I say this hesitantly because at least one of my readers works there and will probably be slightly offended (or just annoyed) by this.  But I am pretty frustrated by how amazon does some pretty senseless things with larger orders.

Last week as previously mentioned I bought a lot of things from them: a series of books, four video games, a hard drive, and a ds lite.  The ds lite and hard drive shipped from 3rd party sites and the rest was from amazon proper.  It asks me if I want to save money by shipping them together, so I agree to this.  Then yesterday I get a notice on my mailbox when I get home that a delivery was made, except that delivery goes to the sales office for the apartment so I can’t pick it up until the next day.  I want to know which of the three batches it was so I log onto amazon’s “where’s my stuff” and I see that the ds lite was scheduled for delivery yesterday, the hard drive scheduled for today, and the rest?

October 19.

Uh, okay.  It seems that one of the books I ordered isn’t released until then which means that it all its wisdom they decided to hold my entire order for three months until at which point the book goes on sale so they can ship it all together in one bundle.  Um..  So to get this straight: in order to save $5, I’m going to not get the video games I ordered to go with the video game system I ordered for three months?

I can hear someone say “but they told you that they were going to do this and you agreed to it”.  Which may be true, I’m not sure.  What I do know is that it’s an extremely horrible default and if they are going to do something like this they really ought to make it more clear what is going on to the end user.  I may not be the sharpest tool in the shed but I’m pretty certain that I’m more technically and internet savvy than the majority of amazon’s customers… so if I missed this I’m sure it happens all the time.

In defense of Amazon, I’m going to point out two redeeming factors.  One, they let you change your order so I once I discovered the error I could pretty easily change my shipping method and they’d ship me the games and books that had been released and it would arrive in a few days.  However since the games system already arrived, I wanted the games now.  And secondly, they let me cancel part of the order, so that is precisely what I did.  I went down the local GameStop and bought the games I would have ordered and my books will come next week and I’m fine with that.

So I’m not saying BOYCOTT AMAZON IS SO LAME, I’m just frustrated with the baffling default that forced me to suffer through the annoying experience that is retail shopping.  Seriously, I think the staff at GameSpot are actually chimpanzees — one of them threw feces at me while I was checking out my order.  Regardless, I now have a DS lite and my silly games.  Animal Crossing is so frigging awesome.