The Ordeal Continues

Not sure what the ordeal is? This will answer that.. All caught up? Good.

So, on December 29th, Amazon authorized a return and e-mailed me a shipping label for said return. The deal with the return is, I have ten days from authorization until the authorization expires. The shipping label was for standard UPS Two-Day ground shipping. On the morning of the 30th, I dropped the package off at the local UPS store (literally a mile from my house). Now, I packaged it up in the same box they shipped it to me in. Perhaps I should explain how it was packaged; the box was a foot and a half wide, a foot long, and about four inches deep. Not conducive for shipping a record in, really; even packed to the gills with plastic air bubbles, the record could bounce around in the box. This is one of the problems with Amazon's record sales; they don't know how to pack a record for shipping. As the dominant recorded music medium for the better part of the twentieth century, I'm sure that at some point there were shipping containers designed specifically for a record album. Think of all those Time Life records flying through the mail in the seventies and eighties (one of which, a Benny Goodman collection, Kathy and I bought at a record shop in downtown Chicago last month). Imagine if those had been packaged so that they would bounce around in their containers.

Anyway, I just packaged it up in the same packaging, hoping to make a point when they get it and open it and realize that the record has been bouncing around in this box all its merry way from St. Louis to Hebron, KY. So I dropped it off on the morning of the 30th. The clerk told me it would be picked up at either ten in the morning, four in the afternoon, or nine that evening. According to the tracking site, at 9:53 PM that night, the package left the UPS store. At 10:15 that same night, it arrived at the UPS shipping hub in Earth City, MO. And then it sat there until January 4th. Five days it sat no more than twenty-six miles from my house. Hebron, KY is a five and a half hour drive from my house...I had three days off work. I could have taken care of it by now.

I understand that we had a holiday to contend with, but really? You delivered my first return to Amazon.com in exactly two days, the second day being Christmas Eve. You're telling me, UPS, that your trucks and planes sit grounded and idle New Year's Eve, New Year's Day, Saturdays and Sundays? I will give you New Year's Day and Sunday. So it finally left Earth City on the morning of the fourth, and then arrive in Lexington, KY at two in the afternoon. Good...I Google mapped it, and that's no more than two hours driving in traffic.

The morning of the fifth, it left Lexington, KY and arrived in Cincinnati, OH shortly thereafter. I was appalled, but only until I learned my geography a little better. Cincinnati is just on the Ohio side of the KY/OH border, and Hebron is just on the other side. It's not even a half hour drive between the two. So this package arrived, just shy of a week later, in Cincinnati at four this morning, and then at five-thirty was scanned out for delivery.

It is now eleven o'clock at night on the fifth. Why the hell has this package not been received by Amazon yet? Now not only do I not want to order vinyl from Amazon anymore, I barely want to order anything from Amazon. But they've got me locked in with this return-refund-on-the-gift-card crap. I think I found something that I need to buy which is about the same price as the record; for Christmas, my sister, her husband and my two nieces gave me Wii Sports Resort, and it came with one Wii Motion Plus accessory. We want another one, and I figure Amazon probably sells a lot more of those in a month than they sell vinyl records in a year, and it's a relatively small and popular item, and since Kathy and I decided we were already going to buy one, I'm just going to buy it using my gift card and buy the record from Euclid Records or Vintage Vinyl, end this terrible loop. But I can't do any of that until the package is delivered. Judging by how it's been going, I estimate another week before Amazon gets it.