HELP ELF! Shopping Online is Overwhelming Me!

Warning - a little bitching going on here while I listen to Christmas carols and work hard to maintain the spirit of the season.

Okay...several years ago I stopped store shopping for Christmas and focused on online shopping so I could keep my holiday spirit intact. Between the people on the roads cutting me off and honking, the rudeness in the parking lots and the "me first" mentality in lines, it was safer for my emotional well being to stay home.

The clutter in the stores during the holidays puts my brain on overload. Now I know how my power-strip feels. Unfortunately, the clutter online has become worse! I have a few tips for the online stores:

1. If you have a brick and mortar location, the customer should be made aware of your inventory. I should be able to pick up or purchase at your store.

2. EBAY? The BID isn't over until after Christmas. Will I bother? Uh, NO! AMAZON you are great in some aspects and confusing in other ways. Prime membership? I never can tell when I'm doing a search for an item when I've left your inventory and moved to a private retailer's site. After I get ready to check out, I discover most of the stuff in my cart wasn't from Amazon and isn't eligible for free shipping. I like ordering from one location to save on the shipping. I'm buying an item not supporting FedEx or other shippers.

3. Online Retailers: If it's the week before Christmas, make sure you are available for questions and for last minute shipping. You know when Christmas is well in advance, but shoppers like me don't figure it out until days before it's ready to show up. You shouldn't need MORE time to pick and pull an item for shipping before the holidays. I'm not buying it from you if you can't get it to me before
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Christmas, and I probably won't need that dragon mug gift after Christmas.

4. My final suggestion comes from my husband, the perennial entrepreneur: The shipping companies should dress up their employees as Santa's elves and have them deliver Christmas day. Imagine that!  

Anyone else have suggestions to help build the economy, since people who have things to sell aren't going out of their way to make it available when we procrastinators need it most?

(You know this was meant a little tongue-in-cheek, right? My sincere apologies to those of you who are working through the holidays, and I know there are many of you. And seriously, I don't want some version of Will Ferrell showing up at the house in a brown truck and his green ELF costume. To our soldiers, police, nurses, servers, firefighters, and all the rest of you who are members of a family juggling the traditional dinner around a loved one's work schedule, Merry Christmas with good thoughts and blessings for the New Year.)

Comments

  1. Thanks, from all of us who are shift workers and have to work holidays

    ReplyDelete

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