Amazon <3
What you see on the left side is what I discovered in my latest book shipment from Amazon. The box looked like it had been run over by a truck or something. Luckily only one of the books was badly damaged, The Amulet of Samarkand. This is a pretty high quality hardcover book, so it must have taken some force in order to disfigure it that much, the book is completely bent and has a severe rift going down the cover. My first thoughts were that Amazon sucks ass, but to be fair - it was most likely some idiotic terminal worker that fucked it up and it was completely beyond their control. My second thoughts were: fuck, now I’ve got to go through that whole refund/replacement ordeal and ship the stupid book back. I’ve been quite lucky during my online ordering years, only once before have I had to go through this step, but it’s a real pain in the ass going to the post office and filling out all the forms needed etc.
Now here’s why I’m completely in love with Amazon. Not only do they have a great selection of stuff at reasonable prices, but after filling out a refund form on their page, 1 hour later I get this wonderful message:
I am sorry for the problem you experienced with your shipment. As
the cost of return shipping is prohibitively expensive in this case,
you do not need to return the original item.
I’ve placed a new order for the item “The Amulet of Samarkand (The
Bartimaeus Trilogy, Book 1)” to be shipped to you as soon as
possible. The charge for this order is $11.67. Please know that I
have requested a refund in the same amount from your original
order. Both the charge and refund will be applied to the credit
card used on the original order.
…
With a big corporation like Amazon, you’d might think that the service would suffer, but the few experiences I’ve had with customer service has been absolutely fantastic so far. They seem to do everything right.