I’ve been a little hesitant to write about this because I’d prefer to keep this site more or less lighthearted. On the other hand, if I’ve had a bad experience with a product or service, it seems kind of unfair to keep it quiet only to have someone else run into the same thing. And on the third hand, I hate to come across as a crankypants, but here we go…
I recently ordered a filter from Adorama–a retailer based in New York. Obviously, the company has been around for quite a while, so someone must be happy with them, but I wasn’t. For those who want to skip to the end, I did eventually receive my package, so you can count that as one weight lifted from the shoulders of the world.
My tale begins, as many do, at Amazon.com. I was looking for a nice UV filter for my nice zoom lens, and I chose a B+W. The price was right, and the filter was actually being sold through Amazon by Adorama.
Adorama shipped the filter quickly. I ordered it on September 24, and by September 27, online tracking told me that it was sitting in a UPS facility near the building where I work.
Then it disappeared.
I’ll point out right away that it wasn’t UPS that lost it–at least not directly. Adorama shipped my package through a service called UPS “Mail Innovations.” (I insist on using quotes around the name, because I believe it’s meant to be ironic.) In this system, UPS hands off the package to the US Postal Service for final delivery.
I could write an entire column about how silly this is. Suffice to say that I work five minutes from O’Hare Airport–one of the largest transportation hubs on the planet. There is a UPS truck at my building at least twice a day, five days a week. I understand that UPS “Mail Innovations” might make sense delivering to a rural area that doesn’t see many UPS trucks, but it makes no sense whatsoever in Rosemont, IL.
So UPS gives the package to the Post Office and it drops from radar. It’s gone. I gave them a few days before I called the postal facility to ask if they would consider delivering my package anytime soon, and if not, might I be able to just come pick it up? A very personable man on the other end runs the tracking number and tells me that the package must have been misrouted. It will probably be scanned at some other facility before being rerouted back to me.
No problem. I understand that both UPS and USPS deal with hundreds of millions of packages, and no matter how hard they try, some are bound to get misplaced. It’s disappointing, but it’s a fact of life.
At this point, it’s Wednesday, October 1. I decided to contact Adorama’s customer service department to let them know that UPS “Mail Innovations” isn’t innovative at all, and in the future, I’d be willing to pay a couple of extra bucks to have my packages delivered the old-fashioned way.
You can’t e-mail them directly, though. They have a web form that you fill out and it e-mails the relevant department. So I filled out the form explaining my situation and hit “submit.”
A few minutes later, I received an e-mail explaining that the company is closed for Rosh Hashana and will reopen in a few days. They aren’t accepting any e-mail during the holiday, so please resubmit on Friday if the matter is still relevant. They apologize for any inconvenience.
Inconvenience? I just wrote four paragraphs and they were deleted faster than the package I haven’t received.
I have no problem with Adorama being closed for the holiday. In fact, I respect it. But I don’t think the same courtesy should be extended to the company’s e-mail servers. If e-mail servers really do need to be shut down under religious law, then the least the company can do is announce that fact on its website and…wait for it…turn off the e-mail-to-oblivion customer service interface.
Fortunately, I still had my browser window open. I was able to back up a few pages to copy and save my note.
On Friday, still no sign of the package, so I went to the Adorama site again and pasted my original text into the window, updated to reflect the two-day delay. In an hour or so, I received an e-mail from an Adorama employee asking for more info. After a few exchanges, he told me that he had contacted USPS, which would be conducting a search for my package. If nothing turned up within eight business days, we could revisit the situation. I asked about canceling my order and starting fresh, and he told me we could discuss that when when the eight business days were up on October 15.
Sounds like a brush-off to me. Let’s see what happens, and we’ll deal with you if the problem doesn’t fix itself.
Five more days of stewing and I sent another note to Adorama. I’m done, I said. I had planned to use the filter during the previous weekend’s shoot and I never received it. Let’s just cut our losses. Refund my card, we’ll call it a no-fault draw, and maybe we can do business in the future.
That was Wednesday, October 8, otherwise known as Yom Kippur. I had just written another well-thought out note to the Adorama customer service department, and it had again been deleted. Please resubmit on Friday if the matter is still relevant. We apologize for any inconvenience. ARRGH! Punk’d again!
This time I had closed my browser window, so I lost what I wrote. Fantastic. I kept stewing until Friday. I planned to write them a shiny new tirade telling them what they could do with their web interface. And before I could get around to it, the package showed up in my mailbox. Like magic. A mere two weeks after it came to towns.
What did I learn? I learned that I will avoid items that are shipped through UPS “Mail Innovations.” I learned that I should copy and save any long note before I submit it via a web form. Adorama learned nothing. And for that reason, I learned that I won’t be dealing with them again.