The computer program can’t be overriden
I ordered three bottles of vitamins recently from Amazon. It seemed a simple transaction: Amazon would be fulfilling the order, and they had them in stock. They’re vitamins I happen to like and it’s almost impossible to find them elsewhere, so that’s where Amazon comes in.
Three bottles put me over the top for free shipping – supposedly. But the computer program didn’t seem to think so. I spent about 45 minutes trying to override it, but finally I gave up and called Amazon customer service.
That was marginally better. The guy on the other end explained there was nothing he could do to override what the program was doing, but he could give me a refund for the shipping. To get to that point it took about a half hour of explaining over and over, and listening to him give his required little spiel.
A couple of days later I noticed that I’d only gotten partial credit for the shipping. And then the vitamins – when they came – arrived in three separate packages, a row of identical triplets.
Another call to Amazon gave me a full refund for the shipping, and I disposed of all the extra and unneeded packaging. But the whole thing was frustrating and time-consuming.
Modern convenience.
There. I feel better now.
“Open the pod bay doors, Hal.”
“I’m sorry Dave. I can’t do that.”
A while ago we started receiving random items from Amazon which we hadn’t ordered. We weren’t being charged for them either, and when I called to see about returning the first one, I was told not to bother sending it back, just keep it or throw it away, whatever I want. The next time I was told the same thing, and also not to bother calling again if I received any more. After the fourth item, I called and insisted that someone figure out what the problem was so that we stopped getting these things. They finally stopped coming. We ended up donating all the stuff to our church auction. Very strange.
I try to batch order things to decrease the packing issues, but sometimes it just still comes in little by little. One day I got a large box that had an item that could have fit into a large envelope. The item was some cleaning cloths for a scanner so it was not breakable.
At least my city allows recycling of boxes, though they just stopped taking glass since it is not efficient anymore.
Back in June of ’14, I bought an Alienware computer (owned by Dell), in the late part of the following May, the computer dies and I have to send it back for repairs (it was under warranty). The send the fixed computer back and in November it dies again. This time, it isn’t under warranty. The service rep tells me that it will cost me $350 to send it in for repairs. I’m not happy about that, but it’s my fault for not buying the extended warranty. I tell her all right, here’s my credit card number and she tells me that she can’t process the repair order.
What I had to do was send an email to their service department with my name, phone number and a “convenient” time that they could call me and process the repair order. That time had to be between 9am and 1pm EST. Now, I’m work from 8am to 5pm (I’m a carpenter) and I don’t have anyone else that can take care of this for me. So I tell them that the best time to talk to me is noon eastern. They call me on the Friday after Thanksgiving at 1:15pm. I am in the middle of installing an engineered floor in a basement and I receive the call when I have a piece already glued and ready to install.
I never answered the phone and they never called me again. Next day I went and research what I need to build my own pc, scrapped out the Alienware for what parts I could use, went and bought the rest of the parts and put it together that afternoon.
So now, I thank the fine folks at Dell for teaching me just how easy it is to build my own pc but refusing to buy any of their products.
In closing, I would just like to say that it’s not the computer; it’s the company.
KRB
Same thing on a book order…but on my screen during the order I couldn’t tell I was going to get 3 separate bundles of books & therefore 3 seperate hits for shipping. All looked just right until the books showed up like little orphans 1 at a time.
Grrrr…I still don’t feel better even after some remediation.
I sell kopi luwak on amazon…
not many sales…
huge complicated automated systems do not necessarily have overides unless they are built in by design. otherwise, work arounds become common. This i know from writing software for 35 years… maybe soon to be homeless as they report they need programmers like crazy… the main obstical is that management forces things, and so, you learn quickly if your not a super programmer, to just do what your told and thats that… no one gets fired for doing what they are told and not going the extra mile… such is the normal way of bureaucracy.
I use Amazon Prime to purchase and check out a lot of books for my Kindle so it pays off for me and I get free shipping on the stuff I order. I also use Neo’s portal to place my order so she probably gets a nickel or two from time to time.
This week I received a fairly large box with a much smaller box which would have shipped fine and a bunch of packing, shipped through the Prime system and I thought that was ever so strange. Then I remembered that the folks working in the warehouse range from smart people who need a job to not so bright who are just walking down an aisle pushing a cart throwing stuff together as fast as possible, maybe if they fill the cart up to take to shipping with bigger boxes they can take a break for a few minuets while the cart is unloaded and they know how to work the system.
Overall I am amazed at the speed they do fill and ship orders and delighted when they send an email to tell me the order is on my porch.
Everyone who has worked in a technical field knows the following truth:
To err is human; to really screw up you need a computer.
Chris B,
I experienced the same thing.
Where the products you received from China?
We found that unordered items were coming from there. Apparently it is a ploy to increase numbers of shipped products.
First World Problems.
There is this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6ZTmk2NynQ
Amazon Prime – free shipping
Edward-
Yes, in fact they were all from China and what you said makes perfect sense now. I was surprised when I called at how unconcerned they seemed at what I had assumed was a computer error that was costing them money for shipping, etc.
Thank you, mystery solved!
Prime is worthwhile for me just for all the streaming video.
What are the vitamins you like from Amazon? Thank you for shopping with Amazon. Some of my family work for the company.
I use Amazon a lot; and it is almost trouble free. I sometimes feel a bit guilty, but the convenience assuages my guilt. And as Neo, noted there are now items on Amazon that are almost impossible to find in stores.
Many smaller companies are not ramping up their on-lone marketing; and some are quite good for specialty items.
Confession. I bought Amazon stock a few years ago, and it has been good to me.
“I was surprised when I called at how unconcerned they seemed at what I had assumed was a computer error that was costing them money for shipping, etc.” – Neo
There’s always a reason for what looks irrational, at least in for-profit (well, sort of) companies.
I tried to repay an undercharge at a store one-time and they wouldn’t let me: too much paperwork for the $$ involved.
Neo … I understand your frustration.
I was a professional computer geek for over 4 decades.
IMHO it is fairly easy to learn to code.
To learn to code well takes a lot of time, study, effort, rewriting, more learning, a willingness to admit when you are in over your head, knowledge of how business works, a lot more things I can’t remember ( I’m in my seventh decade) and … luck.
To be in the top 1% of coders takes brilliance, huge amounts of effort and natural talent. That certainly does not describe me.
(Artfldgr – I’ve been retired for 5 years and I still get calls from headhunters telling me about great job opportunities)
…
Personally I have not experienced any issues with Amazon. Things arrive ahead of schedule and are neatly package. There is an Amazon store in Oak Brook mall out in the western suburbs. Returning Christmas items that didn’t fit correctly was easy.
Oh my. Don’t post in haste. I just read the gibberish I posted, and I am embarrassed. Me and Biden.
I meant to convey the thought that a number of companies are ramping up their on-line sales infrastructure. Their prices are frequently better than Amazon’s on the items they feature; and many of them have pretty efficient delivery arrangements.
In addition to Amazon stock, I bought stock in Shopify, which services the on-line sales community, and its stock performance has been phenomenal.
Several people have alluded to this in bits and pieces already, but let me try to summarize:
1. Amazon is fulfilling your order and tens of thousands of others out of the same warehouses, with packing materials X, Y, and Z being required at continuously-shifting rates. It’s the bin-packing problem on a massive scale.
2. The bin-packing problem being NP-hard, coupled with Amazon’s need to pay for shipping materials, the shipping itself, etc. almost certainly means they and their partners are engaged in a combinatorial auction. Different participants will have different valuations for different bundles of goods and services.
3. The bin-packing problem being NP-hard and the scale of Amazon also mean there’s literally no hope of packing being done “the most efficient way” globally, let alone for each and every last-mile delivery. It couldn’t be done even if they wanted to.
4. Being an Amazon Prime customer, I’ve also received some unordered items and been told it would cost more to return them than was warranted, so to give them away. I’m happy to report that a local animal shelter received some quite nice-looking dog biscuits out of the clear blue sky.
When we build software for customers we make sure they can do as little as possible to override the software.
The reason is simple: preventing them from doing things that cause damage, or worse preventing customer employees from deliberately doing things that cost their company revenue (like giving unauthorised discounts by eliminating shipping costs…).
That’s how our customers want it, that’s what usually makes perfect sense.
AesopFan…”There’s always a reason for what looks irrational, at least in for-profit (well, sort of) companies.”
Many time, it is *rational* for the individual employee or even his entire organization, but is *irrational* from the standpoint of the total corporation. The agency problem is real.
I *love* Amazon Prime. I order things as small as printer cartridges without having to go to a store. I haven’t been to my local Walmart which is only 5 minutes from my house in about 3 years. No need to. There are things I can only get from Amazon (like Ceylon cinnamon-which is good for blood sugar control). I also like their streaming videos. Deliveries are prompt and accurate.
I fail to understand why anyone would consider Amazon to be a “high” tech company. People putting items into boxes followed by other people moving those boxes followed by yet more people delivering those boxes is NOT high-tech anything. That’s what Amazon does, mostly… overwhelmingly, perhaps.
Chris B et al,
The unordered shipments are a ploy to meet the volume requirements for the international trading license.
Meanwhile, Amazon is ignoring complaints because Amazon is agressively recruiting Chinese vendors to expand their merchant platform.
Many of the things that computer programs *won’t do* are things that, in a precomputer or noncomputer world, would have been “our policy doesn’t permit that” as executed by the bureaucracy.
It’s not always the case, but many of these apparent computer issues are really policy design issues. And there are plenty of badly-thought-out policies in large, and even in small, organizations.
Plenty of *actual* computer-systems implementation issues as well, especially in user interface design.
David Foster:
In this case, it was the opposite.
The computer had made an error that went against a very basic policy of Amazon’s, and no one could override it and undo the error.
Snively: Very few will know what “NP-hard” is. There are even many programmers who are not familiar with it. Better to use other terms instead or follow it with a brief explanation in parentheses.
Joe,
FWIW, Amazon’s supply chain processes are incredibly high-tech. Literally defining the state-of-the-art. However, fulfillment is probably the least significant aspect of Amazon’s business. Most software-as-a-service offerings you use run on Amazon Web Services, far and away the largest, most mature public cloud infrastructure in the world. AWS alone is a genuinely staggering accomplishment, setting aside the accomplishment of democratizing the online retail and advertising market, not just for themselves, but for hundreds of thousands of other merchants who market and sell on Amazon’s platform (and often also rely on Amazon’s fulfillment services).
All of this entails some of the best distributed systems and machine learning technology in the world, and part of its success is that you generally don’t need to be aware of it. But just to offer one suggestive example, when you visit Amazon’s home page, by the time your browser has rendered the whole page, over 100 back end services have been used to construct the personalized results you get with a Service Level Agreement of less than 250 milliseconds.