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Greetings from
Amazon.com
A Brief History of Consumerism and Why You Should Care
I was sitting in my office doing whatever it is that I do when the following message arrived in my email inbox. The date was November 5, 2002. The email was an automated whatever from Amazon.com, the self-proclaimed “Earth's Biggest Bookstore,” now transmuted into “Earth’s Biggest Selection.”
For those of you who don’t know, Amazon recently introduced a new “feature”—I guess that’s what you’d call it—called Free Super Saver Shipping. When it was first introduced, you could get free shipping on orders over $75 (at least that’s what I recall). Then it was moved down to $50. I see that it’s now down to $25, though “restrictions apply.” More on that.
Now I’m a big book orderer and reader, having spent by my count nearly $1,300 so far this year with Amazon and assorted other book sellers. Meeting Amazon’s minimum order isn’t a problem for me, so back in September I decided to give Super Saver a go. And thus, the following response. They key here are the dates.
To: kevin@kevinhoffberg.com
From: amazon.com [autoresponse@amazon.com]
Subject: Your Amazon.com Order (# xxxxxxxxxxx)Greetings from Amazon.com.
We wanted to let you know that there is a delay with one or more items in the order you placed on September 30 2002 [note that date] 09:39 PDT Order (# xxxxxxxxxxxx)
Please approve this delay so that we can continue processing your order. (Note that if we haven't received your approval by November 30 2002 [two months after my order, what’s going on here?], we'll still try to obtain and ship the item(s) before that date.) To do so, visit the following Order Update page in Your Account . . . [followed by lots of “if that doesn’t work, try this, and if that doesn’t work, try that”].
Please note: This e-mail was sent from a notification-only address that cannot accept incoming e-mail. Please do not reply to this message [also, please don’t bother looking for a phone number on this email or anywhere on the Amazon site, because there isn’t one].
Thanks for shopping at Amazon.com, and we hope to see you again.
Sincerely,
Customer Service Department
Amazon.com
http://www.amazon.com
Earth's Biggest Selection
Courteous, but fundamentally useless. Like what choice did I have other than to say, “Fine, take your time”? Clicking through to the “where’s my stuff” part of my personal Amazon web page revealed that the estimated shipping date was actually towards the END OF DECEMBER, though that might not be right as things change so just hold tight. Or words to that effect.
For the slight economic advantage of not paying $11.50 to get my $75 worth of books in three days, I now found myself waiting nearly three months. Or would it be only two months? Who really knew? Apparently not Amazon.
What were they thinking? Move the darn limit back up to $75, or whatever it takes to generate enough margin, and mail the books! What’s the point of free shipping if you’re never actually going to ship the books? Perhaps the assumption is that the books will just pick themselves off the shelves, throw themselves headlong into the sorting bins, and hail a passing UPS truck! At least that was what I was thinking when this next e-mail showed up moments later from the great man himself—Jeff Bezos—announcing a once in a lifetime opportunity to pre-flight Amazon’s newest shopping experience, “Project Ruby.”
From: Jeff Bezos [jeffb@amazon.com]
To: kevin@kevinhoffberg.com
Subject: Test "Project Ruby" and get a 30 dollar thank youFor almost a year, we've been working on a new effort which we've internally called "Ruby." Ruby is almost ready for its public unveiling. But, before we release it broadly, we wanted to give our best customers [italics added by me] a chance to try it first (warts and all) and give us feedback.
Ruby is our new Apparel and Accessories store with over 400 major clothing brands (including Gap, Old Navy, Nordstrom, Lands' End, Target, Eddie Bauer, Foot Locker, and many more). Our goal is to provide complete apparel selection and offer it the Amazon way--with easy navigation, a single shopping cart, your ordering and payment information already on file, etc. [I wonder if that includes a complete lack of responsiveness if you want to actually interact with a live person as well as appallingly slow free shipping?] Of course, none of this would be possible without our many apparel store . . . [blah, blah, blah]
Thanks for helping us build a better store [yeah, whatever].
Sincerely,
Jeff Bezos
Founder & CEO
Amazon.com
Well that seemed fortuitous. Here I was steaming around about having to wait three months for my books, and low and behold, I was now in possession of Jeff Bezos’ personal email: jeffb@amazon.com. Just like billg@microsoft.com only different (I wonder where Jeff got the idea for the email handle?).
Now I’ve actually sent Chairman Bill email before. A few years ago I had gotten all exercised about something Microsoft had done, and in a fit of pique, I balled up a decently well written, thoughtfully edited, “wait 22 seconds before you hit send” flame mail, and hurled it at the then and now high panjandrum of software. It wasn’t more than 90 minutes later and my phone was ringing with an exceedingly pleasant young man on the other end of the line saying something like: “Mr. Hoffberg, I see that you sent our Chairman a piece of email. From the sounds of it, you’re not very happy with us. What can I do to help?”
I kid you not. It happened just like that. And the nice young man took care of the problem. So you can imagine that I had at least a modest expectation that sending an email to Chairman Bezos would elicit some sort of response as well. I mean, it’s his personal email, isn’t it?
So I hit reply to Jeff’s thoughtful message to one of his BEST CUSTOMERS, and sent him the following.
From: kevin@kevinhoffberg.com
To: Jeff Bezos [jeffb@amazon.com]Mr. Bezos
I'm sending this back against an email I received about your new Ruby service . . . a service I have absolutely no interest in patronizing for reasons I'll describe in a moment.
I am an Amazon Associate, which means that I have populated my website with book reviews that link back to Amazon. I am also a loyal customer. I haven't checked lately, but my guess is that I order at least once a month, maybe twice, and average about $100 per month in total book purchases . . . mostly with Amazon, but not completely. So I think I'm probably at least a decent customer, maybe even a good customer.
In September, I decided to try your Super Saver Shipping: actually the second time I've done that. The first experience was horrible, but I thought maybe it was just a glitch so I tried it again. The second and last experience was even worse.
I've just today gotten the following notice: “Your Amazon.com order has shipped (#xxxxxxxxxxxx) . . .” It's actually a partial shipment. I got a notice last week saying that the rest won't ship until the end of December. I placed the order in September. It will be nearly a month an a half before I get the first part of the order, and perhaps two months more before I get the second part of the order . . . all to save a few dollars on shipping.
Mr. Bezos, I can't even begin to conceive of a scenario where this could be called good service. It's neither good nor service. My assumption, and one that is reinforced by your website, is that "super saver" means slow shipping, not galactically slow picking and then slow shipping. If that's the case, it's a tragically flawed offer. I see that you recently dropped the minimum order necessary to qualify for this fiendishness. Assuming you're not trying to purposely lose customers, why wouldn't you just leave the minimum at $75 or whatever and just pick and ship the goods within the same lunar cycle that the customer orders?
This leads to my second gripe with Amazon. Getting a hold of someone at your company is effectively impossible. I'm told there's a phone number somewhere on the web site but I've never found it. It's not on the email notices I get. The email notices I get are from a mailer daemon so there's no way to respond back to a real person. The best I can do is hunt around until I find a way to send you a form email, and even that's hard to find. The best I could do the last time I tried was to find a suggestion form that notifies the sender that there will be no reply forthcoming, but thank you for your interest in government.
This is all shabby at the least. If it's any comfort, I publish a regular column and speak all over the world on customer experience and I've gone from singing Amazon's praises to holding it up, along with SprintPCS, as among the worst customer experience providers in the new economy. Someone isn't thinking clearly at your shop because in my book, you've shattered your brand promise. I'd like to believe that my recent experience is aberrant, but it's not. As I've said, I've tried Super Saver twice and it was rotten both times. The inability to speak to someone is a brilliant bit of cost savings, but ultimately destructive to your brand.
So what is to be done? I can tell you one thing: I've started buying more books from B&N. I'm going to try their website for the first time next time I order. I'm probably also going to shift my partner activity to B&N as well. Fix this mess Mr. B. I can't believe I'm the only one.
Kevin Hoffberg
There. That felt good. My fingers fairly smoked as I heaped line upon line, obloquy upon opprobrium. This would command attention. This would get me somewhere. This would make it right to the top. I could already imagine Jeff storming into a staff meeting with my email in tow . . . “Why this is outrageous! I had no idea! This has to be fixed!”
Silly me. What was I thinking?
Not three Internet moments later, my email inbox was binging at me, alerting me to the arrival or yet another missive from Amazon.com. It read as follows:
From: Amazon.com [autoresponse@amazon.com]
To: kevin@kevinhoffberg.com
Re: Your Amazon.com Inquiry [I don’t recall making an inquiry, I thought I was dropping Jeff a personal note]Please note: This is an automated response, but it contains information that should help answer your questions [why do I doubt that?]. Please do not reply to this e-mail, as we are not able to respond personally to messages sent to this address [oh, so I guess jeffb@amazon.com isn’t his real email after all].
To better serve you, we've made it easy to find answers and make changes quickly and efficiently through our Web site [code for “we don’t want to talk to you, it’s too expensive and we already know what’s best for you anyway”]. Why wait for an e-mail response when you can:
Find the answers to your questions in our online Help pages.
[Blah, blah, blah, with lots more links I can click on that answer the nine questions Amazon wants to answer]
We hope our online resources meet all your needs. If you've explored the above links but find you still need to get in touch with us, please use the e-mail form in our online Help department [keep in mind that doing this will generate this same, exact response, i.e., thanks for your interest, but we’re really not that interested].
We appreciate your business and look forward to seeing you again soon at Amazon.com.
Sincerely,
Amazon.com Customer Service
http://www.amazon.com/P.S. You received this message because Amazon.com received the following message [you don't really need to read any of the next paragraph, just look at all the goop]:
From kevin@kevinhoffberg.com Tue Nov 5 14:25:02 2002
Received: from matchless.amazon.com (matchless.amazon.com [10.16.42.218]) by mail-admin-1.amazon.com (8.9.1/) with ESMTP id OAA17590 for <jeffb-autoresponse@mail-admin-1.amazon.com>; Tue, 5 Nov 2002 14:24:49 -0800
Received: from service-4-internal.amazon.com by matchless.amazon.com with SMTP (crosscheck: service-4-internal.amazon.com [10.16.42.50]) id gA5MOm19029604 for <jeffb@amazon.com>; Tue, 5 Nov 2002 14:24:48 -0800
Received: from mail1.infinology.com ([216.89.24.248]) by service-4-internal.amazon.com via smtpd (for matchless.amazon.com [10.16.42.218]) with SMTP; 5 Nov 2002 22:24:48 UT
Received: (qmail 41747 invoked from network); 5 Nov 2002 22:24:33 -0000
Received: from unknown (HELO VAIO) (67.120.85.110) by mail1.infinology.com with SMTP; 5 Nov 2002 22:24:33 -0000
From: "Kevin Hoffberg" <kevin@kevinhoffberg.com> To: "'Jeff Bezos'" <jeffb@amazon.com>
Subject: Your terrible service
Date: Tue, 5 Nov 2002 14:24:25 -0800
Message-ID: <003d01c2851a$1c25d300$6401a8c0@VAIO> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
X-Priority: 3 (Normal)
X-MSMail-Priority: Normal
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook, Build 10.0.2627
X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2800.1106
Importance: Normal
In-Reply-To: <.AAA-23448230-30257,3434.1036073695@mail-ems-101.amazon.com>
X-Amazon-Camel's-Eye: score=-17.4, host=matchless.amazon.com, utc-time=1036535089;
I particularly liked the last part after the PS. Like I really needed to know that stuff about MIME and all. Kind of gives you an allover glow, doesn’t it? As if the line about “Please note: This is an automated response . . .” wasn’t obvious enough, the technology people thought they’d actually show me how it worked behind the scenes. That was nice.
So I guess Chairman Jeff didn’t get my email after all. Or if he did, I’ll never know. And when I start buying my books someplace else, he probably won’t know that either, though some email daemon will continue to plague me with helpful suggestions for books from my favorite authors and notices that I can now buy papal indulgences or whatever else it is that Earth’s Biggest Selection is now selling.
I may be missing something, but I remain firmly convinced that it’s just not this hard to deliver a decent customer experience. For all the whizzy stuff that Amazon.com does with all that data it has squirreled away up there in Seattle, it has somehow missed the part about connectedness. It’s not my avatar or web bot that’s out there picking out sound files that will be read into my brain while I sleep. It’s little old me, tippy typing away, looking for a made-out-of paper-just-like-God-intended book to read with my aging eyes. You know. Me. A person.
How Did We Get This Way?
I sit back and look at all that I’ve just reported, and with the benefit of perspective find myself wondering how did we, or at least I, get to this point? There’s no earthly reason why Earth’s Biggest Selection can’t ship books in less than two months at any price, but still, I admit it, I have become an unforgiving consumer, at least where the big brand, big data warehouse players are concerned.
It’s not like Amazon delivers a bad service (other than this notable example). If someone had described the basic pillars of the value proposition to me ten years ago—click, click access to every book that’s buyable (I’m thinking now about the original value proposition) at a discount price, delivered at my doorstep as quick as I want it—I’d have done cartwheels. What’s not to like about that? And now I can buy a bathrobe to read in, a lamp to read by, and a lawnmower to read instead of, from the very same place that sells me my books. How cool is that? Except that my expectations have been set even higher so I’m not doing handsprings, I’m cranky instead.
Oh what hath we wrought? We pillars of the great age of consumerism—and if I’ve assumed too much about you, please forgive me—now find ourselves in a paradoxical state where we vibrate between deep suspicion of great big brother in all its manifestations (we don’t want organizations using our personal information against us) and wild-eyed indignation when some vendor like Amazon, our bank, or our favorite hotel doesn’t instantly recognize us and accord us the special consideration we feel our patronage so richly deserves.
We want access to infinite amounts of information via the Internet, and yet feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume and general uselessness of what awaits us on the other side of a Google search. We want the personal connection and idiosyncrasies of the corner coffee shop or a friendly local retailer, and yet we treasure the comfort of being able to find a Starbucks or a Hyatt in whatever remote corner of the globe we happen to visit.
This “raging paradoxical pathology” as I’ve taken to calling this phenomenon does not simply visit us as consumers. Down on Main Street, we business people want our vendors to innovate, add value, and act like partners; and yet we want them to compete for every piece of business through exchanges, on-line auctions, and brutal bidding wars. We want an abundance of choices, but we want to do business only with “the best”. We want to move the risk of holding inventory and managing logistics to our vendors, but do we really want to share with them privileged information about our processes and customers?
In truth, we’ve kind of become a pain with this information driven, bi-polar behavior we’ve adopted. A pain to ourselves, our customers, our vendors, and pretty much anyone else that hinders our ability to consume. The nerve of Amazon not having a phone number I can call! How dare they slow ship me like that?
Not that we consumers haven’t always been this way. It’s just that access to all that information, and the simultaneous ability to generate and narrowcast or broadcast a whole lot more of our own, has given new dimensions to both our worst and best inclinations to have and share our point of view as well as expect that something should therefore be done as a result of it.
We didn’t just wake up one morning with all these outlandish expectations. We evolved and revolved from a relatively simple and unsophisticated bunch of producers and traders—a group I call Customer 1.0—into a bunch of information crazed wackos that I call Customer 6.0. The question I have is, “Now what?” Now that we know everything, or think we do, will we be better or worse off as a result? Better consumers? Better citizens? Better leaders? Better politicians? Better human beings?
The Good Old Days and Why They Aren’t Anymore
There actually was a time when consumers weren’t called “consumers” and information about the goods and services we sought to buy was scarce and hard to come by. Way back when, we didn’t log on, turn on, tune in, or even read ads. We were just people who bought stuff from markets and stores, and depending on where we lived, from peddlers, traveling salesmen, agents, and catalogs. We knew what they told us and bought accordingly. For lack of a better term, let’s call that group Customer 1.0. Even today, there are probably 5 billion people who fill that bill.
In western Europe, Great Britain, and the United States, the later part of the 1800’s ushered in the introduction of branded consumer products—a phenomenon that trendy writers today love to bash, but then as now offered the promise of uniformity and consistency, purchase after purchase. For example, why does milk just have to be milk? In the mid-1860s Henri Nestlé began experimenting with various combinations of cow’s milk, wheat flour and sugar in an attempt to develop an alternative source of infant nutrition which he successfully marketed as one of the first branded dairy products in Europe soon thereafter.
Over in the U.S., the Woolson Spice Company in Toledo, Ohio, introduced Lion Coffee in 1884, the first branded, pre-package, sealed-in-a-bag coffee in the U.S. at a time when coffee drinkers scorched their own in frying pans (think about that the next time your order a grande, half-café, soy, cappuccino, wet). In one of the first signs of brand loyalty, customers cut out and collected Lion bag art and redeemed Lion seals for the first advertising premiums: paper dolls, sheet music, games and lithographed cards.
The industrial world was heading into the era of consumer brands which dovetailed nicely with the flowering of magazine and newspaper journalism in the late 1800’s. Rising literacy rates, low cover prices and low postal prices, sensational coverage of the wonders and shocks of the modern age, and the growth of retail advertising contributed greatly to the growth of a homogenized sensibility, along with the products that went with it. It was truly a brand new age, an age that begat a new buying dynamic and a group of consumers we might call Customer 2.0. They were more (if not better) informed, more marketed to, and increasingly more bound together through shared news, stories, and culture.
Into this frothy mix came radio and along with it the first glimmerings of the real time reality many of us love and simultaneously so desperately want to escape these eighty years later. In the 1920s, AT&T formed the first radio network in the U.S., followed shortly thereafter by the “radio group”—General Electric, Westinghouse, and their jointly-owned subsidiary, the Radio Corporation of America—that created its own network centered on WJZ in New York City. Over in the home isles, the BBC was taking shape while Gustave Ferrié made continental history with the first official radio broadcast, made appropriately enough from high atop the Eiffel Tower.
In a technological heartbeat, transmitters popped up in Germany, Belgium, Finland, Norway, Switzerland, Austria, Australia, Cuba, China, and countless other countries, allowing families to put down their books, stop talking to each other, and gather around the big, land-bound consoles to listen to music, variety, news, and advertising. Later, there would be War of the Worlds, All Things Considered, Howard Stern, and late night sports talk [insert other gratuitous references to American radio here], but who knew that then? The rapid decrease in the size and cost of radios along with rural electrification further extended the reach of this new media and hastened an even more homogeneous cultural outlook and an even more evolved customer.
Modern photojournalism came of age during these years, fueled in part by the advent of the small and technically elegant Leica 35mm camera. Publications like Paris Match and Life Magazine turned the traditional magazine formula on its head. Instead of using pictures to illustrate stories, they used pictures to tell stories, further defining popular culture before people even knew there was such a thing. Call all of this the age of Customer 3.0.
After World War II, television created a step-change in mass communications, further contributing to a glorious age of consumerism, mass marketing, and the ability for millions of people to simultaneously watch Elvis swivel his hips on The Ed Sullivan Show. Milton Berle signed a contract for 30 years at $100,000 per year (about what your typical NBA superstar gets for lacing up his sneakers for one game), and the world met I Love Lucy. Hello Customer 4.0.
If you weren’t around in the 50’s, 60’s, and even 70’s, it was a giddy time to be Customer 4.0. Three television channels plus public broadcasting (those poor souls in the UK who had to settle for so much less)! Walter Cronkite was there every night to interpret the news of what seemed like an impossibly small world. There were rockets blasting men into outer space, and later, there was an undeclared war live and in color going on in 60 second bites, right there in our living rooms. And as mind boggling and wonderful as it all was, it was barely a warm up act for what was to come. We’ve had another step-change, a change foreshadowed in the full flower of Customer 4.0 and launched with a vengeance by 1991 with the advent of what was to become the Internet.
Skip Customer 5.0. We’ve now entered the era of what I call Customer 6.0, and with it we have been clobbered with more stimuli than we can possibly handle, and in surviving that onslaught, we have also become the best informed, savviest group of customers the world has ever known.
In the U.S., more than half the households have Internet access. The statistics are similar in other develop countries. In total, nearly half a billion people around the globe access the Internet, which has about one billion discrete Web pages. Three million new pages are added daily. There are 600 million electronic mail boxes out there, and they’re being used hard: e-mailers send roughly four trillion e-mails annually. As I recall, the personal computer was supposed to eliminate the need for paper. That was a nice fantasy. Instead, almost 500 billion paper copies are made in the U.S. each year. Throw in the printers and multi-function fax machines and the number of copies workers make each year jumps to 15 trillion. By 2003 the amount of standard office paper consumed is expected to be double the amount used in 1996.
Whereto Now?
All of this information is clearly not all bad news. Not by a long shot. On any given day, you or I can become an expert on just about anything. Pick a topic, and there’s more than you really want to know waiting out there for you to find. (The healthcare industry calls this phenomena “testing Internet positive”.)
That same Internet makes it possible for Customer 6.0 to generate as well as receive information resulting in a continuous feedback loop that further adds to the mountain of information available to people with similar interests and concerns. Chat rooms, message boards, LISTSERVs, on-line clubs, and all the rest are informal sources of sometimes useful, sometimes useless information that Customer 6.0 nevertheless often perceives as more reliable than what is usually generated by legitimate brand owners.
All of which brings me back to where I started. Customer 6.0 was inevitable, with all the information-born power, schizophrenia about privacy, and persnickety expectations that go along with the affliction. The arc of the last hundred years goes right through the spot we’re sitting in today. If I am at all a barometer, we want the best price, we want to be known and loved, and we want to do business with companies, governments, and academic institutions 24x7x365 and everywhere through all channels. In getting to this point, we’ve become time starved, unreasonably expected, uber-consumers. The rhythmic ebb and flow of daily living that we imagine about days of yore has been detonated by the always on, always available beat of the Internet era.
So now what? Are we done evolving along the information gluttony/high expectations continuum or are we simply marking time at the jumping off point for another step-change yet to come? I’m convinced this is a decently important question for us as merchants, consumers, and as human beings. Maybe I have too little else to think about, but I sometimes wonder if there is an end point, a point when enough data and information is enough. I suspect that the answer is that there is no self-balancing mechanism other than the one that each of us separately chooses. Absent that, are any of us ready for Customer 7.0, or 9.0, or whatever is waiting for us out there? More information? More choices? Even higher expectations for service, customization, privacy, now? Mr. Bezos, are you listening? Are you ready? Are you sure? In the meantime, ship my books.
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webmaster@kevinhoffberg.com
with questions or comments about this web site. Copyright © 2002 Kevin
Hoffberg
Last modified:
05/03/06