Tomasz Korwel
programmer, administrator, engineer - my everyday fights with reality

Nothing else for now, my brain is washed out…

I went to Sugar Bottom couple of days ago in preparation for Sugar Bottom Scramble (I plan to run in Beginner category). I took my video camera with me, mounted remote on my sun glasses and off I went. Unfortunately everything looks much different when you stand straight so the camera pretty much looks into the ground, but we’ll get there next time :-)

Recently I wanted decided to buy small additional piece to our photo equipment. Quick check in Google revealed that my options are pretty much limited to:

a) internet stores with no retail location, with what looked like decent selection and good prices
b) eBay
c) internet stores that belong to big, well known retail companies using internet in addition to their regular operations.

Prices for this particular piece were growing in order presented above. I was a little bit surprised by the difference in prices between stores from a) and eBay. Just a little bit, because I learned over the years that eBay is no longer the cheapest source of goods and if you look deeper, you’ll probably find thing you want cheaper. What intrigued me was the difference. You rarely can find a place 25% cheaper than eBay (we are speaking about new stuff worth a little bit more than $10).

Anyway, I’ll decided to give them a try. I picked one, soniccameras.com made and order and waited. Imagine my surprise when the very next morning I received an email saying:

Thank you for your order. Your order number is: 30206

This email is to confirm receipt of your online order with us.
For your security, please call us at 1-888-450-4111, Option 1
to provide a verbal confirmation so that we can ship out your
order. If you have already called and confirmed your order,
you may disregard this request.

Thanks again for shopping with us.

When I called nice guy told me that they are very sorry but the item is back ordered, I’m 94th in the line and expected wait is around 6 weeks and if I want to wait. Sure I didn’t.

So I canceled the order and went looking for another one. I found one suggested by several price comparing sites, prestigecamera.com. This time I looked not only for price (which was about 10% more than the first one) but also for clear indication that item is in stock. This one clearly said so. So I placed an order. Imagine my surprise when the very next morning I received an email saying:

We thank you for choosing Prestige Camera as your choice
for all your photographic equipment.

In order to further verify your order #53555510, we will
need to speak with you on the phone. Please call our
processing department at 1-800-xxx-xxxx extension
Extension xxx so we may verify and process your order.

I called them and this time story was a little bit different. Again nice man said that the item I ordered is for Japanese market and it won’t work in USA. They have another similar item though designed for US market for the price x. That really pissed me off. Not only there was no info on their site about this, no (as he claimed) pop-up allowing me to choose which option I’d like, The price he offered was equal to MSRP and way above everything else I saw on the Internet. I canceled the order, again.

So I went with eBay, placed an order, payed with PayPal and within 12h received USPS tracking number showing me that the item shipped.

Bottom line: It took less than 3 days to completely ruining opinion I had about internet stores without retail outlet and all price comparing sites. Looks like they are abused to get traffic to scam stores trying to either rip you off on price, or hold your money for unknown number of weeks with vague promise of delivery.

Next time I’ll think twice before I place an order on thing I need pretty quickly.

Today I saw funny thing on the washing machine description flyer:

20 washing modes (e.g. mini 30, hand washing, baby, mix 40, wool, cotton).

Since when do we wash children in washing machines?

Short two loops done this morning to warm things up before so boring day at the office. Each of them covered 2.5 miles of hilly gravel road and 1.7 mile of paved one treated mostly as recovery part :-). Main focus was placed on keeping cadence on the steady level around 80 rpm. As you can see average cadence of 81 pretty much nailed it down.

Click on the image to see full version.