Sideswipe and Skywarp showed up today. I had no idea these were on the way, Amazon sent it out without any notification.

 

Sideswipe and Skywarp will apparently be arriving tomorrow and shipped yesterday without warning.

 

I would contact them about that because, those orders should obviously be at the top of the queue.

 

Yup, still no movement on my day one full price order. :/

 

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They wont help unless I give them other peoples specific order information. Told me they didn't have an answer why people who ordered after me are receiving theirs. They kept telling me to cancel and reorder because of the date listed now. Explained their track record with exclusives and not wanting to bump myself back in the queue. Then they gave me the standard will email you when it's in schtick.

 

Wow, that's terrible customer service. That's like South Park Cable Company terrible . . .

I can see the order information aspect for confirmation and to develop data pool but, saying they don't have to tell you why queue jumps are occurring is nine kinds of making a customer service issue far worse than it already is.

 

The first rep disconnected with me...handed me off to someone else. That irked me more. I was being 100% polite mind you, I think my questions were more than he could handle. The second person was just copy and pasting a script.

 

My conspiracy theory with Amazon's priority for fulfilling preorders is that it takes into account the buyer's proximity to the warehouse/fastest shipping.

I'm not the fastest with preorders, usually the day of, but almost never within minutes of them going up. Somehow Amazon always comes through with my preorders, though. I had zero issues with the exclusives last year. Coneheads, ironhide, the whole lot. Also, I live near Seattle. Just got my shipping notice for SS/SW btw...

 

As mentioned before, it all depends on the warehouse that your order is being fulfilled. If they have it stocked, then you should get your order sooner. Most folks in the West coast have it faster than those of us in the East coast due to the proximity to the local ports.

 

It doesn't take much to make anyone's CS be completely at a loss for what to do, especially given the volume that Amazon does. CS turnover makes general retail turnover look nonexistent and, call/chat/support centers typically woefully under-train employees and then throw them to the wolves because quantity is better/cheaper than quality/longevity.

That's a piss poor script, the deflection should have been their defacto "I'm not sure why this happening but I will escalate it to make sure it won't happen again and to try and see if we can get your order shipped out. However, I can't make any guarantees".

There is always a situation where someone is going to leave being furious with CS (myself included) but, there are ways to turn in that into leaving irate while rolling your eyes hard enough to change the Earth's axis instead of leaving irate and being one step closer to a scorched earth policy with the company. "We don't have to tell you anything" is definitely the later of the two. That's write-up and/or termination territory (even for a cashier) for every retail company I have ever worked for because, that is 100% the type of situation that immediately goes to the DM (district manager) or higher via the customer and the retribution is doled out with great vengeance and furious anger. Amazon can/will sidestep that though because their only B&M (brick & mortar) storefronts are Whole Foods and, no one has any idea if they are actually speaking to a supervisor nor if they are genuinely being escalated at Amazon. Amazon is unfortunately setup to not care unless losing a specific person will put a huge dent in their volume (it's not going to unless they are spending billions on a yearly basis because it will have to show a noticeable NET profit loss against $21+billion NET) and no one with that type of buying power is forking it over to Amazon (they are dealing directly with vendors/distributors and/or manufacturers.

 

I work CS at Amazon.

I'm not sure if retail cs reps have any insight into anything at the order or FC level. I certainly don't, and I'm fairly certain no one at the logistics level does either.

 

Same here...

 

That honestly makes it worse. I can understand no one having access to the data but, that should have been their response along with something about forwarding the issue to the appropriate department for review instead of telling someone they need to provide them with other customer's order numbers and then telling that same person "we don't have to tell you".

Someone somewhere has access to why batch orders for pulls are out of sequence with the order date queue for a pre-order with a limited production run. It would be incredibly short sighted to not track that as rigorously as everyone in retail tracks the time it takes from when a batch drops for an order pull through when it's fulfilled. I guess it's possible that they don't care based on the assumption that no one would ever know if their order was queue jumped but, all hell would break loose if someone knew that a queue jump happened and if their order wound up getting cancelled as a result of queue jumping because anyone with common sense would lose all faith in that retailer due to a complete lack of trust about order fulfillment. It's bad enough that everyone has to worry about if the stock will actually be available to fill their preorder, no one should have to worry about queue hopping on top of that (especially given how frequently everyone's CS throws about the phrase "first come first served").

 

Sideswipe & Skywarp arrived today. Prime member, pre-ordered June 1st at $52.99. Talked with 2 different reps through chat about getting a difference on the $47.99 pricing ala pre-order price guarantee, was told both times they don’t charge back difference. But said I could order again and return this one. Doh well. Both are good out of box, no missing limbs or heads.

 

It's especially odd that a rep would ask for other order numbers. There's nothing any rep can do with any order number that they can't verify an account against (live). It doesn't work like that. But anyway. Retail escalations, again, as far as I know, has no insight into any FC information.

Pretty sure any internal data and reports like that would be kept internal.

When I worked for Diamond Comic Distributors two decades ago it was nice because we could literally see real time stock levels for each warehouse and had direct contact with them AND we could reach out to carriers directly.

We cannot do that where I am now either. So, ya'll need to call USPS/UPS/FEDEX yourselves unfortunately.

 

Yea, that seemed like a "didn't they train you not to ever say nor ask something like that" moment.

I'm sorry if it came across like I was suggesting it should be divulged. I just meant that someone should have access to the data and that it should be investigated so that it stops and doesn't happen again because, queue jumping shouldn't be occurring anywhere in the logistics chain.

I could do that at OfficeMax (see the inventory I mean) as well but we had a local distribution center contact that would handle any research/tracing on special orders (e.g. furniture orders placed in-store). That was long before store-pickup was a thing though and there would be checkout lines stretched deep into the store even with all 4 registers open (as well as the one at customer service) during peak hours. Other companies either had no access at all (including their own store inventory) or you could only see the OH for stores in your district and if they had a SKU inbound (none of that was real time and the delay/polling was terrible).

I don't think any CS department really reaches out anymore. It's really infrequent that I need to figure out why something being sent to me is going the entirely wrong direction or doesn't have movement but, I know for sure that GameStop will make you take care of it on your own. Not our problem (not a quote) seems to be the prevailing attitude now once something ships unless it's from a smaller company. For clarity, larger companies will absolutely refund or ship a free replacement if something no shows but it's pretty much no holds barred wild west territory prior to that point.

Honestly, practically everyone switching to auto-replenishment eventually started restricting far more than store specific inventory control. I mean why pay your employees to do it when you can get the customer to do it on their own for free right?

 

Well, I've got a pending transaction, so God willing I'll get it soon. Ordered it June 1st in the first few minutes so there's hope that all the June 1 folks will get it soon.

 

Which order?

 

Sideswipe/Skywarp.