There are times I think people work extra hard to piss me off. May and June of 2007 proved to be a pretty bad time for e-commerce, at least as far as I was concerned. I had two eDiots bungle orders for me on eBay, and I had two customer complaints on Amazon, both of which were pretty stupid. The later one complained that an unopened Ant Farm I sent wasn’t new enough. Really. That’s the entire story on that one, though I wished they sent to back, because I really did want to keep it, but decided I should get the money instead. I refunded part of their money, though, so it wasn’t all bad for them.

The only incident worthy of expanding upon came from Jo Ann, who purchased a Twin Peaks box set from me. The set was in pretty good condition considering the age, so I sent it off without thinking about it. A few weeks later, I get a complaint. What the complaint was, I didn’t know exactly.

The correspondence didn’t really start off on the right foot, because Jo Ann clearly only had a fleeting grasp of how to convey a concept. It was like being hit with a dozen different ideas at the same time, and none of them made any sense. Take a look at the entire correspondence and try to follow along.

I genuinely had no idea what the hell she was talking about, so I asked her to elaborate, including a few helpful suggestions of what the problem would be. The next e-mail was almost as cryptic, but at least I did manage to glean the problem out of it: poor quality tape recording.

The thing that really confused me was all of the talk of twenty dollar shipping costs, something the good ol’ Post Office is probably concocting as we speak. I shipped the tapes for around three bucks with Media Mail, but it turned out she sent them back Priority Mail for over ten dollars, so I’m guessing that “$6 handleing fee” was her interpretation of the difference in price. Her gibberish really didn’t clarify anything.

What annoyed me was she sent the tapes back without asking. Most companies require some sort of arrangement before merchandise comes back, and I’m no exception. All I ask is the customer gets approval before sending an item back. I had one person send back an item without explanation and never got an e-mail about it, so I ignored it, and Jo Ann ran a serious risk of meeting the same fate had I not received the e-mail before.

I received the tapes and opened them immediately for testing, and it didn’t take long for me to make my decision. The box that holds all the tapes, as well as the tape for the first volume was torn, and the first tape was smashed up.

I made up my mind right away: no refund. This might sound cold, especially considering it could have been the Post Office’s fault, but I wasn’t convinced it was. A co-worker and fellow e-entrepreneur and I looked over the box the tapes shipped in, and there was no damage, and there wasn’t anything in the box that could have damaged the tape that way. We suspected the customer may have dropped the tapes and shipped it back without explanation. Look at the e-mails; Jo Ann makes no mention of it being broken on arrival. The final nail on the coffin was the rest of the tapes, which had quality you could expect from a series produced in the early nineties.

Frankly, if I was willing to pay thirty-five dollars for a series on VHS and it looked like this, I wouldn’t think anything of it. I have a number of older VHS tapes that look worse than this, and I accept it as limitation of the time, not an evil company trying to rip me off.

Since I couldn’t test the offending tape because it was mangled as if it were shipped back via Garbage Disposal Express and the other tapes that weren’t of similar quality as a seventies porno dubbed over twenty times, I didn’t see a reason I should eat the costs. There was no way to prove that there was a problem.

Of course, I was worried Amazon might not see it this way, so I took the precaution of e-mailing them about the situation and asking for advice. Basically, I was told it would be okay to not offer a refund in this case, but I would be kind of a meanie. So I went decided to be an Amazon-sanctioned meanie and let Jo Ann know.

I’ve pretty much come to expect buyers who feel that they’ve been wronged to be self-righteous, even in the face of facts that prove that they’re wrong. So you can imagine that Jo Ann was pretty upset, so much so that she sent me three decreasingly-furious e-mails. I read them in reverse order, so I knew she wasn’t as hysterical about the situation as she had time to consider it, but the first e-mail was a real hoot. She realized that I would “obviously lie and justify [my] actions as long as [I] can live with [myself],” as if I kidnapped her children and sold them into slavery, so she decided not to pursue the matter, but I was going to get it because of one thing: karma.

Seriously, because of this misunderstanding and my decision to protect my interests, karma was going to turn around and kick my ass. I think karma preempted the situation and kicked my ass in advance by making Jo Ann my customer.

No, seriously, she seems like a somewhat reasonable woman, despite her melodramatic posturing. She has every right to be upset, because she paid for a product and didn’t get what she expected. In my defense, I think she expected more than any other seller could provide.

She talks about sending the tapes back on principle, even though “it wasn't financially even worth returning them.” Of course, this was partly ignorance on her part (again, blame the Post Office), but the irony here is I was sticking to my principles in a way that didn’t benefit her. Like I said, if I received those tapes without any message, I would have inspected them, shrugged my shoulders, and reposted them without a refund, or I could have refused to deal with the situation because she jumped the gun, but I was nice about it to a point. And that point was discovering that sometime while it was in her possession, the merchandise was broken. It’s amazing how people like principles until they stop benefiting them.

I also love the comment about how it was impossible for me to inspect the physical tapes, but not the footage. This is just stupid. As I later explained to her, I haven’t been to a video store that’s ever checked used tapes they sell before the customer gets them. Frankly, I wasn’t willing to watch more than twenty episodes of a series for a thirty dollar profit. If there’s a problem with the tapes, most stores accept a return, which I would have done if they weren’t destroyed on her end. It’s a lot easier to check the tapes for physical flaws, which I did, and didn’t find any, and apparently she didn’t either, since that wasn’t part of the original complaint.

As you can tell from the progression of the e-mails, Jo Ann gets less psychotic and actually friendly by the end. Hell, she even wanted to buy something else from me! So I reply with a stern yet calm e-mail explaining the situation, offered some advice, and also offered to pay for the cost of shipping the item back (which I normally wouldn’t do) and gave her a discount off her next purchase. I figured the matter was settled.

I was an idiot. It turns out she wasn’t done with her soapbox, questioning my integrity because of my short returns policy. More idiot points for Jo Ann, because I sent her a message telling her to contact me immediately for the full sales policy (which she never did) because Amazon doesn’t give out customer contact information so easily anymore, and it doesn’t give enough space to send a full policy. Again, she shows some signs of understanding, but it’s annoying that she couldn’t figure out why I would find a picky customer frustrating to deal with, especially when the evidence miraculously gets destroyed.

I replied with another stern email, this time explaining How Things Are. I figured she’d continue to e-mail until the sun exploded unless I told her once the tapes were mailed back to her, I would consider the matter closed. So far so good; no e-mails.

So I came out of this with one unsatisfied customer and a vague feeling of being an asshole. I’m sure opinions of my actions will be roughly divided depending on who you talk to, but at least I stood up for myself and got to keep the money. Small victory.