Since I live in the middle of nowhere I have a pretty good idea of which places are good at online business and shipping. This last xmas shipments from several places just never arrived. Since there was always something falling apart at that time I just didn’t pay attention and figured I’d sort it out when I had a minute. So I finally started doing that last month. I started with Amazon. They used to be very good at customer service but since COVID they just stopped caring. Even if the mistake is theirs they make you pay $7 to ship anything back in order to get a replacement. If it is my fault that’s fine, but they should pay for their fuck ups.
With Walmart they’re actually getting better, but only a little. Like Amazon, if a shipment goes missing, they don’t do anything. They just wait until you ask. When I finally did they sent me a another of the thing I ordered at no cost to me. They also gave me 5 Walbucks to spend on my next order, so that was nice.
Target sent me the missing thing with no trouble at all. There was no bonus to me, but that’s fine. I just want the thing I paid for and the process was relatively easy.
Big Bad Toy Store has never lost a package and in the 20+ years I’ve done business with them only one thing ever arrived damaged. It was recent, but the actual item was fine and I didn’t care about the box. It looked to me like it was packed by someone who was going to quit. Since it was so abnormal I just ignored it and the next time I made a purchase everything was normal again. Maybe holiday stress got to someone.
Recently I decided to start buying some of my manga from Barnes & Noble so that Amazon won’t be the only bookseller someday. Unfortunately B&N aren’t very good at online selling yet. My order came over the course of 3 months. Each time they would send one book they would charge me the full order amount then refund me for the books that weren’t actually shipped. In theory the last of the 5 books will arrive around March 14th. 3 days after the initial update after they told me it would take a week to ship all the books. So, not a perfect experience, but I will, theoretically, get the books and not have to buy then at 3 times cover price from Amazon’s shitty 3rd party sellers. On balance I’m not dissuaded from using B&N just yet. Hopefully they will get better with support and maybe I can move toward using them exclusively for books if they earn it. At the moment Amazon, Target, and Walmart ship books with absolutely no care at all. If they arrive undamaged it’s practically a miracle. Generally I’m not super picky if a book gets a little corner ding, or a folded page, but having one bent in half and then being told I have to pay the full price to ship a replacement doesn’t sit right with me. So far B&N have sent most of the books in a rigid mailer. Hopefully the one bubble mailer was an outlier.
As far as problems go having shipping issues isn’t all that bad, but I’m not so successful that I can continually absorb these small fees. When you enter into a contract with a seller both parties should uphold their end. That doesn’t seem like an unreasonable stance.
Best Buy and Gamestop are so bad at shipping that I just stopped buying from them altogether. Gamestop is much worse than Best Buy though. Best buy doesn’t care, but Gamestop seems to actively hate its clientele. It’s the only place where I’ve received an obviously shop damaged item and they straight up told me, “Too bad, no refunds.” in response. They didn’t even pretend to give a shit. On some level I almost respect that.
Hasbro fucks up all the time, but they almost always just send you whatever random shit is closest to their desk instead of actually trying to send you the thing you ordered. They’re actually notorious for doing that, but it’s not like there’s someone else to go to for their products, so it’s like being in an abusive relationship with them on some level. You just gotta have these lumps of plastic to try and fill the empty void where your soul is supposed to go, so when they tell you to kick rocks you just take it. Like the worthless, little, bitch you know you are deep down.
The absolute gold standard of customer service is LEGO. There is no other company that even comes close to doing whatever they can to aid the customer. As long as you can prove you bought what you said you bought they will replace damn near anything for any reason. They might ask a couple of questions, but in almost every case they just send you replacement parts and there’s nothing else to it. Basically, if you have the unique code from an instruction booklet you can get whatever it is you need fixed. Even parts that you aren’t allowed to order extras of. I once bought a set that had all the minifigures taken out, so I asked if they would replace the one unique character and they sent him to me for free. A character, by the way, that has never been reissued since. Zeb, from Star Wars Rebels. He’s not even in the new Ghost set, or any set from the one scene he was in from the Mandalorian. Anyway, they are so nice I only ask for help when it’s really something I can’t fix on my own with spare parts. I assume other people must be the same way because if it got abused I’m sure they wouldn’t keep bending over backwards for people. Anyway, that’s what I’ve been sorting out for a couple of days so that’s what I was thinking about when it came time to blog.

Support links continue to call out to you from above the blog. As always, I hope you have a nice weekend, and return safely here on Wednesday. Until next we meet, may your gods bless and keep you, or may the cold, unfeeling, universe take no notice of you.

27 Comments

“the universe is cold and unfeeling?”
sounds about right to me lol, but that’s no reason to get depressed, we’re humans, we always say “f*ck” to the universe

I think there is a, [1955 era?], poem-like story, that goes something like this:

A furious man, at night, runs out of his house.
He raises his fist to the stars and the sky and shouts, “I EXIST!”

The night’s sky replies: “That does NOT create in me, a SENSE of responsibility”.

I remember something like that in a scince-fiction magazine in the 60’s. Probobly Analog. They had a practice of filling a page with shorts like this if otherwise a regular story would end with space left on the page.
Only in that short fragment I read the man said it to the Universe and wasn’t furious and didn’t first run out of his house.

Heh, heh,
Yeah.
The story you mention is likely the original.
I think I found my story on brainyquote [dot] com, or some other, “scholarly” site like that!
:D

Yes the universe does indeed “Not care” about what you do. Or don’t do.
That sort of sucks. But on the plus side that means that nothing is stopping you from exercising that free will of yours except the physical and mental limitations placed upon yourself.

If you want to live in a just world you have to put that justice out there.
There is no justice but what you make. And on your quest the universe will not aid you or stop you specifically.

Run that equation in the opposite direction and it will also hold true. THere is no cruelty in this world that you do not make. The more cruelty you put out there into your world the more likely you will find it coming back at you.

The universe is entirely indifferent to you. That is both a freeing and alarming truth to grasp hold of.
It is not out to get you; it is not trying to help you. Most of everything that happens to you, especially as an adult, is a direct or indirect result of things you have said, done, or left unsaid or undone. Most people who are consistently around you treat you in a way that is reflective of how you treat them, to varying degrees (because the same holds true of them; they also affect those around them by the way they treat them).
We have enormous ability to influence our own lives, in subtle nudges. We have very inadequate ability to tightly control our lives, to make everything go exactly the way we want (other people most especially).
We cannot demand an apple appear in our hand and expect it so. We can plant apple seeds in the ground today, and in what seems to us very far in the future, we can reap a bounty 100x greater than the single apple.
Too many people, upon realising their helpless inability to materialize an apple on demand, stop planting any seeds, then look to the person who planted years ago, and can now reach up and grab any apple they like whenever they please from their abundant harvest, and dismiss that person as lucky and undeservedly favoured by the universe.
But the universe is indifferent to you, and to everyone else as well.

“Unfortunately B&N aren’t very good at online selling yet.”

I’ve heard this from three people now, so I’m taking it as truth.

If I may ask, what month is it in-universe, given Jessica’s hat & scarf? I’m sorta looking forward to Mom Blackwell welcoming Thomas and Carol for Thanksgiving.

It’s Quintillis. It’s just a regular night but she’s a woman so she’s always cold no matter what.

Quintilis is July, I must admit, I’ve never seen a woman bundle up that much in the midwest in July, even at night.

I’ve had Amazon Prime for so long that I’d forgotten how regular Amazon works. Being able to send almost anything back without having to even box it (exception: third party seller stuff usually does have to be reboxed) has spoiled me. To the point that I will buy three hats and send two back because I can’t tell which one will fit me.

I have Prime but there are no drop off points nearby. It’s minimum 2 hours to the nearest one, which would cost more than the cost to pay for shipping. The rules have been altered but city dwellers likely won’t notice them.

I’ve also had almost entirely positive experiences with Amazon. The only time I’ve ever needed to return something it was my own fault for not reading the description a little closer. I’ve never received a damaged item, aside from a couple of cases of minor, purely cosmetic damage to outer packaging. The one time a shipment went missing, they sent a replacement at no additional charge before I even knew it was lost. Pretty much the only big complaints I’ve had revolved around things Amazon couldn’t really control, like the time a neighbor and I got very similar packages on the same day and the letter carrier put them in the wrong mailboxes. (We ended up trading packages and both got what we ordered.) Then there was the time I had a book on pre-order for TWO YEARS, but that’s on the publisher; Amazon can’t ship me stuff they haven’t received.

Pretty sure Gamestop has always hated its customers, even back when people still bought games in physical form. But the rise of Steam and the universal move to downloadable games really destroyed what little was good about Gamestop and forced them to go all in on the despicable used-games market, and that just dragged them down into the mud to die.

I hate GameStop because they bought out ThinkGeek and then destroyed what they bought. Fuck GameStop!!!

GameStop is the cancer of video game retail.

Yeah, at first I liked it because they made brick and mortar ThinkGeek stores, so while the website died there was now a physical shop at the mall I could go to and hang out and browse all the cool stuff. Then that closed down too and was replaced with a normal GameStop with more of a focus on merch while the GameStop that already existed in the mall continued to focus primarily on games. I bought a lot of great stuff that were ThinkGeek original products that just don’t exist anymore, and that’s sad. I’d like to be able to replace my Tesla Watch because it broke, and while my Spellbook Backpack is still functional, it’s gotten *very* worn down and beat up since I use it for my LARP character. The character’s gonna be retired soon, so it’s not like I *need* a replacement, but I’d kind of like to have one in good condition again for if I ever decide to trot the old costume out.

Have to admit I’ve always been a little confused that people expect the universe to do things like care, or have “meaning”.

I know somebody that lives in a very small town in Alabama that says Gamefly does a decent job getting physical games to her.

AFAIK the universe is not really a conscious being in any meaningful sense, and therefore has no ability to care. It doesn’t love you, it doesn’t hate you, it just is. As a sapient being, dealing with that is your problem.

Meaning is our responsibility.

Maybe that’s why some people still insist on being products of intelligent creation like God, so that their life CAN have meaning and they’re not stuck in an endless existential crisis.

I work at one of the Kansas City Amazon Warehouses and the AI does not care if your order has a book or not. They want you to shove 3 items into a box in one minutes and I have never seen bubble wrap, only those puff bags. You’re honestly better off saying the item didn’t show up vs getting a replacement for a damaged item.

I think i get what Jo means.

It’s not so much that the universe DOESN’T care, moreso that it CAN’T care. The universe doesn’t have a mind, it doesn’t have emotions, it’s just a place. Your apartment “doesn’t care” if you are happy. Not because it’s cold and unfeeling, but because it doesn’t have the capacity TO care.

Something like that?

Yaayy! I caught up!

Waaah! I caught up!

I started reading BF in October2022, on the recommendation of my son. On the strength of his recommendation, and my own curiosity, I kept reading even though I did not yet like any of the characters except maybe Ed, or sometimes Jo or Nina, until one evening I found myself eager to click to the next page because I couldn’t wait to see what happened next. (That was a little before color.) Your storytelling was compelling enough to thoroughly hook me. Bravo! Bravissimo!

I have been savoring my way through the comic–and all your author blogs and all the comments–ever since, and have come to really like nearly every character. I have enjoyed your art from the get-go.

Thank you for many hours of enjoyment. I look forward to many more, and I wish you all the best.

Thank your son for me, he sounds like an intelligent, cultured, individual. I’m glad to know you came to enjoy my work eventually. Thank you for giving it a chance. I appreciate it.

Sounds like the current PR team nailed it.

“Hasbro fucks up all the time, but they almost always just send you whatever random shit is closest to their desk instead of actually trying to send you the thing you ordered.”

Reminds me of the classic Simpsons episode where Homer was trying to lose weight and sent out for a weight-loss instructional tape only to get a vocabulary builder tape instead because the stock ran out.

“Cow. Slaughter. Abbatoir. The COW was SLAUGHTERED in the ABBATOIR!”

dang, I wish that I had the same luck with Lego

granted, the sets that I have parts breaking on are over a decade out of print, and some of the pieces got remodeled in later years so they send the remodeled pieces for replacements, which sure they functionally work still (tho I feel like they’re a little taller), but now I have a piece that clearly doesn’t belong on the thing

I’ve looked into self-repair but for such small parts, nothing really provides the needed tensile strength, so I’m just hoping someday I have enough disposable income to bribe someone at lego to send me schematics for old molds

2645 Public Relations.

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