I hate the Internet. It’s full of empty, empty promises.
Four weeks ago I ordered a digital camera off the ‘net. I felt smug: I
was using the newest way to find low prices: Froogle. Froogle is
Google’s latest brainchild — it crawls the net, looking for anything
that could be an item for sale. Then it indexes it, records the price
and takes a thumbnail picture of it.
So when I typed “Fuji Film Finepix 2650” into Froogle four weeks ago,
I was pleasantly surprised to see the camera priced everywhere from
$140 to $320. Wow!
I found the site that was selling for $140 — even once shipping was
factored in, $165 is half the price I could have paid, if I wasn’t
careful.
To be extra smug, I ordered an AC adapter as well. I found a site
selling it for $20 — good times, right?
Last week my AC adapter arrived. No sign of the camera.
Three days ago, I called up the company. “WHERE IS IT?” I screamed.
The sales rep politely informed me it had been on back order for three
weeks. Was this printed on the site? Of course not. They had every
intention of shipping it to me as soon as it became available —
perhaps in the next month or so?
You know that movie, “Fifth Element”? Yeah. At one point in the movie,
the evil villian ZORG is given some bad news by one of his underlings.
“I am -very- disappointed,” he says. BOOM — guy on the other end of
the phone line dies in a catastrophic explosion. Bet he didn’t see
that coming — an exploding phone booth!
As a journalist, I have no such superpower. Instead, I CANCELLED MY
ORDER! Yes! Take that, dumb Web site! The same day, I used bizrate.com
to find a good price on the camera. I ended up paying $20 more.
I’m still angry at the Internet. But this morning, when I logged onto
Fedex’s site, I saw my camera had made its way from New York to
Oakland to Portland and had just checked into the sunny suburbs of
Springfield!
Hot damn! My camera! Now to order the memory card…