So how's the online shopping experience going, now that AI has made
boring old fixing bugs obsolete?
Someone I know on Mastodon mentioned that a particular sort of
pen was available cheaply at Rymans (£10 rather than the usual rate of
£20+). I thought that sounded worth a try, so set out to buy one. Yup,
there they are on the web site, a different SKU for each colour but
that's fair enough, and a little "Add" button by each.
Clicky, I go.
"You need to select a store before adding to cart".
Um, no, I'm not going to pick it up, and I don't care which shop (if
any) your stock is at; your job is to know that, and ship it to me.
Clicking on the black pen that I want gives me three options:
collection, "home delivery", or super special "Ryman Zoom Express
Delivery, In as little as 25 minutes, powered by Deliveroo". Well,
clearly that's going to be expensive, let's try the normal sort.
"Home delivery is not available."
OK, how much does the "Zoom Express Delivery" cost?
"Sorry, your selected location is outside our current service area.
Please try a different address or choose another method."
Maybe I should try to pick it up. But Ryman, being originally an
honest retailer, mostly has shops in town rather than out in the
middle of nowhere: great if they had one in Wycombe, but they don't,
and since they are in the middle of town (nearest are in Banbury and
Basingstoke) I'd have to go specifically to that town (e.g. next week
when I'll be driving past anyway), negotiate parking, find the
shopping centre, and so on. Not worth the effort for a "might be nice"
thing.
But.
If I choose the white pen, presto, I can select delivery. So the
black pen isn't uniquely hard to deliver, it's just out of stock,
which is a thing you could also have noted on the page that listed
the various items. Instead, I have to select each colour and see
whether it'll allow delivery in order to find out which colours are
actually available.
And then, as it turned out on the same day, I tried to buy some socks
from Marks & Spencer. Well, I'd used their web site before, so instead
I asked my wife to take a look in when she was in Wycombe anyway.
(start Chris)
And I nobly set out to dare the very centre of town, where merely
leaving the car cost me two quid for an hour's parking, in a car-park
that seems to be downright coy about where the various shops are
relative to any of the lifts. Inevitably, I chose the wrong place to
park because the lift to that entire quadrant was out of order, so
while I could go out down stairs, I needed to find a lift somewhere in
order to get back up to the car. Eventually I found M&S more or less
where I thought it ought to be by dead reckoning, and went in and up
on an escalator to the first floor. No, I was not singing a song by
Flanders and Swann; that must have been someone else. (Hail to thee
blithe Wompom, hail to thee oh plant...)
I have had worse retail experiences, I suppose, but I can't off-hand
think when. For a start, there were no assistants in the shop except
at the tills, so nobody from whom I could hope to find out where they
had hidden what I was looking for. I did ask one of the five other
customers I saw (on a Saturday afternoon!) who was trying to find a
pair of shoes that fit him, if he happened to have seen socks at all,
but he hadn't. Well, putting them near the shoes would take all the
fun out of everyone's Retail Experience, wouldn't it. Putting them
near the underpants would also have been too bleedin' obvious. Having
any signage at all might have negated the object of the exercise,
which was clearly to avoid selling anything to anyone. After I had
searched that Menswear floor twice, I finally went to the only till
and interrupted one of the two transactions I had seen while I was
there, whereupon a Saturday Lad I hadn't noticed bobbed up from behind
the counter (I do mean bobbed; I think he'd been hiding under it in
case someone organised a lynch mob or something) and told me that
socks were by pyjamas. Silly me: of course they were. Shuddering at
the recollection of the time I tried to buy a pair of M&S pyjamas this
century in Hereford, I duly followed him there, to find that of the
sort of sock we wanted in the size that was needed, they had one
solitary bunch of three pairs, but in the wrong colour. The socks were
all hidden behind something else, but by that time I was losing the
will to live and failed to make a note of what was shielding them from
obtrusive customers. Both the obtrusive customers.
I came away confirmed in my impression that this is a shop which
really prefers not to have physical customers in a physical location,
and that on line would be the only way to get what we wanted. Only for
me at least, it wasn't. It wanted my postcode, but when I typed that
in I was told (repeatedly) that "We can't get your current location.
Try checking your browser settings or type in your postcode, town or
city." At this point I washed my hands of them and told Roger I wished
to have nothing more to do with it. I don't think I told him he would
have to go barefoot, but I may have thought it.
(end of Chris, back to Roger)
So back to the web site for me it was. And that mostly worked,
thanks to some of Owd Roger's Computer-Wrangling Tricks (send SAE for
pamphlet), except that when the receipt arrived (not sent until some
ten minutes after the transaction was completed) it said both "we'll
email you when it's ready to collect" and "We'll email you when your
order has been despatched". This is the point at which I would be
asking a human "are you feeling OK?".