Taking Stock of the Situation
A tale of an amazon.com interaction

Sunday, October 14, 2001

Ordered 2 CD's and a DVD, requested "ship together when all available"
1 CD available now, 1 CD available 1-2 weeks, DVD available in December

Tuesday, November 6, 2001

Combined that order with 2 more DVD's, also shipping in December.

Saturday, December 2, 2001

Cancel the "available" CD, because while they waited to ship, they ran out, and I don't want them waiting forever.
Change to "ship as each item becomes available" to avoid losing anything else.

(3 DVD's ship normally during December.)

Monday, December 17, 2001

"We wanted to let you know that there is a delay with one or more items in the order you placed...You'll need to approve this delay so that we can continue processing this part of your order. To do so, visit the following Order Update page in Your Account:"
(This would be the CD available 1-2 weeks after October 14.)

Tuesday, January 22, 2002

"We wanted to let you know that there is a delay with one or more items in the order you placed...You'll need to approve this delay so that we can continue processing this part of your order. To do so, visit the following Order Update page in Your Account:"

Wednesday, February 27, 2002

"We wanted to let you know that there is a delay with one or more items in the order you placed...You'll need to approve this delay so that we can continue processing this part of your order. To do so, visit the following Order Update page in Your Account:"

Wednesday, April 3, 2002

"We are sorry to report that we will not be able to obtain the following item from your order... Though we had expected to be able to send this item to you, we've since found that it is not available from any of our sources at this time. We realize this is disappointing news to hear, and we apologize for any inconvenience we have caused you."

What's amazing is, as of right now, it's still available on their website, still showing a 1-2 week shipping delay!

While I have ordered additional items from amazon.com since October, I now always choose "ship as items come available" and I never order something that's not in stock. Caveat emptor, I guess.

The truly ironic part is that I would still be committing some sort of copyright violation if I downloaded the music of this single from some dark corner of the Internet, even though the record company, in its infinite wisdom, has stopped producing it. And I have yet to find a version out there (ahem) that doesn't sound like it was recorded off the radio, unfortunately.