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Date: Mon, 6 Jan 2014 10:59:59 +1100
Subject: Re: Blog "about python 3"
From: Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com>
Cc: "python-list@python.org" <python-list@python.org>
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On Mon, Jan 6, 2014 at 9:56 AM, Terry Reedy <tjreedy@udel.edu> wrote:
> On 1/5/2014 11:51 AM, Chris Angelico wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, Jan 6, 2014 at 3:34 AM, Roy Smith <roy@panix.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Amazon's (short-term) goal is to increase their market share by
>>> undercutting everybody on price.  They have implemented a box-packing
>>> algorithm which clearly has a bug in it.  You are complaining that they
>>> failed to deliver your purchase in good condition, and apparently don't
>>> care.  You're right, they don't.  The cost to them to manually correct
>>> this situation exceeds the value.  This is one shipment.  It doesn't
>>> matter.
>>
>>
>> If it stopped there, it would be mildly annoying ("1% of our shipments
>> will need to be replaced, that's a 1% cost for free replacements").
>> The trouble is that they don't care about the replacement either, so
>> it's really that 100% (or some fairly large proportion) of their
>> shipments will arrive with some measure of damage, and they're hoping
>> that their customers' threshold for complaining is often higher than
>> the damage sustained. Which it probably is, a lot of the time.
>
>
> My wife has gotten several books from Amazon and partners and we have never
> gotten one loose enough in a big enough box to be damaged. Either the box is
> tight or has bubble packing. Leaving aside partners, maybe distribution
> centers have different rules.

Or possibly (my personal theory) the CS rep I was talking to just
couldn't be bothered solving the problem. Way way too much work to
make the customer happy, much easier and cheaper to give a 30% refund
and hope that shuts him up.

But they managed to ship two books (the original and the replacement)
with insufficient packaging. Firstly, that requires the square of the
probability of failure; and secondly, if you care even a little bit
about making your customers happy, put a little note on the second
order instructing people to be particularly careful of this one! Get
someone to check it before it's sent out. Make sure it's right this
time. I know that's what we used to do in the family business whenever
anything got mucked up.

(BTW, I had separately confirmed that the problem was with Amazon, and
not - as has happened to me with other shipments - caused by
Australian customs officials opening the box, looking through it, and
then packing it back in without its protection. No, it was shipped
that way.)

Anyway, this is veering so far off topic that we're at no risk of
meeting any Python Alliance ships - as Mal said, we're at the corner
of No and Where. But maybe someone can find an on-topic analogy to put
some tentative link back into this thread...

ChrisA