Months and months ago, almost a YEAR ago, I asked your advice about replacing my coffee-maker. Then I dithered around and did nothing, because my coffee-maker was still usable and so I wasn’t in the state of adrenaline/emergency that is apparently the only way I can motivate myself to take action / make decisions on things.
Then I dropped my coffee-maker’s carafe Friday night and it shattered everywhere, and wasn’t I glad to have collected advice in advance! I spent part of Friday night and part of Saturday morning re-reading all the comments, looking at coffee-makers, and adding and subtracting to my cart. I ended up ordering the Cuisinart DCC-3200 14-cup Programmable Coffee Maker. I like that it loads water/coffee basically the way I’m used to. I like that I can see through the carafe, even though that also means I can drop and shatter the carafe (but I’ve only done that once! once!). I like that there is a lot of talk about how hot it keeps the coffee.
I compared prices to see if I should just zip out that very day and buy the new one, but I still had my old 4-cup Mr. Coffee to use as an emergency back-up, so instead I ordered from Amazon; the new pot was supposed to arrive Monday. Monday late afternoon, the tracking was still saying it would arrive by 9:00 p.m.; at 5:01 p.m. I got an email saying the delivery was running late and would arrive Tuesday or Wednesday. It was the “or Wednesday” that got me, combined with the email suggestion that I could always track my package for the latest updates. Oh can I? Thanks, that helps!
I have Prime shipping, and I have allowed many, many, many, many guaranteed-delivery-date packages to arrive late without consequence because it didn’t really matter and for the most part I don’t need packages to arrive that quickly. I mostly wanted the FREE part of the shipping rather than the 2-day part. But just last week we were charged ONE HUNDRED NINETEEN U.S. DOLLARS for a year of Prime shipping, which is high enough that Paul and I discussed cancelling it and came very close to doing so, and that discussion was fresh in my mind.
And also I was finally fed up. I love Amazon, and I love shopping there. But I keep hearing how it can be considered dicey to shop at Amazon for a variety of reasons. Meanwhile the rates for Prime keep going up, and more and more of the items don’t even qualify for Prime shipping (or perplexingly, some of them say they qualify and yet the cheerful prediction for arrival is four days or eight days or whatever) (honest to god, do not explain this to me, I already know there are “reasons!” and my complaint is that those are not GOOD reasons and/or that the items should not then claim to qualify as Prime items). And now they’re using their own Uber/Lyft-like delivery system which means strangers drive unmarked cars into my driveway and startle me, and these new delivery people keep falsely marking the delivery “handed directly to a resident,” making it difficult to protest to Amazon when it wasn’t in fact delivered at all, or when it was left in the dirt under a dripping roof. Plus, I have concerns about the vetting and pay/benefits of such non-employees.
So with all of this, with all of these costs paid in money and in ethical compromise, it should at least, at LEAST be reasonable to expect them to compensate customers when they don’t keep the few promises they DO make. So I contacted Amazon and they gave me a $10 credit. Which is nice, and I am satisfied: that’s one month’s worth of Prime.
But from now on I will be paying attention. I will notice which items guarantee the delivery date, and I will watch to make sure they arrive by that date; if they don’t, I will contact Amazon. Before, I let it slide. I let it slide again and again because I didn’t care enough and I didn’t know what to do when I DID care enough. And because I and many other people let it slide like this, Amazon felt comfortable continuing to push it. But they pushed it too far and too many times, and it crossed a line that forced me to notice and care, and now I DO know what to do, and so I will be doing it. If they had kept it at the old level, they could have gotten away with it basically forever. But because they went too far, they tripped a switch and I will now be tracking the situation closely. It is a useful metaphor for our times.
Here is how I got the credit:
1. Scroll down to the bottom of an Amazon page and select “Contact Us.”
2. It will ask a series of questions, with little pull-down menus. I selected that it was about “An order I placed,” and then I had to say “Choose different order” to find the one I wanted, and I selected that order. Then I selected “Problem with an order.” Then I selected “Shipping or delivery issues.” Then I selected “Shipment is late.”
3. It gave me a little “Did you know?” thing about tracking my orders. THANKS YES I KNOW I CAN TRACK MY LATE ORDER TO OBSERVE IT BEING LATE. I scrolled down a little further to “Or, talk to someone.” I would have preferred an email option, but it only had phone or chat, so I selected chat. It opened a new window and started a chat.
4. I kept in mind that the person who has to answer these chats is 100% not personally responsible for the late delivery of my package. I said that I’d received an email that my item would be late, and that I was writing to ask if that particular item had qualified for the delivery guarantee (I could not figure out how to tell; it apparently tells you during the ordering process but not afterward). The customer service representative asked for two minutes to investigate. When she came back, she said it had been shipped on time and the delay was the deliverer’s fault; she did the cut-and-paste things that every Amazon customer service rep does about how this doesn’t usually happen, they haven’t met their own standards of excellence, they apologize. Then she offered the $10 credit, and I thanked her for her help. The end.
Interestingly, this morning when I took their suggestion to track my package, I could see that the tracking had been updated: yesterday afternoon it said it was “out for delivery,” but now that has been revised to tell me that yesterday afternoon it was in fact MANY STATES AWAY. At 7:00 in the evening, two hours after they’d told me it would be delayed, it arrived at another location two states away. At 5:00 this morning it finally arrived in my state. So this means it is even less helpful than I’d thought to watch a package being late, since I can’t even watch it being late: I first have to watch it neeeeearly arrive on time, and THEN see it be cast backward into another dimension where it was late all along.
Thank you for much for spelling out the steps you took. I have been letting this slide as well, but will be putting your strategy to good use.
If you decide you want to ditch Amazon Prime but can’t quite make yourself do so AND you have Netflix, you can watch Hasan Minhaj’s episode about Amazon. I guess conversely, if you like Prime, don’t watch.
(I quit Prime some years ago, but then we switched to Fios at the end of last year and got a year of Prime free, and I am looking forward to my next illness, when I will binge Catastrophe and Mrs Maisel.)
I’m like you. I usually don’t care when a package is late, but sometimes I DO care, and every time I’ve contacted Amazon about it, they’ve been great about extending my Prime membership for an extra month at no cost. There was a brief period of time where a delivery company they had contacted with kept delivering my items to the wrong house, many blocks away. My address was always correct, they just had an idiot driver who didn’t read it carefully. Anyway, I ended up with almost a full year free, and I don’t think they use that company anymore.
I had the “all my stuff went to someone else” issue for awhile too, about 18 months ago. Always items that were not coming via Amazon Delivery, rather than UPS, FedEx or USPS. The people who would receive my stuff, would sometimes deliver it, but late enough that I had already re-ordered (using the chat interface). Well I didn’t need two of those items, so one always went back as a return/refund. It’s only happened once recently and it was a doozy to work out… they supposedly batched a couple of my orders, and upon delivery a picture was taken saying X, Y and Z were delivered. Well, Z wasn’t in the box. But there’s a picture of the box and it says Z was delivered. I did get it worked out eventually. But I’m not a fan of them combining two separate orders, especially when one is a subscribe and save item. I also get frustrated when UPS delivers to USPS for regular route delivery (this is not exclusive to Amazon, in fact Kohls is the biggest offender). Also stop delivering on Sunday! I order a lot of times on Fridays, and often Sunday is the delivery day for Prime items. Well, I don’t need it that soon BUT the “get a $1 credit” option doesn’t have it arriving for a week or longer. Can I get a Monday here?!?!
Sometimes watching the Tracking on packages is mind-boggling! I’m always baffled how something is “out for delivery” for 2 days.
Uh Amazon, love you, hate you.
Gah – always items that WERE coming Amazon Delivery (in my first few lines above…. derp).
Ooo! Ooo! I recently figured out how to stop Sunday deliveries! Go to your account, your addresses, then click on edit under your default address. Scroll down to the very bottom where it says Weekend Delivery and click on the line that says “I can receive packages on Saturday and Sunday” and it will show check boxes next to both Saturday and Sunday and you then UNCHECK Sunday and save changes! And then voila, no more Sunday deliveries! Prime two day shipping will automatically skip to Monday if it needs to!
Oh thank you – this is awesome!
I let it slide for years for the same reasons. Aside from strange tracking issues, I’ve observed, too, there are shenanigans with guaranteed arrival dates on the website. Sometimes the guaranteed arrival date is advertised as one date on the product page, but in checkout is a later date. That happened to me numerous times until they finally pushed it too far. I really needed something by the advertised date.
I want to cancel Prime. I hate Amazon enough that I’ve been shopping elsewhere for as much as I can.
Interesting they do that to their Prime-customers, too.
For me (with Amazon Germany though) it happened around Christmas 2017 when I wanted to order one last present. There were several options for the item I wanted and I had to look at a number of those first, since they mix Amazon and other sellers now and you only see that when going onto the product page, and then some other articles, too, to find those that would arrive on time and would push me over the €29 to get free shipping. They had at that point upped the free shipping from €19 to €29, so I wasn’t a very happy customer anyway.
After finally making it to the order screen, my things suddenly were scheduled not two days before Christmas but two (working) days after.
I didn’t order but first called them to see what was up with that and was told that the prediction is made for delivery from the closest warehouse that stocks it, but with me not being a prime customer, it would come from ones further away – in my case, Italy, and France – then be put together at a center in Germany and THEN sent to me. Nothing to do about that either, companies in Germany aren’t big on freebies for dissatisfied. So I scrapped my order and went into the city to buy it in a store instead.
In your case, in the USA, I think they likely have something similar going on with which warehouse is stocking things, but caused by the country being so big. It’s possible the page only shows the ideal shortest time for a hypothetical customer and then updates to the actual closest location to where you live once you go to checkout. Which is infuriating.
I had other instances with them with being treated worse than a normal customer would be elsewhere, just because I don’t have Prime, and it led to me spending less than half in 2018 than what I did in the years before. They don’t want my business? Then they don’t get it.
I’m with Shin ae. I’ve been letting his slide for years, too. But this weekend I ordered a BOOK, which should be straight forward for them, on Thursday and was told it would be delivered on MONDAY. Then I ordered another book on Saturday and was told it would arrive on Monday, too. Both books arrived Monday, but the book I ordered Thursday was damaged in an undamaged box. More and more books that I order from them arrived damaged in a perfectly fine box. I complained about the delivery time on the Thursday book and was pretty much given a *shrug*.
And, like others have said, more and more doesn’t even qualify for Prime shipping and when it does Amazon doesn’t even have the best price. You know what? I’m canceling my Prime membership today.
I have received a lot of damaged books in undamaged boxes, too! Dust jackets with black streaks or little tears, or book corners bent over. A lot of times I’m buying the book as a gift and so it really does matter to me that it look new and nice. (I mean, it matters if it’s for me, too, but it matters DEAL-BREAKINGLY if it’s a gift.)
Same!
The damaged book in an undamaged box is a pet peeve for me. When I first started ordering from Amazon, years ago-they shipped books shrink wrapped on a piece of cardboard so they stayed nice and safe in the box. Now they toss the whole order together, regardless of how things might be damaged. Then of course, the book orders where the books are tumbling around in the box, no packaging material at all. So frustrating!
For a space of time, I was getting books with what looked like grease hand prints on them. I sent those back!
I have been having the same Prime frustration. I am primely frustrated. Thank you for laying out the steps, because, yes, it has always been kind of a hassle to deal with it. But I am not going to let it slide anymore. (AND I am ordering more things from Target, which has free two-day shipping on LOTS of things and has so far always been on time.)
ALSO did you know that even though you can return most Amazon-fulfilled products for free that sometimes that doesn’t mean free return SHIPPING? I did not know that until I bought a very expensive and large coffee maker for my husband, and then found a better (MUCH better, like $50 better) version elsewhere, and asked to make my free return of the original. And then — ONLY THEN — found out that my “free return” option was to drive to the nearest Amazon drop off location. Or I could pay for return shipping! Okay, the Amazon drop off location is not SUPER far away, but it is in the middle of the city and it takes at least an hour to get there and then an hour to get back and there’s city parking to contend with and it’s a huge hassle and I will definitely be keeping an eye on that for the future. GLARE.
(Also: UGH. I feel so entitled and pouty, complaining about this stuff. And I 100% understand that Things Happen. But also, as you pointed out, $119 a year! That’s a lot of money! So I feel like it should work the way it is supposed to work, without being cagey about policies or unapologetically BAD.)
“Cagey” is a good word for it! Everything people have said is true, and I hate having to be so CAREFUL about what I’m ordering. Part of the appeal of Amazon is the fast-and-easy factor. If I have to be CAREFUL about it, I might as well get in my car and shop at Target. Amazon is often more expensive than just going to Target anyway. Sometimes I can get a good deal on something, but for day-to-day items, Target is better.
That’s not entitled. Afaik it was standard for a long time, and removing an option like that is basically like making the product people pay for (the product being Prime) more expensive on the sly. If on top of that, the product itself is also made more expensive on top of that, it’s more than enough to p*** people right off.
They recently and completely quietly changed the free return policy for their Prime members in Germany as well. My sister has prime, and ordered a video game for my nephew’s birthday that then wasn’t needed. When she went through printing the return label, she suddenly could only do so when choosing a “buying” option for it to the tune of about $6. Yeah, she wasn’t happy about that at all.
I think Amazon forgot that Prime for many people still has the highest value in not needing to worry about shipping at all. Shortest time frame possible, no extra cost for sending OR returning. For many, Prime isn’t worth the extra money just because they tack new shiny things on on top of it, when that core benefit is being slowly eroded.
I’ve never signed up for Prime. My regular old Am@zon account is satisfactory. Orders over $35 ship free. Many a time I’ve placed an order in the late afternoon and it’s arrived the next day. I guess I’ve been living lucky. And no, I’m not affiliated with Am@zon any way. Enjoy your new coffee pot very soon, I hope!
There is an app called Paribus that will track all of this for you. It will alert you when a delivery is late, and breaking Amazon’s delivery guarantee (if there is one.) It will also give you the exact verbiage to use when you contact Amazon, that you can copy and paste.
Also on the OMG am*zon, really? bus. In my neck of the woods, I have noticed that they have trouble counting to two, so things frequently take longer. I signed up for the free 30 day trial, but am not staying around for more. It hurts to say, because I also really dislike w*lm*rt for the way they have decimated so many small communities, but. . . their “free with $35 order” is far more reliable. Ugh! It is difficult to be a happy consumer these days, yes?
We quit Amazon Prime and are very happy with the decision.
We used Amazon quite a bit for our business, in a small rural town with no USPS street delivery in town. We have to have a PO Box. (The bit about USPS *forcing* us to rent a PO Box is also frustrating, but that’s another story.)
Amazon will not (or did not at the time we cancelled our subscription) guarantee delivery to a PO Box. And that’s fine. BUT sometimes they still chose to send thing USPS anyway. And that’s also fine. What was not fine is despite having two lines for an address and using both (putting our street address in case of FedEx or UPS delivery, PO Box in case of USPS delivery) Amazon would always, always refuse to guarantee delivery dates.
I did contact customer service and complain that Amazon was refusing my dual addressing but then also using USPS for a street address to which USPS does not deliver. They agreed it was frustrating but offered no solution.
I believe my husband ended up canceling the Prime subscription mostly do the stretching out of delivery dates, which he found the most frustrating. But the USPS delivery/not accepting a PO Box address thing had made me stop ordering a lot from them beforehand.
It’s been 3-4 months now. We got through the holidays without any crazy shipping charges and mostly finding things with free shipping in 5-10 days. 5 days was very close to the shipping time we were getting with the paid subscription.
Oh my gosh, same issues here! I don’t have Prime because I won’t that large amount, and usually I get free shipping anyway. But the fact that we have to get a PO Box that we have to pay for even though our town doesn’t have house to house delivery is bad enough, but then the whole “use both addresses just in case”, ugh. And then sometimes Amazon will start the shipment with UPS or FedEx (street address) and then switch it to SmartPost (USPS, no street address). Argh!!
Your instructions were so helpful, it inspired me to follow them and get reimbursed for a (small) package that never arrived (but was marked handed off directly) during the Christmas-hubbub. I was overwhelmed with figuring out how to start that process and engage with customer service, but with your instructions, I was able to power through it. I now feel exceedingly victorious for a Tuesday morning!
I had to cancel prime this year. “Had to”, ha. But I ordered a bunch of stuff on prime day and whatever driver for whatever service (not a big carrier, I think an unmarked car deal) either stole my packages or left them at a completely unrelated house or SOMETHING but I never got them, and then! Then! Amazon WOULD NOT REFUND MY ORDERS.
I had to dispute the charges with my credit card (WHICH IS SO STUPID BECAUSE IT GOES OUTSIDE OF THEIR NORMAL LOST PACKAGE PROTOCOL AND IT MAKES IT SO THEY CAN’T DISPUTE WITH THE CARRIER) and anyway It’s been months and I’m still mad.
I find that Target has nearly everything I want from Amazon, for nearly as cheap, but with really excellent shipping and customer service. Not clothes I guess, but household items and what have you. I also find I’m making way fewer impulse buys which is good for my wallet.
My husband bought me this exact same coffee maker for Christmas and I really like it.
I have complained about late deliveries before and not been offered a credit. Either I’m not doing it right or it depends on the person you talk to. Still frustrating.
You should try signing up for paribus. https://paribus.co/
It’s a website that you give access to your emails and it lets you know if a price drops and keeps track of when companies like amazon doesn’t come through on their shipping times. And then, it harasses them for you and you get some kind of refund $5 or $10.
I signed up for and forgot about it and then was pleasantly surprised when the caught something.
Amazon recently left a package of mine at another house. I know this because the picture of the house their driver took when dropping off the package was not my house. It also didn’t match the pictures that they had taken of my house on many previous package deliveries. So – I called them. Their suggestion was that I print out a picture of the wrong house, drive around my neighborhood (’cause he probably hadn’t missed by much) until I found the house pictured with the package, go up to the door, ring the bell and ask for my package. Seriously! This was their advice!
I hope she takes him for everything in the divorce.
I have cancelled Prime and have no intentions on restarting it yet. I thought with the higher price estimate they charged for the items, I had already paid for my “free shipping” a million times without the additional $119. And the shipping was never arriving within 2 days as promised — especially frustrating since I live in a major city with an Amazon warehouse in it. Literally, many items are 30 minutes away. I was done. I rarely shop them anymore and now occasionally use them as a search service ultimately purchasing elsewhere.
I have had similar issues with Prime and recently complained when an order placed on a Friday didn’t arrive at my house until the following Thursday. I was informed by customer service that Prime no longer means 2-day free shipping in that it’s 2 days from the date you place the order, but rather, 2 days from the date the order is turned over to the carrier. This frustrated me to no end, but some googling turned up similar experiences from others. Not sure when this changed and maybe it’s been like this for awhile and I haven’t noticed, but this may be the catalyst for cancelling my membership.
“see it be cast backward into another dimension where it was late all along” i’m dying hahahaaa
I want to break up with Prime. I really do. But with 2 babies I cannot quit the convenience of getting baby gear without leaving the house and without having to accumulate $35 in products first. I’m sorry, Amazon workers. I’m part of the problem!
Just to chime in why I don’t use Amazon – I have had to use them in other countries, because it literally costs $200 to send 4 books to Spain and there is no other choice – but I live in Seattle and just watching the corporate culture be so dismissive to its surroundings has REALLY bothered me. Every other big multinational company in our area “gives back” in some way – to schools, the city, sports, the arts and culture scene. I’m sure some of it is a great tax break for the corporations but hey, at least the ballet and art museum is being supported. Amazon minimally supports a single homeless shelter but overall, they are not what I consider to be good corporate citizens so I choose not to use them. Their whole HQ2 shenanigans didn’t make me feel any better about their intentions.
I know lots of people who work there and the scope of their ambitions makes me crazy – do they have to own EVERYTHING and crush everyone else? I have also watched the “independent contractors” load up their car with the packages and um, no. It seems so sketchy.
Downside: I really want to watch The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel – but luckily Delta had it on a flight so I wasn’t exactly cheating by binging it on the plane, was I? :) Also, I don’t live in a small city and recognize how difficult it is to get many items in smaller towns without Amazon. But if you have another choice, I urge you to choose it. My 2 cents.
Another Seattlite chiming in to day that Amazon is a terrible corporate citizen and I will not support them with my money. I think Kay describes it much better, I generally just say that they’ve raped and pillaged our city. They’ve brought in a ton of low wage jobs while driving rents and costs of living up with their higher wage jobs. All while paying ZERO federal taxes.
Homelessness has exploded in Seattle in the last 5 years, now all of my grocery stores have encampments behind them and the parks and playgrounds all have tents in them and RVs parked along the street.
I don’t hold Amazon solely responsible, we had an income inequality problem to begin with- but they added gasoline and lit a match.
This is fascinating to me. I’ve been a prime customer for years and have prob had two problems with deliveries and they fixed both of them. I never would have thought I’d see so many complaints. We definitely have the random car deliveries now but I still get everything on time with no issues. We are moving overseas this year and fully intend to rely on them delivering to our APO address so hopefully we don’t have any issues. (I do know that shipping to military addresses negates the whole two day delivery, obviously, but with prime video and music and reading I still feel like we get out money’s worth)
Unless you are living on a US military base, you won’t be able to access the videos or amazon first reads while overseas. A lot of that stuff is blocked based on IP address and a VPN doesn’t always/consistently work. Also, there are a lot of items that can’t be delivered to an APO address. Music seems to work, but I am not sure if that’s because most of the music is already downloaded to my phone.
That said, we’ve kept Prime cause shipping birthday/Christmas presents to family and friends in the states is way, way easier that way.
I use prime mostly bc shopping is labor and it save me time which I value highly. I think Amazon is boarderline evil so based on this string I’ll be looking at Target.
My gripe with all online shopping is the packaging. One order shipped in 5 boxes. Big boxes filled with air pillows for tiny not fragile item. Or the dreaded brown box in a brown box – why two boxes? Just slap a label on the one. It’s so wasteful.
Between online orders and Costco I feel like we use a trees worth of boxes every week (maybe some hyperbole on my part). Amazon would get all of my business if they took boxes back to reuse them.
I feel you on the packaging…however…you are not always reducing it when you shop in store.
Everything comes to our store in boxes. There is sometimes some air pillows and/or brown shipping paper inside there. There are often small boxes within the big box. There is ALMOST ALWAYS a plastic bag around each individual item.
I put my boxes up for free on Craigslist, I give my air pillows to the local Postal Express shipping place, I save some other stuffing that a specific store that does lots of shipping wants, and then I use the plastic bags to “show” items in our store (filling a backpack with them so the backpack looks better). I do have ways to directly recycle all of that stuff but I try to re-use it first.
So it is possible that you may have a small carbon footprint with online shopping if you are vigilant in re-using/recycling packaging vs. shopping at a retail store that throws all the packaging in the trash.
OMG! I just ordered stuff with a guaranteed delivery by Thursday–I needed it for a class Saturday and now delivery is Saturday which is TOO late for the morning class I’m teaching–I’m contacting them.
Prime to Alaska SUCKS we cant order after Thanksgiving or we get January delivery dates.
I’ve found that Amazon’s customer service can be VERY hit-or-miss. Like, one time I complained because an item arrived a day late (which I wouldn’t normally do, but I really needed it on the day it was meant to be delivered), and they gave me a free month of Prime. Another time an item arrived MONTHS later than expected (it was supposed to be a Father’s Day gift and it arrived in, like, August), and I got a “Sorry, this is a thing that happens and unfortunately we can’t do a single thing about it.” I mean, what?
OMG we had that too, with snowshoes, they came in May…due in February!
Where do you find the initial “contact us” button, please? We are trying to get a refund right this minute.
Let’s see if I can retrace my steps. I’m remembering just scrolling down and seeing it, but I can’t reproduce that. One way to do it is go to the main page, scroll down, click “Help” (under the “Let Us Help You” column), then scroll down and choose “Need More Help” from the bottom of the list; one of the options that brings up is “Contact Us.”
Thank you so much!!!
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I’ve had that happen a few times: delivered, handed off directly…
When the package definitely has not been delivered.
I once even had written on the box – couldn’t deliver – black dog in yard…. my dog is orange and is never alone in the infenced front yard!
Why do they do this?!
Are they late and won’t deliver when they’re supposed to do they just lie?
I can’t even believe I am typing this, but I am likely cancelling my Amazon Prime today! After being a HARD CORE amazon user, I have 3 issues that popped up today. First – double billing, separate dates for $119 prime. Second – two VERY expensive returns I made at Kohls have not shown up at amazon and I was just hit with those charges. I have the # to call, but pretty much nothing will keep me a customer at this point. I am seething. Good Bye Amazon!