On Dealing With Frustration

(I was going to call this post "Dell - The Worst Company in the World" but thought better of it.)

I have a new approach to my Dell debacle - slow breathing, Happy Thoughts. I think my extreme frustration last week was bad for my health.

My hero and the person I would most like to resemble is someone I have never met. I saw him in a documentary about Chechen rebels kidnapping a theater audience in Moscow a few years ago. When gun-toting masked men stormed the stage and told the audience that they were all being held hostage, this man turned to his neighbor and said, "I may as well have a nap. Please don't disturb me." He put his hat over his face and went to sleep. Women with bombs wrapped around their stomachs moved into the audience; the kidnappers threatened and made demands; after a few hours the authorities sent an anesthetic through the air vents that knocked out everyone in the theater (accidentally killing half of them) and then stormed the building and shot all the kidnappers; the now-unconscious man was carried out of the building by medics and laid on the sidewalk with the rest; he apparently woke up and wandered off, and nobody knows who he was. That's the way to conduct yourself during a kidnapping.

So in that vein, I'm trying not to get my blood pressure up as Dell continues their campaign of terror against me.

My first computer, as you may remember, had a defective hard drive. It also didn't contain an element I ordered and didn't do some of the things the sales rep said it would do. Also Dell sent my credit card number to an ISP and authorized them to bill me, although I had not agreed to that. They also charged me more than they said they would. Oh, and talked me into buying an expensive component I didn't need. But that's all water under the bridge... I sent back the defective computer. The replacement came yesterday.

...And it had a corrupted operating system and has to be returned. And I hauled it down two flghts of stairs to my car but now it looks like the waybill to return it won't be coming till Monday so I'll have to haul it back up again. It's only the fifth time I have hauled a similar box in the last two weeks. So I should think of it like free weight training (hauling boxes)... an interesting way to meet new people (at the UPS office)... a chance to work on my telephone skills (talking to Dell support)...

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Whatever Happened to eShopping?

Several years ago when internet shopping started to take off it was the companies who provided great user experience who got the attention and the business. Amazon, Dell and eBay all skyrocketed because they were the best.

This week I had a rude awakening as to the current state of eShopping. I bought plane tickets on nwa.com and a desktop from Dell.

Both experiences were atrocious. The only reason I can see for this is that storeless shopping is now ubiquitous. It's no longer a cool novelty. We have to put up with it like we put up with automated phone services. Usability? - ha ha. It's all about cutting costs now, not about improving quality. Perhaps only Amazon has remained a great user experience (but they're getting really sloppy about shipping delays).

Northwest Airline's nwa.com provides a user interface that is pitiful. For example, you choose a date by popping up a little calendar. The default is the current date. Fine, but when you've entered your departure date and try to enter your return date, the default is still the current date. Other problems include how they handle Canadian orders; what happens if you mistakenly sort by price; and the inability to retain your information when something goes wrong (you have to enter your entire itinerary again). It took me nearly two hours to buy tickets to Memphis with a layover in New Orleans, and this wasn't my first time ordering tickets on nwa.com.

When I purchased my last computer from Dell, five years ago, the experience was great. After choosing the computer I wanted a page came up with a long list of options. Next to each option was a link to complete info about the option. I was able to quickly get exactly what I wanted. What a fabulous way to shop, I thought!

Five years on and Dell Co. has changed... a lot. The user interface is a hodgepodge of ill-explained products. Each model has several variants with different processors and so on... in fact I never figured out what the different products with the same model name had in common. They seem to be deliberately confusing. When I tried to make the purchase online, Dell told me that if I wanted free shipping I had to order through a sales representative on the phone. The sales representative upsold me, and managed to do this in two ways: (1) she quoted a much lower price until it got to the point of sale, when the price miraculously rose substantially; and (2) she convinced me to buy something she said would do what I wanted, and when I got the computer and it didn't she sold me extra components. How did I get conned into this? I can't explain it. I feel royally suckered - as well as frustrated, angry, and extremely inconvenienced.

Economists David Laibson and Xavier Gabaix describe consumers as either "sophisticates" or "myopics". Myopic customers, they say, are those who are fooled by companies into making bad purchases. Companies hide information from customers in a process Laibson and Gabaix call shrouding. Common shrouding techniques include branding, creating forced scarcity, confusing the customer, and creating hidden costs (eg selling cheap printers that require expensive cartridges). At this point I feel like a myopic consumer.

Dell quality assurance, by the way, has also become questionable. They sold me a hard drive that was so defective that it died during the first week I had it - just long enough for me to have invested a lot of time configuring Vista. No problem they said - return it and we'll send you a new one. No problem for them, for sure. I'm the one who had to pack the box and lug it to UPS.

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