If You Really Loved Me You'd Let Me Eat Your Brain

Early last week I received an e-mail from Barnes & Noble (B&N) advertising a clearance sale. Books as low as $1.99! How could I resist? I could have all of my Christmas, Kwanzaa, Ramadan, Hanukkah, Festivus, Boxing Day and Winter Solstice shopping done before August.

I went to the B&N site and sifted through the 600-ish books that were sale for $1.99. I picked out 13 books and ordered them. As an added bonus I got $0.20 off each book because I have a B&N membership. 13 books for $1.79 each. Quite a deal.

For some reason I did a bunch of screen captures of the long Web page listing the items in my order just before pressing the "Submit Order" button. The total came to $24.58. I submitted the order. I was told the order had been received and everything was fine.

I checked on the order a few minutes later. The price of one of the books I ordered showed up on the order status screen as $9.75. I did a bunch of screen captures of the order status page and immediately e-mailed B&N. In my message I pointed out the error and asked them to make sure I’d be charged the original price of $1.79. I attached two JPG images in support of my claims that an error had occurred.

B&N’s reply was generic and confusing:

Barnes and Noble.com offers very competitive pricing on many items, resulting in the best value for our customers. However, as with all retail products, prices are subject to change due to current promotions.
As such, we are unable to credit you for the difference in price, and will honor the original price at the time of purchase.

I replied, telling them that their reply was insufficient. I didn’t ask to be credited the difference between the original price and the erroneous price, I just asked to be charged the original price! No charges had been posted to my credit card yet.

Before B&N got back to me on my second e-mail I received three more automated e-mails from B&N. First, we’ve broken your order into two shipments and you’ll be sent these three books. I specifically told them to send everything in one shipment regardless of how long I had to wait. Second, a message saying oops, the first shipment of three books has been delayed. And a third message saying that they’d shipped the remaining books.

Unfortunately the third message about the second shipment still had the incorrect price of $9.75. Also before B&N had replied to my second e-mail message there were two charges posted to my credit card: $5.67 on July 10th and $27.28 on July 11th. Great.

Next, B&N replied to my second e-mail.

Unfortunately, our system does not allow us to open attachments. Please resend your email without the attachment at your earliest convenience.
If you have a question about content on a specific page, please cut and paste the URL (page address) into the email for ease of reference.

According to our records, the total charges for your order are $32.95 with $5.67 charged on 7/9/2005 and $27.28 charged on 7/11/2005. This charged total was detailed in the order confirmation email that you received. Please review that email. We apologize for any confusion.

This tells me nothing! So I fired off a third e-mail message to B&N congratulating them on further compounding their error. I also chastised them for not telling me sooner that they can’t open attachments. In lieu of attachments, I asked them how they’d like me to prove to them that the order web page I was show totaled $24.58. I also asked how they intended to fix the entire mess. I wasn’t testy but I told them my patience was running thin.

Just before I sent the e-mail UPS dropped off a package. It was the first shipment. But not really. It had my name and address on it and the correct B&N order number but when I opened it I found a VHS tape containing a six-hour tribute to the career of Michael J. Fox and a “Fundamentals of Heat and Mass Transfer, Fourth Edition” textbook. Liang Wang of Urbana IL won’t be getting her or her books any time soon.

So I added this indictment to my third e-mail to B&N and fired it off. No reply yet.

This is really a shame because up until now I’ve had great service from them and they’ve regularly matched or beat the prices of other online book and DVD sellers. I think if I don’t get a good response from the customer service droid I’ll take the whole mess to the nearest B&N store and let them sort it out. If I get any friction I’ll just have them cancel everything, including my B&N membership!