Shipping

The Mild Wife and I are fans of online shopping. On some level, the convenience of it all is hard to beat. I mean, you sit there at a laptop (usually), and you decide that you want a particular item to show up at your doorstep. In terms of actually having to do something, all you really do is point and click. Hell, you're going to walk to and from your doorstep anyway, since you're going to leave for work or head out at some point or another.

The other thing that's helpful is that you can quickly and easily edit what you shop for. The Mild Wife and I give ourselves a small allowance to spend every month, and deciding how to spend said allowance is much easier when you have a virtual shopping cart. In a real life store, you would have to wander around the store looking for any item that caught your eye. You would then, in theory, throw all of those items into your cart/basket, and then sort through them all once you were done picking. You'd have to mentally juggle prices and items, to end up selecting the items that made the most sense. Like I said, online shopping has its advantages.

However, one recent purchase highlighted one annoying downside: website can lie. The Mild Wife had chosen some cosmetics from an online retailer (name withheld to protect the guilty), and she selected the basic shipping. It wasn't an urgent purchase, and the website said that it would arrive in three business days. Three business days usually amounts to at most five days if you order near the end of the week, but all in all, it doesn't seem like an unreasonable wait. Personally, I mentally round it off to about a week, and figure I'll get my purchase in no more than a week. A week really isn't too long to wait.

So, the Mild Wife puts in her order, and assumes that the item will arrive about a week later. Au contraire. As soon as she put the order in, the arrival date listed some date that was mostly definitely not three business days later. Well, that seemed odd. We figured we'd give them the benefit of the doubt, however, and maybe it was three business days after the item actually shipped.

Um, no. Whatever it was that led to the later shipping date, we couldn't make sense of it. They did, however, provide shipping updates whenever you looked up the order. That meant that we could tell when the items had left a particular warehouse, or what city they were in. All of this led to my two all-time favorite comments about shipping, courtesy of the Mild Wife:

• "Standard shipping? They should just call it Slow As Hell Shipping!"
  This was after looking at the shipping updates and cross-checking that against a calendar. My memory's a little fuzzy, but I strongly suspect that we were past the original three business day mark.
  
• "I swear, I think they got in a truck and drove there and back."
  Can you tell that we were over the whole shipping process with this particular company? The thought of someone having to drive there, however, did make me chuckle.

So, watch out for that shipping, folks. It can make for a frustrating wait. On the other hand, it can also make for a really amusing story, so you might end up with a blog post or two out of the whole ordeal.