Tuesday, May 5, 2009

In which Bellwether Meltdown deals with an unruly Amazon marketplace seller

Prologue: I ordered Mr. Show season 4 from an amazon marketplace seller last week. It was $9 listed as new and sealed. It arrived yesterday. It was not sealed, and there were fingerprints on the discs. It was in good enough condition, so I'm really not about to spend a week or more playing etag with amazon and a seller to correct this, but it's still exceedingly shitty, so I left the seller a one star feedback.

Today I received this email:


-------------- Begin seller message ---------------------

I was sorry to read the feedback you left regarding this order. Amazon strongly encourages buyers to contact seller prior to leaving negative feedback so we may have a chance to address the issue. I apologize for the error.... I sell both new and used items. Your order may have been accidentally switched with another. If you had contacted me, I would have tried to remedy the situation. Please consider removing feedback and contacting seller directly.

-------------- End seller message ------------------------

And this is my response:

In what world governed by any sort of logic is it incumbent upon the buyer to clean up for the sellers mistakes?

Upon shipping you ostensibly had three things in front of you: a listing, a printed packing slip corresponding to said listing, and an item. If you cross check the item with either the listing or the packing slip before you ship it, you would have noticed that the condition of the item in your hands did not match the listing of the item.

Now there's two possible scenarios that could have played out

A) You didn't do this.

If this is the case, you're either lazy or just bad at your job, so kiss my ass for implying that I should reconsider my bad rating

or, far more likely

B) You intentionally listed it wrong, OR you DID check the two and rather than contact me, you thought, "eh, it's $9, he's cheap, he probably won't raise a stink about it, and if he does, I can mark it new again, resell it, and I'm only out my shipping"

Well guess what, I am pretty cheap, but not so cheap to the point that I'm going to spend several days playing email tag, waiting for a return label, driving to ship it back, then waiting for some sort of resolution that may or may not result in me getting my DVDs. Since I'm a miserable, vindictive prick I figure the one star rating is far more frustrating to you than the loss of the $9 which you would have in all likelihood recouped by reselling it with a slightly higher price to compensate for the lost shipping revenue.

I wouldn't even be responding to this email if not for the fact that the implication that I was in any way at fault was incredibly infuriating and frustrating and I find e-browbeating you to be mildly cathartic.

-Your humble servant, Bellwether Meltdown, Knight of the British Empire



Yeah I'm an asshole, the question is, how big of an asshole am I?