Tyler On Everything

As a first time home-owner I feel like I should have a list of renovations for spring. So I do:

• Replace main floor carpet with hardwood
• Build backyard fence
• Finish second half of basement, including installing bathroom

The last item is probably the most ambitious. I will try to get started on it as soon as possible, although the items are pretty close to priority going forward.

Here are some diagrams of the changes I would like to make in the basement.

Before:

After:

I’m like that wife on Jerry Springer… I keep getting the crap kicked out of me and I keep coming back!

BestBuy (bricks and mortar and dotCa) have terrible service. There is no denying it. Quite possibly the worst service I have ever encountered, especially when you consider the general price of the items. As bad as the customer service is at the store it is even worse online.

This is the latest situation. Two weeks ago BestBuy -both in store and online- had Black Hawk Down on Blu-Ray -my favourite movie- on sale for $19.99. Of course as the -somewhat- proud owner of a now victorious Blu-Ray player, I went out to get it. Hmmm… Sold out. No problem, I went home to check the remaining stock in other stores. Sold out at both the Kanata store and Ottawa East store. After checking around it was sold out at every store.

No problem, I will order it online and just mark it for store pick-up, to get the price. No dice, for store pick-up it must be in stock. No problem, I will just have it delivered, surely like Amazon.ca it must be free. Nope. $2.98. No problem, that isn’t a huge amount to pay. So I ordered it as well as T-2 on Blu-Ray.

So last week I go to check the order, T-2 is in stock, but BHD is still not. I check the website, Kanata has it in stock, the other stores do not. No problem, I wait patiently.

This week I check, all stores have it in stock, online shopping still marked as not in stock. Hmmm… not only that but the price has increased to $28.99. I start to check other stores in Ontario and other provinces. They all have it in stock!

I start to get angry, as only someone as anal retentive as myself can. I email customer service. They respond:

Currently, Black Hawk Down (Bilingual) (2001) (Blu-ray) is on special order at our central warehouse. As our store inventory is separate from the inventory at our web store, sometimes a product may be in stock in your local Best Buy Canada retail store, and out of stock on our web store, or vice versa. We understand your frustration, and apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you.

This doesn’t sound right to me, so I ask about converting the order to a store pick-up, since its now in stock. The response:

Once an order is placed for shipment, it cannot be changed to in-store pickup. For an in-store pickup, the product must be in-stock and available in the retail store at the time the order was placed. If you place an in-store pickup order now for this product, it will not be for the sale price. We do not match prices on any past sales, however, the price on your online order number 7073635 will remain at the discounted price when it ships.

I get ever more angry. I question whether it will ship, and point out that I have had other bad experiences, including waiting 3 months for a DVD to ship. I mention that I believe that they are holding up the online orders in hopes that customers who purchased the item at the lower price would get frustrated and cancel their orders. This is not what I believe, but I figured it was the best way to get someone with more authority into the situation.

Cory is replaced with Kris:

We apologize for any inconvenience that you may have experienced and we thank you for your e-mail.

The item in question, Black Hawk Down on Blu-ray DVD, is currently Out of Stock. We are awaiting a shipment of this item from the manufacturer, once we’ve received this shipment your item will be shipped.

Delivery is subject to warehouse availability. Out of stock items will be shipped as soon as possible, upon arrival from the manufacturer/publisher. Please take shipping time into consideration.

For more information please view the following:

http://www.bestbuy.ca/helpsection/EN/online_policies.asp?onlinepoliciesID=1&logon=&langid=EN#delivery

At this point I angrily point out that I am taking availability into account. The exact item is available at every single store in Canada and it should not be a problem to either have one shipped to me, or made available for me to pick it up. I suspect that they can not accommodate this as the online store is operated separately from the bricks and mortar locations. Regardless the fact that their ordering service would let things get into such a situation is simply appalling. I will keep pursuing this to see if I can get something out of the situation. Regardless, I would sincerely advise against shopping at BestBuy.ca

Morons!

Complete and utter MORONS!

I ordered some stuff off of eBay from a guy in Toronto, not hugely expensive stuff,  so I really didn’t expect him to ship FedEx. I had it sent to the house as I expected it to be regular ExpressPost. Anyway, yesterday I got an email with FedEx tracking. I checked it out and saw yesterday morning that a delivery attempt had failed -I wasn’t home to sign. I phoned FedEx and asked when the package would be back at the depot. They unfortunately could not tell me, but said that it would be close to 7pm that evening.

That was a little late for me on Valentine’s Day so I requested that they not make a delivery attempt the next day, and that I would pick it up during the day -As I work about 5 minutes from the depot. About 30 minutes ago, I was about to go pick up the package, but I decided to check the tracking again, and make sure that it is still at the depot. ITS NOT! Its on the truck for delivery. I phoned -absolutely furious- to have them tell me, that it isn’t their job to leave it at the depot, that it is their job to deliver it. I told them that I would not be at that location during the day -EVER!- and asked what would happen if they couldn’t deliver it. They told me it would be sent back to the shipper. Which leaves them as completely incapable of doing their job! FedEx is on the list.

One of my guilty pleasures is to go to Amazon.com and start browsing movies or books that I have really enjoyed. Then I got to the 1/5 star reviews and read people shitting all over them. It is quite entertaining to see what some moron who thought that Independence Day was the best movie ever made thought of A History of Violence.

After a while of doing this I am starting to realize that you may be able to tell more about a movie from reading the 1/5 then from reading the 5/5. Real morons seem to be able to out themselves pretty quickly when their medium is the written word. It is quite amazing really, but it seems that stupidity is doubled when they put pen to paper, and it only goes up from there when the internet is involved. Of course this does assume that I will enjoy movies that idiots hate.

Oh well, its always entertaining seeing people continually misspell the most simple words. Once again the internet does seem to bring out all the crazies, that must be why I’m writing this blog.

Got my second Enbridge bill last night. $240.74. With the equal billing my credit after paying would be: $210.41.

Gah. Morons.

So I called this morning and this time actually talked to someone moderately useful. He lowered my equal billing gas charge from $210 a month to $85. My monthly bills are now $109.49. Although I still think I may be building up a large credit as the weather gets warmer for the next month.

I talked to a few people at Richcraft and apparently lots of new customers are having the same problem. When I talked to the guy at Enbridge he actually asked me if the house was vacant. Very funny and pretty unbelievable.

So for a second I am going to forget that Amazon.com has a gamut of great products at very competitive prices, products that dotCa just doesn’t carry. For the moment I am going to focus on the fact that the identical items are frequently at very different prices.

I recently placed an order from dotCom and I will use that as a comparison. For the comparison I will take USD and CAD to identical, as at the moment there is almost no difference. For the comparison I ordered 3 blu-ray discs:

• Rescue Dawn [Blu-ray]
• The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford [Blu-ray]
• Planet Earth - The Complete BBC Series [Blu-ray]

The total from Amazon.com with shipping is: $121.81

Now that may not be the actual total as it is possible that I may be charged tax plus a handling fee at the border. Tax would be 13% of $121.81 = $15.84. The handling fee from Canada Customs is $5. How they can charge you a handling fee to charge you money is beyond me, and should be saved for another entry.

That would bring the total to $142.65, although its not guaranteed that I will be charged customs.

Now to have a look at the same 3 item total (with free shipping) from dotCa: $169.35

That is a difference of $26.70 if you get charged duty/taxes.

Amazon.ca really needs to get their act together and bring their prices more closely inline with the dotCom prices. I will note that it is not always such a large discrepancy, so it is worthwhile checking. Getting the items through customs is also more of a challenge and will take longer. So if there is something that you are anxious for -No Country For Old Men perhaps- then it may be worthwhile to order -or preorder in my case- from dotCa.

The city of Ottawa is a lot like Enbridge gas. They both like to rip me off. Like Enbridge the city sent me a bill for water and sewer that was completely estimated. Now not as bad as Enbridge, the city only doubled it. I called them, and they were very apologetic and told me to simply call after any errors. It is quite amazing but the city is way better than Enbridge.

I should also mention when I tried to call them, I called, pushed 1 for English, the phone rang and boom. Person. Unbelievable. I don’t think I am going to need a new spreadsheet for my water and sewer.

Rogers loses. Last week with my new LCD TV I picked up the Rogers HD box. Does it work? Yeah, kinda. What is it lacking? HDMI! It has component video, but that is no where near HDMI. About the only solution I have at the moment is to get a DVI<–>HDMI cable and then use a digital audio cable.  So back to MonoPrice.com I go.

Bell has HDMI, they win.

I am very determined to show Enbridge that they are idiots. I keep turning down the thermostat, I have spreadsheets tracking my gas usage, this is not good for me, this is not good for them. I am hoping after I make them look like real idiots I can get over this.

At the current moment it looks like my actual usage come March will be less than their estimated usage for January.

Yes that is correct, it looks like it will take me 3 months to use what they think I should use in one month.

I still haven’t lowered myself to checking what my neighbours use through sneaking peeks at their meters. Maybe tonight.

He saved Best Buy from the list. He finally rectified what should never have been a problem. I can’t understand how its possible for them to provide such poor service, when you are spending $3k on a TV. They actually seemed annoyed when I tried to apply some of the discounts that I was entitled to, such as:

• $50 off- TV out of stock
• Free shipping- TV out of stock
• $100 off- brought in an old tube TV
• Free Blu-Ray player
• Free Football
• Free NFL DVD
• $100 off- purchase of Rogers (gah) HD Box

All in all there was a lot of money coming off the price of the thing. In the $1000 range. Anyway, I would point out that they forgot to include one of the $50 discounts and they would say: “You really care?”

I couldn’t believe it, apparently they have a lot of independently wealthy people who work at Best Buy who don’t care about $50.

Anyway, after getting it ordered I started waiting for it to come in. I could never get them to answer the phone at the Ottawa West store, so I called the Ottawa East store. They told me that they had 12 in the warehouse. Once again I phoned and waited (while their phone rang) for 25 minutes. After that time they told me that I would have to go in to book the delivery.

Again I mission in and receive even worse service. The guy was actually flippant asking me why I cared so much about whether I get the TV right now since the layaway plan guaranteed the price. He couldn’t seem to comprehend why I would care about a $3000 bill sitting on my credit card without actually having the TV. That ended with their ordering system being down.

Like the annoying asshole that I am, I spent the night phoning asking about the state of their ordering system. Finally it was back online. They still couldn’t book the delivery over the phone. I went in and the same asshole told me that it was offline, at which point I had to inform him that I just called and someone told me it was back working. He still didn’t want to try, I got a little angry and he agreed to try again. It was working.

It was at this point that he pawned me off on some guy named Vince - Inventory Manager… He was awesome. It took a whil, but I finally got everything booked for delivery. -There was only 1 left in the warehouse when my booking finally went through- He actually treated me with some respect, and got things solved. He solved BestBuy from the list. They really need to consider a commission based system, to try to get their employees to treat people with respect.

Sigh… Maybe they will be on the list.