Buyer Beware: ProFlowers

Last month I was in Israel for three weeks. These three weeks included the date of my anniversary. I still wanted to do something nice for my wife on our anniversary, so I decided to send her flowers. I used a company that I had seen an ad for ProFlowers. While I was checking out, they gave me an offer for $15 off my order. All I had to do was fill out a survey, which I did. As part of this process I agreed to sign up for a service called EasySaver. Joining was oh-so easy as ProFlowers shared my credit card information with EasySaver. Of course EasySaver then starts charging me $15 per month for membership.

Now I was clearly stupid for falling for something like this. I was quite embarassed when my wife noticed the charges on our credit card. Luckily we only got nailed for May and June. Anyways, clearly my fault. However, I really hate shady operations like this. I will never use ProFlowers again. As far as I can tell, EasySaver is completely worthless anyways. Hopefully other folks will be smarter than me and not fall for scams like this.

Black Friday

Yesterday my wife convinced me to go shopping with her and her sister. Normally I dismiss the idea of shopping on Black Friday, smugly stating that people should just buy everything online. Long lines, supply shortfalls (artificial or not,) and the like are all just signs of inefficient markets that will be replaced by the ruthless efficiency of e-commerce. Somehow Crystal talked me in to hitting the mall at 7 AM...

One amusing thing to me is the bait-n-switch items. These are the "limited" quantity items that are offered at a huge discount (do stores actually take a loss on these things?) in order to get lots of people in the store. The store then runs out quickly, so customers wind up buying other, more expensive items. This year's bait-n-switch special was definitely GPS units. Not only did every big-box store out there have sub $200 GPS units in limited quantities, but places that don't normally sell GPS had them as well. Get your GPS at Long's Drugs or Sportsmart, woo hoo!

Black Friday was actually a lot of fun. My niece has managed various American Eagle stores for the last ten years or so, thus I have a lot of empathy for the folks who work on Black Friday. They all seemed to be in a good mood yesterday, and I had a good time joking around with people.

Black Friday had a dark moment for me though. I managed to drop my Blackberry in a (thankfully clean) toilet. I fished it out quickly, and took the battery out of it. I waited a few hours, and it booted it up. The keyboard was crazy though. Sometimes it would not type at all, but other times keys would be entered without me touching anything. So I took the battery back out and left it out over night. This morning everything is working good as new! What a relief!

Yesterday ended on a very bright note. We are going to Florida for Christmas this year, so my wife decided to give me an early present: a Nintendo Wii. She didn't want to try and hide it from me in the luggage, and this way we got to play it with our family in Bakersfield. I am happy to say that I have a sore shoulder this morning from playing Wii Tennis late last night... She asked me if I wanted other games for it, but I really did not expect a Wii and had no idea what games are supposed to be good on it. I will probably get Madden for it, just because I used to love Madden on the PS2 and Gamecube. Guitar Hero looks like a lot of fun, too. I have basically taken the last 3.5 years off from playing video games, as I stopped having time for stuff like that when we started having babies. I'm not sure how much time I will have to play it now either, maybe once I finish my book :-)

Christmas Shopping @ Circuit City

Saturday I finished up my Christmas shopping. I was researching a certain product and found it very cheap at Circuit City. What was bizarre was that it was $10 cheaper to buy online than at the store. Circuit City offers in-store pickup at no extra cost, so basically I could save $10 by buying it online and picking it up at the store. So that's what I did.

They gave me a confirmation number to use. Of course the Circuit City site suggested I print out the confirmation number, I probably would usually (trees be damned, heh.) But at the time, my wife was in the middle of printing a ton of Christmas stuff. The confirmation number was emailed to my GMail account. So I figured that even if I really needed the number, I would just get it off my GMail via my cell phone. However, I didn't really think I would need the confirmation number.

So I went to Circuit City, where I had to battle crazy Christmas traffic just to find a parking spot. I finally did, and waltzed into the store. There I was greeted with a long line to customer service, and there was a sign indicating that customer service was where I needed to go for "web pickup." Fine. So I waited in the line, and finally got the customer service counter. There the clerk asked me for my confirmation number.

I told him I didn't have it, so he asked for the credit card I used to buy the item online. This was exactly what I expected. I handed him my credit card, but after swiping it he said there was "no hit." He asked for the phone number I had used when I placed the order. I gave him this number, but again "no hit." He then preceded to lecture me on how I should have printed out my confirmation number.

At this point, I brought out my cell phone only to see the dreaded "no service" indicator. How could this be? My phone is through Verizon and Circuit City sells Verizon phones! I've had the phone for a year and I've never lost service on it anywhere in the Bay Area. I've taken it to the east bay, San Francisco, all over the penisula, and of course all over Silicon Valley. Never any problems. I've biked in the hills south of San Jose, up to Calero Reservoir, and never had problems there. But for some reason at Circuit City in South San Jose... no service. The ever-so-helpful then suggests that I go use "the broadband terminal" to retrieve the confirmation number from my email.

I was annoyed to say the least. I see the "broadband terminal" and of course there's a ton of people there. So I went outside, where I had some spotty service, and retrieved the number. Then I stood in line -- again -- and finally met with the same clerk, but this time with confirmation number in hand. Finally I got my purchase.

Amazing how I can pick up eTickets for thousand dollar plane tickets with just the credit card used to purchase the tickets, but this is not good enough at Circuit City. I'm not sure what bothers more -- that this did not work, or that the guy tried to use it and it did not work. I'm not so sure I'll be doing the in-store pickup again at Circuit City anytime soon.