The Chronic Consumer

I’ve been shopping online for many, many years now and have only had a handful of problems with the hundreds of orders I’ve placed. The only truly terrible experience I had with an online store was when I ordered a watch from JomaShop.com, but even that was eventually straightened out. There have been several other times when I’ve had to monitor transactions closely and follow up with emails and phone calls to make sure I received my stuff, but I guess that’s to be expected sometimes.

Well, now I’m bracing myself for another bad experience similar to what happened with JomaShop. I recently placed a $100 order at a site called AmericaRX.com, which is a place I’d never used before. Like a total idiot, I didn’t follow my own rules about investigating a website before ordering to see what other customers have to say about the place. If I had, I would have seen a TON of negative ratings about AmericaRX.com, ranging from extremely slow shipping to missing items in the order to packages never being delivered at all.

Anyway, I placed my order this past Sunday (April 20). I received an email first thing Monday morning saying that my order was “ready to ship” and that I’d get another email with a tracking number after it actually did ship.

I waited until 5pm ET today, and still didn’t get a shipping notice — an occurrence eerily similar to what happened with JomaShop.com. I had a bad feeling about things because there’s no way it takes 2 business days to go from Ready to Ship to Shipped, so that’s when I started to check out reviews of AmericaRX.com. Sure enough, their Yahoo! merchant rating is just 2 stars out of 5, and featured many horror stories from harried, dissatisfied customers.

So I immediately called the AmericaRX.com customer service line, waited on hold for five minutes before getting transferred to a CSR named “Maggie” (but who was clearly not a native English speaker), and then told her that I wanted to cancel my order because it hasn’t been shipped yet. She went through the motions of punching in my order number, etc. and then said, “I can’t cancel the order because it shipped out today.”

Excuse me? Then why didn’t I get a confirmation email with a tracking number? Mumbled response about how those all go out at the same time at the end of the day. I then said that I’d like my shipping confirmation email ASAP, and she agreed to find out the tracking number and send me an email right away.

Well, it’s been 15 minutes since I hung up the phone, and I still haven’t received the requested email yet.

Is my panic premature? Sure, I guess so. I haven’t really given AmericaRX.com a chance to perform. But reading through their feedback really spooked me, you know? I hope things work out right, that I get the items I ordered and not a bottle of Orovo or something totally random like that, but I have my doubts. This could end up being a disaster!

At least I feel a little better after posting this and getting it all out there. I’ll be sure to post a follow-up to let you know how everything plays out!

In celebration of Earth Day, I thought I’d write a post about how you can do your part to help save the environment while getting free stuff at the same time. Everybody loves free stuff, right? So listen up.

The best way to go about getting free items of all kinds is to join a so-called “freecycle” group and find people who are trying to unload what you need.

I know, I know: getting a 5-year-old pool table for free isn’t quite the same thing as getting a brand-new model, but the bottom line is that you’re not spending a dime on the product. In times like this when money is tight to begin with, who’s going to quibble about a product’s age? As long as it’s in decent shape and works properly, I wouldn’t care that it’s used.

I’ve checked out Freecycle.org, and while I haven’t actually gotten anything from there, I could see myself using it again in the future. A lot of the items are in perfectly good condition and are just being replaced because kids have outgrown it, people are moving into smaller accommodations, etc. There really are some great finds waiting to be discovered over there.

If you like free stuff, check out Freecycle.org today. Then you can put the money you save on all your free goods towards bills that can’t be paid for by barter, such as your rent or car insurance.

Oh, and be sure to do your part by offering your unwanted items up for grabs at freecycle sites as well. Obviously, these types of operations need takers and givers in order to succeed!