Why It's Hard To Get Angry at Amazon

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Bad customer service is a common bane of our time. Despite the hoopla put out by virtually every company about how much they care about you, including the protestations about how “your call is very important to us,” more and more people see through it. Roll-your-eyes annoyance, resentment, and even anger are feelings most of us experience regularly in encounters with many of our goods and services providers.

You’re at CVS or Rite Aid looking for an item. There is no nearby clerk to ask, and when you find the item, the price tag is missing or wrongly placed. You’re at Home Depot or Lowe’s looking for curtain rods. Every length except the one you need is in stock. At the supermarket, the cashier for the line you’re standing in is in a bad mood and her unfriendly vibe puts you in a bad mood too. A Best Buy appliance delivery crew scratched your hardwood floor and you cannot find anyone at the store (or the company) to take responsibility for the damage. You’re on hold with United Airlines for five or six minutes before you reach an agent (in the Philippines) to try to solve an itinerary problem and he finally determines he has to pass you on to someone else … “Sir, do you mind me putting you on hold for a moment or two?” Almost everywhere you go you are standing in one kind of line or another.

Not only do these annoyances not arise with Amazon, many of them cannot. You want Vitamin C, glue, a laser printer, towels, curtain rods? On Amazon there are scores and scores of choices, each clearly described with the total price as well as the price per unit. In some cases you’re told you can find the item cheaper elsewhere and Amazon will direct you there. Items often have hundreds of customer reviews so you can make judgments about their quality and value. If it’s an item that you would normally like to see and touch before deciding to buy, Amazon gives you the option of clicking on a picture so look at it from all sides. If it’s a book you’re interested in, while you cannot sit down in a nice chair to flip through it, you can “look inside” and read 10 or even 20 pages of it. If you need to return an item the process is easy, clear and you’ll be refunded quickly, no questions asked. If an item arrives broken, you can sometimes get reimbursed for it without even returning it. [Full disclosure: I am not a shill for Amazon, do not work for the company nor own stock in it. I simply cannot help noticing how and why it has entered my life.]

Brick and mortar retailers, especially independent ones, claim certain advantages over Amazon. An example is this statement in the trade magazine of the American Hardware Retailer Industry: “independent home improvement retailers offer expertise; immediate help for homeowner emergencies; high-quality, specialized products; competitive pricing in many areas; and a contribution to local communities that has always outstripped Amazon.” Amazon not surprisingly seems consciously to be trying to counter these claimed advantages, even the one about emergencies. Say you need a new fill valve and flapper assembly for a toilet and you need it right away. With Amazon you can have it tomorrow, or you can drive 30 minutes each way to the nearest Home Depot. With the time to park and get in and out of the store the hour and a half to two hours is time you do not really have. In such a case an emergency begins to become a negotiable concept.

Amazon also seems to understand that the underlying connections to local shopping are eroding. The connections we used to have with most retailers are pretty much gone, along with the loyalty that we used to feel. In a small town or even a big city neighborhood when there truly were “mom and pop” stores, you had a relationship based on your “custom” (the root of the word customer thus implies mutual loyalty and regular buying). The power of calling a customer by her name, asking about her family, could easily outweigh all other considerations including sometimes price. You’d shop where you were known and seemingly liked. And if there was a problem, if mom or pop had a bad day, if you did not find what you were looking for, all of that did not lead to resentment, but to understanding.

Now when you shop at your local ACE hardware (which is technically “independent” but part of a 4,000 member strong cooperative) or CVS, Walmart or Lowe’s there is no interpersonal relationship. You’ll see one cashier on one visit and another on your next. As for expertise, a retired plumber working at Lowe’s or Home Depot might know something about the item you’re looking for, but then on Amazon the hundreds of reviews might clue you in just as well about a product’s pros and cons. Moreover some of the innovations that brick and mortar stores are instituting to make them more competitive and more convenient for you, may in fact be exacerbating the very thing that people miss (though often unconsciously) – a human relationship, even if it is a superficial one. With the introduction of self check-out you now are completely removed from human contact and the resulting time saved by a shorter line is negligible.

Finally it is easy to become resentful at a brick and mortar store because it is a physical entity – you can see reality. You can see where the price fell off the rack, you can see the misplaced items, you can see the dirt on the floor, you can feel the confusion of not knowing which aisle has what item, you can notice the absence of a clerk’s smile, or the gruff attitude of an employee blocking the aisle while he or she stocks the shelves.

In contrast because Amazon’s foibles and inefficiencies are invisible you have fewer opportunities to get annoyed. And besides the rational reasons for choosing Amazon -convenience, choice, etc. – one hidden motivation may be suppressed anger at traditional retail establishments. It’s not just their often poor customer service, but the sense that they’ve taken you for granted. If for example your chain pharmacy has been for years the only option within ten minutes of your home, you keep going there despite being somewhat unhappy at their prices and iffy service. Now as Amazon starts selling more and more goods of all kinds, you find your regular deodorant costs $2.60 on Amazon instead of $3.39 at Rite Aid or CVS. It’s a guiltless switch. Not only don’t you feel disloyal to CVS or Rite Aid, you might even feel (sub-consciously or not) that it serves them right!

 

source: forbes.com