by Mal Karman
All the ads in the morning paper were screaming that is was Black.
Friday—except that every calendar in the country told me it was Thursday. In fact Thanksgiving Thursday. Weeks in advance, I had mapped out the day in my head: wake up with yoga, do some writing, go for a hike, watch some football, and partake in a turkey dinner with a bevy of close friends.
Until last year I had resisted the insanity of this so-called bargain-hunting holiday all of my life. Apparently my memory is failing because that experience took way too much energy and I swore I would never again succumb to corporate America’s fishing expedition. I can still hear the dark suits in their high-rise offices now: “We need to convince this reluctant consumer to believe that by spending money he’s actually saving it. Get him to use the plastic so that he doesn’t feel the pain until, well, that agonizing bill arrives. Everyone with a wallet or pocketbook will bend if we appeal to their bargain hunger.”
So, yeah, there I was, hooked like a sunfish by an ad at Fry’s Electronics—an Onkyo audio receiver with 6 HDMI inputs for $149—presumably half price, though in reality about 65 bucks less than it would cost otherwise. But the sale started at 5am in Palo Alto. Gas and tolls eat into the bargain, n’est-ce pas? And do I want to be in a car at 4am? This time, I figure I can buy on the website. Wouldn’t I rather be online than in line?
In this era of “virtual” you can get around the gas and tolls by hiring people to stand in line for you for those in-store doorbusters, though that negates almost everything you can “save”—unless you’re hunting a big-ticket item. For me, the decision to stay up all night and go online is not the brightest one I’ve ever made. Is a night of sleep worth $65? Ask the folks at Motel 6.
The trick here is that, prior to the early morning crush on the Internet, one has to sign up for a “personal promo code.” I actually did that, and when I confidently typed it in at precisely 5am, the page loaded a message: “Coupon successfully applied.”
After entering my credit card number and security code I clicked “submit order” and got a second message that read: “An error occurred while validating the coupon, please re-try it again.” I thought that rather redundant. It’s either please try it again or please re-try it, not “re-try it again.”
I obeyed the redundancy. At 5:02, 5:04, 5:05, 5:09, 5:11, 5:15, 5:16, 5:19, 5:28. At 5:36, I gave up and tried to go to sleep. For three hours. I tried. My body clock was having none of that. “You want to mess with me,” it seemed to say, “I’ll mess with you back.” Like the Soup Nazi on Seinfeld, “No sleep for you!”
Wide awake at 8:43am, I went back to the site and gave it another shot. This time I got different results. Not results, mind you, but results. A new message told me, “We’re sorry, but there has been an error generated from our server. Please go to the previous page and try again. If you were in the process of checking out, we suggest that you call our Customer Service (8am-midnight, 7 days per week) … ”
That seems pretty clear, doesn’t it? So I phoned—and got a mechanical voice telling me there is no customer service. They will be back—after the sale is over and prices have regained a normal footing.
Fool that I am, I went back to my computer and tried several more times. It was 9:50am. This time I received new messages that convinced me it was not possible to access the Black Friday deep discounts and that it was a scam to get me to buy other stuff on the site. Up popped new screens reading: “The connection has timed out.” “No data received.” “The server is taking too long to respond. The site could be temporarily unavailable or too busy. Try again in a few moments.”
I concluded that the purpose of Black Friday, or Noir Thursday as the case may be, is to drive the deal-digger to the brink of insanity, especially after my final effort netted this: “Unable to load the web page.”
But to my astonishment, on Friday my inbox indicated that Fry’s was shipping me the AV receiver—at full price! I dashed off an outraged e-mail, which I ended with “Unacceptable! Unacceptable!!!” The response, via e-mail on Saturday, told me,“We are unable to cancel your order as requested because it has already shipped from our fulfillment center. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience.”
By then, I was ready to dismantle my house just to find a board with nails. I finally managed to get a human being on the phone and told him what I went through. He checked my personal promo code—those numbers that started me on this descent to home shopping hell—and guess what? I was being sent what I ordered with the discount. There was only one problem: On all those occasions where I had been stonewalled by this or that message, my order actually went through—not once, but 19 times. As a result, they were shipping me 19 Onkyo AV receivers.
The ones I don’t destroy in exasperation may be eligible for return. May be. I am, however, left with one overriding thought: Shopping on Black Friday or any part of Thanksgiving Day is for turkeys.
Ask Mal to go shopping at [email protected].
