Netflix VS ZIP.CA

Many others have blogged on this very topic, so I’ll keep this post pify.

For some reason, several years ago, Netflix decided that it was not worth their time expanding into Canada. Probably because they realized that with the postal service up here, even if they had a distribution center every 5 kilometres apart, they couldn’t guarantee their normal standards for delivery (1 day).

Whatever the reason, this left the marketplace wide open for many Netflix-wannabe competitors to sprout up. The largest became ZIP.CA.

Well, ZIP.CA is kinda like Netflix except it has less selection, charges more, has extremely limited availability of popular titles and low availability of everything else, and is slower because it uses CanadaPost rather than USPS. I’m sure you already know this.

What you might not know is that even the envelopes suck! For everyone who is used to those neat reusable envelopes that Netflix sends out, be prepared for something a little bit more low tech. ZIP.CA sends their DVDs in old-fashioned envelopes, the kind that you have to bust open with a letter opener. Not even a perforated tab.  Inside, you find a seperate return envelope folded up.

I guess Canadians aren’t so environmentally conscious afterall.

Now I know that Netflix has a patent on their envelope scheme, but couldn’t ZIP.CA come up with something a little better than this…

Snail Mail…literally!

I know my friends back in America complain all the time about USPS, but if you want to see how slow and inefficient mail can really be, you gotta come here and experience Canada Post! It’s something else entirely…

So, Canada Post refuses to deliver mail on Saturday, takes every single excuse for a non-working holiday they can think of even when everyone else is working, and doesn’t seem to have any locations in Toronto with pick-ups later than 5:30 (from what I’ve seen). And of course, the postage costs more than it does in the USA!

But how slow can they really be?

Last Tuesday, I had a small package shipped to me in envelope by First Class from London, Ontario. That’s about 191 km (or 118 miles) away from here.

It FINALLY arrived today. The average human walks about 5 km / hour. So one could walk there and back in less than 80 hours, less time than it took for Canada Post to deliver it.

Now, maybe I’m exaggerating a bit by calling this “snail mail”. It’s closer to the speed of a turtle, which can move on land at about 1 km/h. That would get my envelope here in 191 hours, or 8 days, which surprise surprise…is how long it actually took! Canada Post, I know your dirty secrets. You use turtles, don’t you?

The irony is that people here tell me that it takes more time for mail to get delivered with-in Canada than it does for mail to get delivered from Canada to a U.S. destination. This of course, is not true in reverse when you send items from the U.S. to Canada, since Canadian Customs will ensure that you’ll wait forever. I’m still waiting on two items shipped to me from back home, and will probably have to wait a very very long time!

Ed gets Socked!

While I was watching Ed the Sock, several large messages scrolled on the TV screen, reminding me that Ed would soon be no more. After 25 years of providing solid entertainment, the unique and all-Canadian talkshow puppet – an idea that could only come about in Canada – is going off the air thanks to Rogers, the epitome of a souless Canadian corporation.

The irony is that this particular episode I was watching was about celebrating everything Canadian. I’m not exactly sure why, nor do I really care, but I do know they had a girl in a hot tub gulping maple syrup whenever Ed made a joke about beavers. See, Canadians CAN produce good TV…

http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/MediaNews/2008/06/25/5981036-sun.html

So the story is that Rogers acquired CityTV, the producer of Ed, less than a year ago, and I guess they decided that Ed didn’t really fit-in with their image of being a family-friendly and morally responsible company on the outside (while being a very immoral company underneath). Even worse, they want to turn CityTV into a woman’s channel. As if the world needs another one of those!

Also, as the above article mentions, dumping Ed gives them more room for their “U.S. acquired programming”.

Very ironic when you consider that the CRTC (twisted Canadian equivalent of the FCC) has for many years banned most American networks from entering Canada, under the premise that this protects Canadian television!

Of course, such doesn’t prohibit Canadian networks from broadcasting American shows, and it essentially gives them exclusive rights to those shows. Why even bother producing your own creative content, when you have a monopoly on content that was produced for someone else?

And that’s why 90% of the primetime programming on Canadian networks like CTV and CityTV are American shows, except with extra commercial time added to rake in the profits.

So here’s an idea: Maybe if American shows were allowed to be aired on the American networks they were intended for in Canada, all these Canadian networks would suddenly find themselves with empty schedules, which would force them to go out and produce their own content with all the money they’re currently using to buy American shows!

And they’d have to actually compete for viewers, instead of just bidding on the show that got the highest ratings two seasons ago in the U.S.

Until then, expect to see more home-grown shows like Ed the Sock getting the axe, until someone stops the corporate greed machine in this country.

SEARS.CA Update

Right now, it’s 5:27 PM on July 22.

Last week, I got two calls from Customer Service. During the first call, I got put on hold, and subsequently hung-up on again. The second call was a day later, and I finally made some progress (I thought) in getting them to reschedule the delivery for today.

They told me it would arrive between 7 AM and 2 PM today.

And…

R-e-tailers

That’s short for Retarded e-tailers.

I finally started this blog after realizing that the motto, “the customer is always right,” is something completely unheard of in Canadian business. They instead seem to live by a different ethic called, “there’s a sucker born every day.” And if one walks aways because he’s tired of being ripped off, that’s okay because another will come by shortly.

The irony is that many of the worst offenders are large Canadian corporations, which you would think would only exist if they had previously established a certain level of trust with their customers.  Even more disheartening for an American like myself is the fact that most of these corporations bare the logos of companies we’d be familiar with – Sears, Office Depot, Best Buy, Amazon, etc. The American corporations aught to be ashamed of themselves for lending their name to Canadian subsidiaries that practice business in a way that would never fly back home.

A while back, I saw the perfect TV stand on SEARS.CA, the online division of Toronto’s largest department store (there are no Macy’s or Bloomingdale’s here). At a mere 30 buck, it was in the inexpensive price range I was looking for and also happened to match decor of my room perfectly. Having had numerous bad experiences buying things online in Canada, I first checked to see if my local Sears Canada store carried this TV stand, but as luck would have it, they told me that this was an item that could only be ordered from SEARS.CA or their mail-order catalog.

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I went back to SEARS.CA a few days ago, and placed my order. How hard could ordering one lousy TV stand from one of Canada’s largest e-tailers be?

So, when I got to the delivery options, the website asked me if I wanted to pick my TV stand up in a local store or have it delivered straight to my home “for as low as $4.95“. I really don’t want to bother wasting more time with a trip down to the local Sears and paying $4.95 for shipping sounds reasonable. Of course, I’m careful to read the fine print, which says that additional charges may apply. It says, “You will be advised of your shipping charges when ordering.”

Fine. Let’s see how much they want to deliver a TV stand. To my surprise, when I continue through the checkout, it takes my CC info but never tells me how much I will be paying for delivery. I guess that whoever made the website forgot to the implement that feature. Instead, it just says that my order has been placed and now has the status “Pending”.

I think to myself that maybe they’re planning to call me back to confirm the order, and that’s when they’ll tell me how much shipping is going to be. What a needless hassle, but I’m already used to that here. Otherwise, I should just assume that the shipping is going to be $4.95 right, because that’s what they advertised and they NEVER TOLD ME OTHERWISE!

They don’t send me any confirmation email, nor do they tell me how or when my TV stand is going to be shipped. I mean, can you believe that most American e-tailers actually let the customer choose their own shipping option – I believe that most Canadians would be shocked!

On Sunday, I get a mysterious call. It turns out to be an automated recording, the kind that we usually hang-up on. It’s of really low quality too, and so garbled that finally all I can make out are a few words: “Tuesday”, “delivery” and “Sears”. I guess that means that I should be getting my TV stand on Tuesday, which was yesterday.

Tuesday comes around and I wait for the delivery. I still haven’t the foggiest clue when they might try to deliver my TV stand, and I have other business that needs to be taken care of, so I can’t afford to stay at home all day. My first brilliant idea is to check the SEARS.CA website to see if they’ve updated the order status to give any clues. Well, this is interesting…

It says that I need to contact Customer Service because the order status feature is “undergoing maintenance”:

Under maintenance, eh?

My first call to Customer Service results in the system rudely hanging up on me before I can even get through to an actual human being. Note that they must be using really cheap VoIP because the voice quality is so poor, I can barely hear the menu options. I call back a while later and this time manage to get ahold of someone. Ahh, at last!

The rep tells me that my TV stand is actually going to be shipped by UPS, and is being shipped today but won’t arrive for another few days. I double-check with her THREE TIMES to confirm that my order is in fact being shipped by UPS and will not under any circumstances arrive today. I then ask her if she can give a tracking number, since that’s usually customary with UPS shipping. She tells me that there’s no way she can give me the tracking number until my order is confirmed to be lost and then after that, it takes 10 days to process a request for a tracking number!

Gee, all that? Well, how much was shipping? She acts surprised, like no one had ever thought to ask such a question before, and finally comes back to me with a figure that is close to 13 loonies. I grumble, because that’s more than I hoped to pay for this cheap TV stand, but oh well.

At least everything is settled now, and I can attend to my daily business, right? They’ve wasted enough of my time…

Around 6 PM, when I’m far away from home, I get another mysterious call on my cell. The guy has an unintelligible accent, and I keep asking who this is but he’s not making sense, and I finally say that he must have the wrong number and am about to hang-up, when he finally mentions my name and says something about a TV stand. I make out that he is from Sears and there to deliver it.

Am I there to receive it? Well, no, you see that’s a problem because I was not long ago told that it wouldn’t be arriving today and was being shipped by UPS, not being delivered by Sears itself. I tell the guy that Customer Service told me this, and he simply tells me that I can expect another call from Customer Service and ominously hangs up.

So there you have it! I figure that when you consider the delivery charge, the taxes, and the ridiculous $3 credit-card processing fee that I just found out about, I gave SEARS.CA about 50 bucks of my money for goods and services that I will probably never receive. And while that’s only slightly above the amount I’d be liable for if I disputed this charge with my CC, it’s certainly worth more than a few meals on a student’s budget.

I suppose I could always try to take SEARS.CA to small claims court, if Canada even has such a system. I’m no novice when it comes to online shopping, and have been ordering stuff online for over a decade now. I don’t just buy stuff from the United States, but also Great Britain, Germany, Japan, Hong Kong and even Mainland China. Never have I had as many problems as I have here. eBay sellers even act more professional than major Canadian e-tailers.

What makes Canadian companies so special that they think they can get away with having e-commerce less reliable than we had in the 1990’s???

ANOTHER ADVENTURE I HAD NOT LONG AGO WAS WITH OFFICEDEPOT.CA

I was looking to buy some cheap student bookshelves, and I saw them advertised on the American website OfficeDepot.com. Hmm…I wonder if they ship to Canada?

My question was soon answered, because as soon as typed in my funky Canadian Postal Code, it zipped me right over to OfficeDepot.ca, which looks so much similar to the American website that I couldn’t help but feel a slight sense of false comfort. Everything was the same…well, except for the prices, which were 50% more than on OfficeDepot.com for the bookshelves I wanted to order.

That’s the price you pay for living in Canada. I’ve already learned that there’s not much you can do to avoid the ridiculous price gouging, other than (in this case) having the bookshelves shipped to an American address using OfficeDepot.com and reshipping them to myself here in Canada.

That’s probably what I should have done.

Instead, I was a sucker for the free home delivery being advertised where they said they could deliver it the very next day. And I do like efficiency! Except, it wasn’t really “next day delivery”, because when I placed my order on a Sunday evening, it scheduled my delivery for Tuesday. Fine, well that’s still quicker than shipping from the USA.

Tuesday comes around. I don’t get any phone calls, emails or anything, but my instinct tells me to check the online status of my order. Hmm…that’s interesting, it now says that the expected delivery date is on Friday, not Tuesday! Do I have my dates right? Yes, okay, well I guess there’s been a slight delay. Wish someone would have at least called me to explain the situation, but I guess I can wait a few more days…

Friday comes around and still no bookshelves. So I again check online, to my surprise, the delivery date has been pushed back again, this time by A WHOLE WEEK! What on Earth is going on here? So I call Customer Service to figure out what’s going on, and they come back to me with this story about bookcases being rare and only shipped from one supplier so they are still waiting for them to arrive. They promise me that there will be no more delays!

Let me also mention that I checked the website several times throughout my ordeal, and my supposedly rare bookcases were always listed as “In Stock”.

Well, what do you suppose happens?

The delivery date gets pushed back another week. And another week. And another week. During this time, I’ve sent tons of emails to Office Depot and called their Customer Service numerous times. Finally I speak to a Customer Service Rep who admits to me that Customer Service can’t help me (even though it IS supposed to be their job) and I really need to speak to someone at the warehouse in Mississaugua that handles the delivery for my area. At least he was honest.

Unfortunately, I lost the phone number for that warehouse, and couldn’t find it again, since it’s not listed anywhere. Some more time goes by, and finally, I manage to get this warehouse to call me and schedule a delivery. THEY DON’T EVEN APOLOGIZE FOR ALL THE DELAYS, MUCH LESS OFFER ANY EXPLANATIONS!  And when I ask when they will deliver my bookcases, they say that it will be sometime between 8 AM and 5 PM, and they won’t call beforehand to let me know they’re coming. Like everyone can wait around at home all day because they have nothing better to do.

But after a month, I finally got my bookcases.