do no evil

It was in the summer of 2001. I lived in a large house in Salt Lake City, Utah. My birthday was coming up and one day I found a package on my porch with the familiar arrowed swoosh tattooed all over it. There was no doubt, the two events had to be related, but it wasn't immediately obvious who had sent me a birthday present or what it was.

The box was nearly cubic and quite heavy. It was too big for books and too hefty for some nonsensical highly collectible protectively padded bone china doll. I was curious, dragged it on into my living room and ripped the cardboard open. The space inside was almost entirely filled with the solid white body of a bread maker.

I was explosively delighted but then the curiosity I still felt flipped to bafflement. Who could have guessed? Who could have known that I wasn't a big fan of sliced bread and related wonders? A sheet of paper, stuck to the left flank of the apparatus, revealed the person responsible for this act of unsurpassed generosity. It was my mom.

Then, as now, my mom was leading a quite life in a small town in Germany, away from the burning edge of technology, happily riding her bike through the woods surrounding our town. How did she get ten pounds of Chinese-made kitchen appliance onto the steps to my porch nearly five-and-a-half thousand miles away?

Hadn't it been for the power of the internet and the commercial acumen of amazon.com, she would have never been able to get a bread maker to the US, let alone onto my doorstep. But with the help of an internet-savvy daughter, she pulled it off, providing for several years of good fresh bread on my table. I've always loved my mom, but back then on the carpet of my living-room floor, I warmed my heart to Amazon.

They're in the business of making money, quite obviously and quite successfully, but they hide this primary objective under a fuzzy layer of overwhelming customer friendliness. They sell most of what customers could possibly want, don't ask for much, and ship it quickly, wherever you want.

Over the years, before my 2001 birthday and afterwards, I have ordered countless times from Amazon, shipping packages to the US, France, Germany and the UK. I have never been disappointed.

The other day, I bought friends in Italy a Christmas gift. Amazon.it doesn't exist. The redirection pages lets the user choose an alternative based on linguistic capabilities. Amazon.de, amazon.fr and amazon.co.uk are the options. The shipping cost, no matter what is picked, is as if the order were processed by the nonexisting amazon.it. All was good.

All was good until my friends opened the package and tried to play the DVD. What it said on the package, on the receipt and on the DVD was not what showed on their screen. The disk was all messed up and needed to be replaced with the right product. I took it upon myself to effect the transaction.

I clicked through endless script-based screens to set up an exchange, getting increasingly frustrated. "The item is not as described" only got me a refund. That's not what I wanted. Picking "Parts were missing" helped. The item would be exchanged. The original would have to be returned, though, eligible for a shipping refund of up to £1.24 only (which is not even enough to send a letter from Italy, let alone a package).

There was no phone number. I was getting a bit annoyed. Anyway, I submitted the request. This had been a gift, and it'd better be right. Whatever. Less than half an hour after the request, I got an email that's evidently been written by a human being. It said that

as the cost of returning the package is in this case prohibitively expensive, we ask that you keep the original item with our compliments. Perhaps you would like to donate it to a charity in your area if you feel it would be appropriate to do so. There will of course be no additional charge for the replacement order.

The story ends at this point, but not the post. This is supposed to be an advertisement for one of the few companies that I really like. And I write all this to justify that, from now on, all the links to books I recommend will carry a Amazon affiliates tag that will earn me a little commission if any of you is tricked into buying a book by what I write. Please click through my links, and happy reading!