disc is shredded along the spine. The “steelbox” is actually in splinters, the amount of pressure this package must have withstood to take this kind of damage is astounding. I have never seen damage to a metal case like this before.
Jeff Bezos and I don’t agree on much, but one area we do is on his vision for a market of the future, with an absence of humans in sales and marketing. Bezos believes that the ideal system for consumers is one where they can come in, make a purchase, get their product and leave, without ever interacting with a human. This can be seen in the RFID Amazon shops, and even in Amazon itself. It takes effort to find a way to talk to a human. Bezos is quoted on his customer service philosophy, “The best customer service is if the customer doesn’t need to call you, doesn’t need to talk to you. It just works.”
That’s brilliant. And it fails the moment that the customer needs to call you. If you have perfect service, you don’t need customer service. But no one is perfect. Particularly not in a business as large as Amazon. Jeff Bezos could be perfect, but he hires imperfect people. Amazon could be perfect, but they rely on shipping provided by very imperfect companies. There will be problems, and Bezos’ ideas about a future free from customer service are quite obviously not ready for prime time.
So, there was no human to talk to. I got an automated return slip. I packed up my game. I shipped it back and I waited for the refund so that I could repurchase the game, because there was no direct replacement/exchange program available in this human-free scenario. A few days after that, they confirmed receipt of my package and refunded me my full purchase price. Now I could go about the business of buying my game a second time.
Fortunately, the game’s Collector’s Edition was still available. There was no guarantee it would be. While these are largely just marketing devices, there have been games where specialized editions have sold out, and I would truly have been out because of their inadequate shipping, but in this case, I’m still only out time. I place my order and a few days later it arrives on my doorstep.
Déjà vu. It’s the same package, down to the same contents and the same outer wrapper. They didn’t change anything. This wasn’t a mistake, it was a change in business practice. As soon as I saw that package on my stoop, it no longer mattered if my product was dented or not (it was, again, though nowhere near as severely), this needed to stop. So I refused to take “No,” for an answer and found a way to get in touch with an actual human. This poor guy was performing customer service for a company that thinks customer service is when they never have to talk to you, which means that he only ever talks to the most irate of customers. I feel for him, but I had to give him the facts.
I wish I could share exactly what I posted to him, to show that I was trying to be helpful and not just an angry customer, but the follow-through was not ideal. I was promised a transcript of our conversation to be sent by email. None came. The representative did his best to handle my concerns, but he clearly has no power over what shipping containers Amazon uses. If this had just been a warehouse decision, as I’d initially assumed, then maybe it would be a teachable moment, but as a single moment of failure in a corporate-wide effort, he placated me as best he could and we moved on into our separate spheres.
When I started writing this article I was going to state how this had changed how I was going to buy fragile items from Amazon — I wouldn’t anymore — but that I was still content with them shipping me cords, books, and other such items that are extremely unlikely to be damaged in shipping, even when insufficiently protected. The Amazon response to the second incident and the intervening time have changed my mind. One thing that helped was reading this wonderful piece in The Atlantic, about the perils of recycling when we’ve got a trade war going on with China, the purchaser of nearly all of our raw material recyclables.
The whole article is well worth reading, particularly for anyone who has a shred of environmentalism, but let me pull out the money quote for me as it pertains to Amazon and shipping and this whole fiasco.
Amazon has tried to reduce waste by sending products in white and blue plastic envelopes, but when I visited the Recology plant, they littered the floor because they’re very hard to recycle.
The Atlantic – Is This the End of Recycling? – Alana Semuels – 2019-03-08. Hyperlinks in the original.
Amazon is pushing to reduce costs in shipping, reducing weight and bulk, and trying to be more sustainable by using less packing materials. If that were all that had happened, I would have been just as upset when this started, but I’d be understanding. In the end, though, Amazon’s new packaging choice is only reducing costs in shipping. It’s no more sustainable, and may well be less so. Plastic is far worse for our environment than cardboard. The increased potential for disastrous damage to the products in transit is just another reason not to go down this path.
So, for me, for now, I’m done with Amazon’s shipping.
