Can’t buy it online. Can’t buy it in the store. Fail.

I was scouring the Interwebs today to see where in Canada I could buy a GorillaPod SLR at a price that wasn’t highway robbery. I stumbled upon the website of a well-known Canadian retailer, which had this exact model in their online store at a great price.

The website very specifically said, “This product is not available for online sale” and to “please visit (a store) near you.” That’s annoying at the best of times. What’s the point of having an online store if it doesn’t sell all of the products listed? (And a quick browse through the online store of this particular retailer indicates that there are lots of products for sale that aren’t actually being sold on the website.)

Undaunted, I drove down to the local outlet of the store, and they didn’t have the GorillaPod SLR. They had two other models (one lower end and one higher end) for sale but not the SLR model. I asked an associate about it, and he said that they don’t stock the SLR model at all.

So, to recap, they advertise a product online that they don’t sell online, tell you to visit the store, and it’s not sold in the store, either.

Epic fail.

I decided in the end that since I’m heading to the U.S. later this year for a few days that I’ll just buy my GorillaPod there.

A service fee complaint that is not about Ticketmaster

I just bought a ticket to the Downhere/Building 429 concert in Edmonton at the end of August. The company handling the tickets charged me a $3.50 "service fee" and a $2 "handling fee" (which together added approximately 50% to the price of the $12 ticket). That was bad enough, but then I paid $0.57 to have the ticket mailed to me. Umm ... $5.50 in extra charges, and you can't swallow the cost of a stamp?

Why do companies do this?

I'm trying to buy a new watch. I found a really sweet titanium-carbide gold watch from A Certain Watch Company.

So I start researching the best price for it. I find it at an online store for $215. But they don't ship that brand of watch to Canada.

I call my local jewelery store. They can't get it for me because A Certain Watch Company doesn't sell that model in Canada.

I find another online store, and, yup, they won't sell it to me because A Certain Watch Company doesn't authorize American watch models to be sold outside the US.

And, of course, A Certain Watch Company's Canadian website doesn't have the particular model I want.

I could, however, get someone in the US to buy it for me and mail it to me, but I can't actually BUY it from Canada.

So ... I want to give A Certain Watch Company money and they won't let me. Dumb.

I'm not complaining about the new Facebook, but ...

Within a day or so of Facebook permanently updating everyone to the "new Facebook," a friend of mine changed her status update to bemoan all of the people bemoaning the new Facebook.

She said that complaining about the new Facebook was such a "first world" complaint. In other words, only people like us in North America, full of affluence and without any real worries in life, could be bothered by a different interface on a piece of free software we are using.

Fair point.

However, my issue with the redesign is not a complaint per se about how it looks, but how it functions - or doesn't function.

Since the switchover, I have found Facebook to be very buggy in all sorts of ways. The news feeds are often 18 hours behind, or are weird mixed bag of brand-new updates plus stuff that is three days old. It doesn't update my Google Reader feed automatically anymore, forcing me to manually import stuff every once in a while. Stuff like that. And there seems to be no actual mechanism for giving feedback to Facebook in any way that results in a live human being responding and saying, "Yes, we're aware of that problem and we're trying to fix it."

Those would probably fall under the category of "first world" complaints as well, and I don't have any problem with that. Really, I don't care much at all how Facebook looks, but I do care about how it functions. And right now, it's not functioning very well.

Thinks that make you go hmmm...

Gas in Edmonton: $1.31

Gas in Caroline, Alberta: $1.26

Taken to the cleaners

This isn't quite Consumerist worthy, but still ...

Last weekend, I took my suit in to the local, neighbourhood dry cleaners for a regular cleaning - plus I had a stain on a silk tie, so I wanted to get that cleaned, too. I told the woman that the suit was just a normal cleaning, and pointed out the stain on the tie.

(Yes, the stain is still there. But I found that out later after writing the rest of this.)

My wife and I went to pick up the suit a few days later, and noticed that in addition to the $23 cleaning bill, I was charged $5 for "re-hemming."

I asked the clerk why I had been charged $5 for having my pant legs re-hemmed when I had made no mention of it when I took the suit in. (Not to mention, I was unaware that my pants needed re-hemming.)

She said very matter of factly that the suit must have been tagged for re-hemming because they don't do that unless there's a tag on it.

Yes, I explained, but I did not ask for my pants to be re-hemmed.

But they wouldn't have done it unless there was a tag on the suit, she said again, adding that I must have asked for it to be done.

But, I protested yet again, if I had asked for it to be done, why was it not on the claim slip I was presenting, which clearly read "one suit, one tie" and nothing about re-hemming. (There is even a spot on the claim slip for "tailoring" and it was blank.)

She repeated again that I must have asked for this or else it would not have been done.

At my wit's end, and with people waiting behind us in line, I paid the bill, including the extra $5 charge.

But I asked that the manager contact me to discuss this further, because I was unhappy about it. (And what I was unhappy about more than anything was the fact she didn't immediately apologize and remove the $5 from my bill. Instead, she implied I was trying to scam them out of $5.)

Two days later, no phone call from the manager.

So today, while I was at work, my wife went down to talk to the manager. The manager said she had phoned the employee who originally served me when I brought in my suit, and she remembered me asking if they re-hem pants.

My wife said that I had asked for no such thing.

The manager asked how would my wife know that, as she was not there when I dropped off my pants!

My wife then said that if I had asked for the re-hemming, why was it not on the claim slip as a requested service.

Oh, well, the manager said, sometimes those things fall between the cracks.

Sigh.

In the end, we got our $5 back. But we're never using that dry cleaner again.

Lest anyone think I'm making a federal case out of $5 - it's not the $5 that bothers me. It's the fact that in a "he said-she said" where the circumstantial evidence certainly favoured my version of events (i.e., nothing being written down on the claim slip about re-hemming), I found it astonishing that this company, for five measly dollars, would basically call me and my wife liars and cheats.

The proper response would have been an immediate apology from the clerk who processed my pick-up about the mix-up and my $5 removed from the bill.

Failing that, the next best response would have been the manager's prompt response apologizing for the mix-up and giving us the $5 back.

But stonewalling us over a $5 charge and calling us liars is ridiculously bad customer service.