Not Time to Stop & Shop

[dcarrigg]

Wild days in New England. Biggest local grocer in the south of the region now on strike. Started in the late 19th century as a local operation. Now owned by giant Dutch conglamorate Ahold Delhaize.

Anyways, it has been a week of retail and service hell for me.

1. Buffet and Gates are big holders of my former trash company, Republic Services. They haven't come by in weeks. 7 consecutive missed pickups. Looks like I'm filling a pickup and headed down to the dump this weekend. Who knows what's going on there. Every day I'd call and they'd say they'd be right by. Nope. Finally I cancelled the service. Now they want me to pay a pro-rated bill and a cancellation fee on top of the money I already paid them to provide no services whatsoever. Lunacy.

2. Also tried to buy a pair of jeans online. Thought I'd replace a decade+ old pair that's looking a bit worse for the wear. Levis. Simple stuff. Name brand. Low quality. But you figure you know the size and the cut, so you don't gotta try them on. Well, they were supposed to come last Tuesday. On Wednesday I got an e-mail saying the new delivery window was sometime between May 22nd and June 21st. Why the hell wants jeans next quarter? Not hard to find, I can take a drive & buy anywhere. Did the same thing to me last month with coffee.

3. This year I've gotten in the habit of ordering groceries every week online from Stop & Shop and picking them up on Thursdays on my way home. Pretty easy. They have them outside in a cooler ready to go. Run out and fill your trunk. Done. Only yesterday they went on strike. So now I had pre-paid almost $200 for groceries I couldn't get, not that I'm the type to cross a picket line anyways.

The trash problem still isn't fully resolved. The other two are. But this took over a dozen phone calls and a lot of BS.

And the upshot is that it got me thinking about how, without really expressly announcing it, e-commerce has upended the traditional model of paying for services rendered or goods received. Now you pay up front, and hope they deliver the goods or services you already paid for. And if they don't, now the onus is on you to try to get your money back. And they do not make it easy.

Buyer beware, I know, I know, but on a week like this the whole retail goods and services system feels so broken and deranged. All I wanted to do was exchange cash I had for a pair of pants, some groceries, and trash pickup. They all took my money. I got nothing in return but headaches and call center people telling me lies.

Anyways, I wish the Stop & Shop folks luck. Same people have been at my local one since I moved here a decade or two ago. They're efficient and friendly and run a good ship. Strike's an inconvenience for me, but those overseas wooden-shoed bosses want to jack up their health premiums by 650% for worse coverage and cut other pay and benefits. Plus they recently put in sketchy 2 meter tall security robots that my first instinct was to punch. 31,000 strikers in 6 states, I believe. First major private grocer strike like this in 30 years.

[Mega]

Re: Not Time to Stop & Shop

Resently lost my local bank, they were GREAT & lovely helpful people I miss them & the branch (being going there 45+ Years).

On a different track:-

[dcarrigg]

Re: Not Time to Stop & Shop

Hit play on that and straight away in the first 10 seconds was a Republic Services dumpster. Not quite irony, but damn.

[Mega]

Re: Not Time to Stop & Shop

It is strange that its the DUP & Tory that is driving the union out of Ireland.........

Mike

[dcarrigg]

Re: Not Time to Stop & Shop

For certain. There's always been an inbuilt irony to it from a certain Irish perspective. Some in UK are trying to get free of EU. Some in Ireland are trying to get free of UK. It's why I don't think Nigel's Irexit idea will map well. First, an Irish Exit is already a thing. Second, it's obvious that UK treats Ireland as inconsequential and lesser. So feels like without EU, Ireland would have no negotiating power and UK would just shred Good Friday unilaterally. An Englishman barging in telling you to disarm and give up your negotiating power, probably not going to be the most popular thing.

Ireland is weird. Irish nationalism has historically been left nationalism, which is the opposite of most western nationalist movements. FF is ALDE, FG is EPP, but neither quite map right to the normal left/right or liberal/conservative conventions. And then there's SF, which is its own special thing and the mother of the others that stayed hard left and remained abstentionist and nationalist. I can't think of another country where the politics shook out anything quite like that. Consequently, I think it kind of marches to the beat of its own drum a little more than most places.

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: Not Time to Stop & Shop

"... e-commerce has upended the traditional model of paying for services rendered or goods received. Now you pay up front, and hope they deliver the goods or services you already paid for. And if they don't, now the onus is on you to try to get your money back. And they do not make it easy. ...

The economist John Kenneth Galbraith noticed a similar thing writing about the great crash of 1929:

In many ways the effect of the crash on embezzlement was more significant than on suicide. To the economist embezzlement is the most interesting of crimes. Alone among the various forms of larceny it has a time parameter. Weeks, months or years may elapse between the commission of the crime and its discovery. (This is a period, incidentally, when the embezzler has his gain and the man who has been embezzled, oddly enough, feels no loss. There is a net increase in psychic wealth.) At any given time there exists an inventory of undiscovered embezzlement in – or more precisely not in – the country’s business and banks. This inventory – it should perhaps be called the bezzle – amounts at any moment to many millions of dollars. It also varies in size with the business cycle. In good times people are relaxed, trusting, and money is plentiful. But even though money is plentiful, there are always many people who need more. Under these circumstances the rate of embezzlement grows, the rate of discovery falls off, and the bezzle increases rapidly. In depression all this is reversed. Money is watched with a narrow, suspicious eye. The man who handles it is assumed to be dishonest until he proves himself otherwise. Audits are penetrating and meticulous. Commercial morality is enormously improved. The bezzle shrinks.

Right now e-commerce is enjoying a big fat juicy bezzle.

[DSpencer]

Re: Not Time to Stop & Shop

And the upshot is that it got me thinking about how, without really expressly announcing it, e-commerce has upended the traditional model of paying for services rendered or goods received. Now you pay up front, and hope they deliver the goods or services you already paid for. And if they don't, now the onus is on you to try to get your money back. And they do not make it easy.

Buyer beware, I know, I know, but on a week like this the whole retail goods and services system feels so broken and deranged. All I wanted to do was exchange cash I had for a pair of pants, some groceries, and trash pickup. They all took my money. I got nothing in return but headaches and call center people telling me lies.

I think this is maybe the biggest reason Amazon became so popular. E-commerce is great until you get burned, then you never want to go back. There's definitely a "possession is nine-tenths" feel that once they have your money and you have no product, damaged product, crappy product, etc you are the one who is SOL. Amazon largely removed the risk of online shopping by being willing to step in and fix those problems by erring on the side of consumers.

My personal experience has been very good through Amazon when something wasn't right. However, they seem to be developing a different set of problems. There's a million sellers for almost every product and most you've never heard of. Every search is filled with sponsored results from generic brands. It's hard to trust reviews because so many of them are faked. Lots of the the more well-known and trusted brands seem to not offer their products through Amazon.

The widespread use of call centers is one of the most maddening developments in human society. It's basically just a wall of low paid workers to keep you from ever interacting with the people actually responsible for the reasons you call. The trend to automated just ramps up the dystopian nature of it. Nothing better than hearing how your call is valued from a voice robot because having a human talk to you is too expensive.

I've been happy buying jeans from LL Bean. They seem relatively normal looking, durable and reasonably priced.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Not Time to Stop & Shop

Thanks for that, Thrifty! Old an issue as civilization itself, I suppose. Funny thing is, I didn't really even notice myself doing it. I try to be conscious of things like that--aware of my actions, especially financial ones. But in the last few years, I have increasingly shifted towards paying up front and assuming goods would be delivered and services would be rendered. And I did it without thinking the potential consequences all the way through. Guess we are late in a cycle, and I'm part of the party.

This week was quite a wake-up call for me personally. Had me thinking back to the early days of e-Bay and how careful and worried everyone was and how they and Paypal and others sort of worked to bridge that trust gap. It was largely effective, but it took time. I slid into it. Now I'm getting out. For all the convenience it provides when it does work, the inconvenience when it doesn't is maddening. I don't need more stress in my life. I'd happily trade 2 weekly side trips inside a store if it gets me out of 20 minutes of being on hold or dealing with an outsourced customer service agent trying to get my money back. Like I said, I'm over a dozen calls in, and still not done. Got my groceries elsewhere, but I still have a pile of trash to deal with and no new jeans to throw on this weekend when I go to deal with it. I'm going to be extra-conscious of paying up front for anything this time around.

Incidentally, I got ahold of the town, since they license trash haulers. They gave me a local management contact to try to get out of these bills I have for no reason. So now I'm off to make that phone call before lunch ends. I would rather write a paper check every week and tape it to the barrel than pay someone online for several months up front again, have them not show up, have no recourse when they don't, then get slammed with a cancellation fee when you try to cancel the service that they're not actually providing. And I know the call center has an automated system to put in complaints and missed service requests. Could just be a software glitch. Could be a work stoppage. I have no clue what's wrong. But neither do they. That's the problem. Since customer service doesn't even know how to contact operations, there's no way to fix it. The missed pickup people are in Indiana, the billing people are in North Carolina, the actual trucks are local in Massachusetts. The way that firms are designed now-a-days means one hand never talks to the other. One office takes your money. One office schedules things. One office delivers them. And if there's a breakdown in the computer automation, nobody knows any human being on the other side or how to contact them to fix it. So you get trapped in a Kafka nightmare limbo.

Same thing with Stop & Shop, I think. Beyond the bezzle, there's the terrible customer service. They want you to check out and bag your own groceries now as a roving 6'5" robot shoves a camera in your face and follows you around so it can contact the police and give corporate an edge in court proceedings while they cut their workers' pay. It's not really automation. I mean, it partly is, but it's also partly a combination of enhanced surveillance and conning customers into doing labor for free they didn't used to have to do, like scan items and enter plus and bag everything. It really is worse service, despite how efficient or profitable it may be in the short term. And of course it leads to strikes and customers thinking, "Yeah, those robots do suck!"

Actually, that's one of the most striking things about the strike. It's not that 95% of people won't cross the picket line. It's that the damn robot keeps coming up in every news story I've seen and people in person at the strike keep talking about the damn robot. It started last month. It's easy to say on paper that automation is going to replace everything. But it's a whole different thing as a customer when a 6'5" monster quietly spins around the corner at you for the first time shoving a camera in your face. I'm not joking when I said my first instinct was to punch it. There's something very primal about a big massive thing meant to intimidate sneaking up on you--sort of kicks the fight or flight in. And it's obviously too big and intimidating and there's obviously too many cameras on it for it not to be designed for loss prevention beyond spill detection. It's not an improved customer experience. It's really not. I mean, the novelty of the thing keeps kids interested. But despite the taped on googly eyes, its job is obviously to make customers' and workers' lives worse, not better.

And you know the really telling thing? The robots and self-checkouts aren't popping up in the high class grocers. Fancy people don't have to deal with them. They're popping up in Walmarts and Stop & Shops. Pleb control.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Not Time to Stop & Shop

There are LL Beans nearby. Sort of out of the way a bit for me. But I could check it out. Used to have sleeping bags and backpacks from their HQ in Maine. Sterling return policy I guess got abused so now doesn't exist any more, so haven't really thought of them as much since. But it's a good idea. Little store I can walk to from my house also sells Carhartts. Don't really want the whole carpenter thing, but it might do the trick if I get lazy about taking a trip.

Jeans problem actually was Amazon. Think they sold me a pair that doesn't actually exist, or it's something wrong with their JIT system and it thought they had inventory when they didn't and now they either can't or aren't figuring out how to quickly source it from the supplier. I don't buy a ton from them, but occasionally it's convenient, since it's a bit of a trek for me (20-30mins) to most big box stores, and sometimes they have good prices. And on rare occasion, like when I needed a window balance for a specific small window in my house, they're the only place I could source something easily. Local hardware store, Home Depot, and Lowes all didn't carry it.

So I'm not really here to hate on it and be hypocritical about it. They were probably the easiest of the three to at least cancel and get my money back. But it's the second direct from Amazon (not 3rd party) sale I've had to cancel in as many orders for the delivery time getting pushed back months. Months. Last time was for coffee. Semi-perishable stuff you don't really want 3 months older. And who says, "I'll buy coffee today to brew in July." It's the sort of item that any well-run system wouldn't allow to take longer than a week, and would just scrub off the storefront. Nobody buying pants wants them for 3 months from now, save for maybe the most extreme formal wear or some custom costume.

Anyhow, it's not the first time I've dealt with Amazon doing something like that or losing an item somehow. But in the past they've been more conciliatory and thrown a few bucks at me to shut me up or find a reasonable substitute item and send it one-day or something. These last couple of times in 2019 they only gave me the option to wait 1-3 months or cancel. I read an article a while back about the policy changing. Used to be 30% of the item off or $40, whichever was less. Then dropped to 10% of the item or $10, whichever is less (sometimes also a free month for prime members). Then in fall 2018 it dropped to $5 store credit. Now it seems to be nothing. Indian call center lady and guy both said they no longer offer extensions and cannot offer any credits for shifting the delivery date out months, nor will they ship a substitute pair of jeans expedited to make up for it. Cancel or wait. I even escalated before I cancelled. Oh well. Still, it blows my mind that their system even has a 3 month delivery window option for anything that weighs under 5lbs, especially foodstuffs.

I honestly think my grandfather could have ordered jeans and coffee from sears & roebucks by telegraph more quickly.

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: Not Time to Stop & Shop

..But in the last few years, I have increasingly shifted towards paying up front and assuming goods would be delivered and services would be rendered. And I did it without thinking the potential consequences all the way through...

OK, a personal story.

Many years ago we decided the Christmas gift for my parents would be a custom-cut glass plate to protect a new dining room table that was so expensive they were reluctant to use it. I went to a local art glass place and made the mistake of paying in full, in advance.

The weeks rolled by with occasional telephone calls, it would be finished soon. Mañana.
Eventually it was Christmas Eve morning and I had nothing. So I got in my pickup truck at 8:30 am and headed to the glass shop.

I stopped at a carry out and got a six pack of Heinekens, a pack of Kool cigarettes, and a pack of Marlboro cigarettes. Went to the shop and banged on the door for a long time. Finally some guy answers and I step in.

I tell him my story, and he says "Oh yeah, the boss is just finishing that one up. He’ll be here any time, come back in a couple hours".
“Oh thanks”, I said “But I would rather wait. Want a beer? Want a cigarette?” He scowled, but he took one of each and wandered off.

After 20 or 30 minutes the boss shows up, hung over and looking rough. We say hello and he tells me he only needs to sand and polish the edges. I should come back in a couple hours.
“Oh thanks” I said “but I have always been fascinated by this kind of work, it is so amazing. I’d rather stay and watch. Want a beer? Want a cigarette?” I point to them on the table and smile real big and friendly. He scowled and took a cigarette, and got to work.

A couple hours later most of the beer and cigarettes were gone and I had my glass table top in my truck.

I hate paying in advance.
.
.
.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Not Time to Stop & Shop

I love this story. It'd make a great film scene. Low drama, but full of great detail. Grabbing both menthol and regular. Killing them with kindness on Xmas eve. The whole thing's great. I'm sure it was frustrating as hell. But it's a really funny scene.

[Techdread]

Re: Not Time to Stop & Shop

Why do you need a local bank now a days? Cash machines maybe, but bank can't remember the last time I went in one.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Not Time to Stop & Shop

Why do you need a local bank now a days? Cash machines maybe, but bank can't remember the last time I went in one.

I always go in. Ditched the debit/atm card. Bank's free. Card has fees at point of sale and at cash machines. Credit cards might cost vendors, but points and no fees if paid off every month makes them better for point of sale purchases than debit. Haven't touched a cash machine in over a decade.

[Techdread]

Re: Not Time to Stop & Shop

I always go in. Ditched the debit/atm card. Bank's free. Card has fees at point of sale and at cash machines. Credit cards might cost vendors, but points and no fees if paid off every month makes them better for point of sale purchases than debit. Haven't touched a cash machine in over a decade.

Yes, been buying from the Far East for two decades now, using two rules 1. Credit Card (company goes bust the credit company gives you a refund), 2. Use the slowest mail option (customs don't bother opening slow parcels so no taxes).

[jk]

Re: Not Time to Stop & Shop

credit cards offer a lot of protection, allowing you to contest a charge instead of paying it. i've always wondered what the time window is, though. does anyone know if you can contest a charge 2-3 months after it's appeared on your statement and you've [presumably] paid your full balance?