

Learn from my misery: Don't buy a nook. - there
http://blog.fsck.com/2010/01/dont-buy-a-nook.html

======
teej
I have one word for you my friend: chargeback. Call your credit card issuer
and state that you a retail outlet made a sale, made some promises on that
sale, and charged you $278.

This is the easiest action you can do to deal the most damage. Anyone who
processes payments knows that chargeback hurt a lot. Chargebacks are a
consumer protection, so they are easy to do.

If a company makes a promise to give you X, Y, & Z at a certain price, they
have to follow through. You have a few options, but chargebacks can be the
simplest way to get there.

~~~
jordyhoyt
To add to this, threatening to chargeback can be an excellent way to get
decent customer service out of some places. Most customer service associates
are trained to go way out of their way to avoid it.

~~~
patio11
You can also avoid the call center by looking up your favorite source of
executive information, finding the name and address of someone like a VP of
Customer Relations or what have you, and writing them a polite, businesslike
letter on dead tree explaining what happened and what they need to do to make
it right for you. This will get read by their secretary, who will call the
switchboard, ask to be transferred to the person in charge, and say "The Boss
wants this handled now." And that is about all it takes. (Well, apparently the
VP in this case was not great, either, but you could have shaved two months
off the resolution time by contacting her earlier.)

I've had to do this to a bank or two which was under the mistaken impression
that I owed them money. Incidentally: a tact I particularly like, since I own
shares of essentially any publicly traded stock by dint of owning broad index
funds, is to send the letter to Investor Relations. Just say you're a
shareholder (you are certainly not the most convoluted situation that results
in getting invited to their shareholder meeting) and that you've had a
problem, blah blah blah, please fix at your earliest convenience.

~~~
BrandonM
_Today is January 22nd. Tiffany called me back about an hour ago and told me
that Melanie Doty, Barnes & Noble's Vice President of Customer Care had
instructed her to tell me that, despite repeated assurances to the contrary,
Barnes & Noble wasn't going to be able to honor their promise to me because
their computers showed that my order had been cancelled._

------
patio11
The ex-CS drone in me winced just reading that.

Granted, I think we're probably getting half the story -- my experience with
customers that type subject lines like "Help! multiple nook delays and broken
promises" is that they are not always the most pain-free to deal with. (The
easiest customers to support are the ones who treat it like it is all
business. Incidentally, taking this tact has helped me with a megacorp or six
over the years.)

However, the fact that something even remotely close to that story could
happen shows broken CS policies. At my previous employer where I was a CS
drone, I could have resolved the issue on any call: "Oh, we promised you a
$100 gift card? I'm terribly sorry you haven't received it, sir. Can I make it
up to you by issuing a $100 refund to your credit card, which will show on
your bank statement within one to three business days?" Or at ANY point in the
circus they could have said "I'm sending you a new Nook. It will ship from our
warehouse within the hour and be hand delivered by FedEx tomorrow morning.
When the first one arrives in a few days, do us a favor and just tell the
delivery guy to take it back. Don't worry about the cost: we'll cover all the
charges. We're serious about making you happy."

Obviously you don't want $8 an hour CS drones making that decision too often,
but you can always just trust-but-verify their judgments. (I got flagged by
the computer twice for being overly generous. My manager came over to talk to
me about it. I said "A customer was unhappy. I resolved the situation." and
got a pat on my shoulder. This was in a business with margins so thin you
could shave with them, too, rather than high-end electronics which lock people
into your purchasing system for life. Crikey, you think they'd fall over
themselves trying to get that in his hands.)

~~~
ZeroGravitas
I'm not sure of the etiquette but: _tact_ should be _tack_ , it's an old
nautical reference. Only mentioned since you used it twice.

~~~
patio11
Thanks! I've apparently been misusing that my entire life.

~~~
ars
Tact is also a word. It means being sensitive to the situation.

Tack is the direction you are going.

------
flatline
This was entirely a rant about customer service and delivery issues. I got my
nook a week before they promised delivery and I've been perfectly happy with
it ever since. I even called customer service once while waiting for it and
they answered all my questions.

The Nook itself is still a little rough around the edges - it just feels like
it was a rushed job to get it to market, which it probably was. The good news
is that most of the problems I've experienced with it seem to be software
related. Biggest annoyances are not being able to go to a page (?) and the
sluggishness of the LCD touchscreen. It's crashed a couple times formatting a
book the first time in.

OTOH, the paging speed is good, the PDF support is adequate, and I've spent a
fair amount of time reading on it without issue.

~~~
count
The paging speed is good? Wow, your expectations are super low - I can almost
read the pages faster than the nook can turn them!

~~~
jff
The Kindle is no better. Flash, flash, flash, flash, ok we've finally loaded
your next page. I would have hoped that an electronic book reader could turn
pages faster than I can by hand.

------
DanielStraight
What I still don't get is after stories like this and my own experiences
dealing with customer service is why they don't just put _one_ person at the
call center who actually has the power to do something. If there was someone
there that could make an autonomous decision without needing to ask the
computer for permission and physically put a Nook and a $100 gift card on a
truck to your house, then we wouldn't have these problems. But no one can. I
get the impression that all the people you dealt with were being completely
honest. They sympathized but literally couldn't do anything about it, at least
not without getting fired. Customer service people who can't do anything are
as good as no customer service people at all. I don't understand companies not
trusting and giving real power to their customer service agents.

~~~
nazgulnarsil
customer service reps with the power to send out goodies = scam target.

~~~
gsmaverick
It seems to me that is not always true. It is well-documented that all Zappos
customer reps have to ability to hand out goodies as they see fit.

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jcapote
This has nothing to do with the nook itself but rather the process about
acquiring one through the holidays. I expected an article about the actual
hardware itself.

~~~
mbreese
This is true, but if their customer service for acquiring the device is
anything like their customer service if something goes wrong and they already
have your money, this is a bad sign. Not only that, but he's spent so much
time (~2months) dealing with this that it has jaded him entirely on the entire
thing. What was supposed to be a good experience (who doesn't like a new
gadget?) was ruined by B&N customer service. True, this was their first big
foray into consumer electronics... but that's no excuse for bad service. Even
if they had said in December "it's on backorder, and we have no idea when it
will ship", that would have been 100X better for this guy.

If you promise something, you must follow through. This is something that most
companies just don't get: details matter. How you're treated on the phone
matters. The ordering process matters. The pre-purchase information (web page)
matters. Hell, even the box and shipping process matters.

And this is all _before_ you even get to use the device. Imagine if you've
gone through all of that. How could you possibly write a non-biased review?
You can't, because all of the stuff leading up to the device showing up at
your door completely ruined the experience.

------
siong1987
I own a nook myself now. And, used to have kindle.

From my experience, kindle is a lot better than nook with just two reasons:

1\. Amazon offers more books(especially programming books) than B&N.

2\. Amazon offers cheaper books and it doesn't require you to join the Amazon
book club. You have to join the B&N Book Club to get cheaper price which is
always the same price that you get from Amazon.

------
Xixi
That reminds me an anecdote when I moved to Paris. I wanted to get DSL, the
standard over there with quite many operators to choose from. I choosed Free,
because they are cheap (30€ for ~18 Mbps at the time if I remember correctly,
TV and phone), and the most innovative player. They also have a reputation of
extremely bad customer service...

Since I didn't have a phone line (yet), and the previous tenant didn't have a
phone line either, the process seemed to be a tad more complicated than usual
(for them). Anyway I ended up on the phone with one of their sale rep
(obviously not French, my guess would be someone based in Marocco), who told
me that it was going to take roughly 4 to 6 weeks to setup the phone line, and
then everything would be fine. That's a very long time... but what do you
want, they are cheap, and it's France, never expect anything to come fast.

2 months later nothing, not an email, not a phone call, nothing at all.
Considering their completely useless customer service abroad, I decided to
just forget about them (without canceling anything) and called one of their
competitor (Orange, formerly known as France Telecom) : the most expensive,
but 1 week later I had phone, TV and 8 Mbps internet for 44€ euros a month.
14€ more than Free, 10 Mbps slower, but at last I could stop "borrowing" my
neighbor connection.

I never heard about Free again until one year and a half later, when I
received an email roughly stating that "there had been an issue and
consequently I won't get DSL from them". I will never know what went wrong,
but I'm amazed that they reacted after such a long time.

I mean, one year and a half... I wonder. After such a long time they should
have guessed that I don't care anymore ? What were they thinking ? It was way
too late not to look completely ridiculous. It doesn't make any sense to me.

------
sown
>We recently received an email from you. However, the email did not include a
text message. Kindly re-send your inquiry with a text message so that we may
respond to your request.

I'm going to remember that one. It was pretty good.

~~~
jamesbritt
I see something like this and can't but think of how in the world it could
happen.

I really can't see a person doing this; there must be some wonky code that
filters mail. All to make things more efficient.

------
cmelbye
It's sad hearing stories of companies being complete idiots towards customers
like in this case. I can't believe that this still happening in this day and
age.

------
chrisgoodrich
This should be a case study for recruiting. Sounds like Barnes & Noble's
hiring practices need a serious overhaul. Find some passionate people and they
could turn around their business in no time.

~~~
nfnaaron
I'm not so sure this was a hiring problem. It sounds like everyone he came
into contact with treated him well, while he was in contact with them. The
individuals who promised to get back were probably in chaos, and/or told to
say exactly that and then take the next call. And the next. But they were
probably doing their job very well, within the system they found themselves
in.

It sounds to me like a large part of fulfillment was outsourced (not so
unusual) and there was very little involvement from BN during the "channel
design" (don't know what you call that, I'm not in the biz) and channel
operation. Basically, some vendor was allowed by BN to screw BN and its
customers.

The VP who denied the $100 gift card was probably staunching a hemorrhage of
gift cards.

None of this is an excuse. But it sounds like BN actually hired well, at the
point of customer contact.

~~~
chrisgoodrich
I see your point, it probably has more to do with culture than hiring. The
employees (at all levels) do appear to have done what was required of them
with a friendly tone.

Where I think this becomes a hiring problem is that I would expect that
somewhere along the way that Barnes & Noble would have hired somebody who
would actually do what they were hired to do - Customer Service. In my
opinion, this issue was never resolved and therefore every representative who
worked on this case did NOT actually do their job.

No representative (regardless of the process) should promise a call back if
they don't actually intend to follow through. If Barnes & Noble had hired
correctly, the system wouldn't have failed this miserably.

------
Luyt
I bought a BeBook, which is a rebranded Hanlin. Why? Because it's an open
platform: I run OpenInkpot on it, and I even could write my own software for
it if I wanted to. It doesn't have wifi, but I don't miss it; I copy ebooks
and texts on it using the USB cable. It displays flat plain text files fast
and well. As for readability on portable electronic devices, nothing can beat
an e-Ink display in the bright sun ;-)

~~~
pedalpete
But where do you get complete books to read on it?

~~~
RevRal
I use Project Gutenberg to get free ebooks.

<http://www.gutenberg.org>

~~~
rinich
That's great if you're fine with not reading anything written while we were
alive.

~~~
RevRal
I can't vouch for the service, but there's ebooks.com .

Personally, I prefer formats more flexible than PDFs, like plain text files.

DRM issues. Pricing issues. Platform issues. And, apparently, customer service
issues. The ebook has a little more maturing to do, so for contemporary books
I'd still stick with physical copies.

~~~
hexley
How is a plain text file more flexible than a PDF? It's trivial
programatically to extract plain text from a PDF so it's as least as good as
.txt?

~~~
dmv
Actually, it is not trivial to programmatically extract plain text from a PDF
in a consistent format. In many cases it is easy, but the PDF format is visual
first and content second, resulting in plenty of opportunities for Captcha-
like problems.

Despite that, PDF, especially PDF-A, is the superior format for preserving
published content.

------
staunch
Can't help but thinking the Amazon affiliate link to the Kindle is tacky and
lame. It's hidden by a URL redirector, and only disclosed at the end (the
second time it's used).

I also can't help but thinking that this is not a friendly warning to others,
but simply one more attempt to finally get something out of B&N by causing a
public fuss.

Call me Mr. Cynical.

~~~
chaosmachine
The link says "buy a kindle". It's pretty obvious where the link goes. Why
would you care if he gets commission on it?

~~~
kmt
Principally, you care because you might have been manipulated into reading an
article with a catchy name just so the author can make some sales.

That said, most likely this particular post is a genuine complaint plus an
opportunistic idea.

~~~
SwellJoe
_Principally, you care because you might have been manipulated into reading an
article with a catchy name just so the author can make some sales._

If it weren't someone that we all know, then that might be an issue. But Jesse
has been around the hacker and entrepreneurial community for a long time, and
has a reputation to uphold. If you've been to OSCON, YAPC, etc. you've
probably seen him speak and possibly met him. He's not some random dude trying
to cash in on this new-fangled Internet thing.

~~~
kmt
Certainly. In a previous life (10 years ago) I've been a user (and a hacker)
of RT. So I know the guy, which is why I said this is most likely genuine.

------
mscarborough
Long story short, early adoption invites a lot of problems.

Not to discount the OP's valid issues, but shipping and customer service
problems have been evident with most every new hardware release that I can
remember.

edit: plus at the end of 2009 i noticed that while the local B&N has a big
Nook sales kiosk right when you walk in, staffed by a salesperson, when you go
to buy a book the big Nook banners behind the sales desk have small 'sold out'
banners taped across. obviously a bad sign.

------
nobosh
Sad story but not at all unexpected.

------
ryanpetrich
But doesn't misery love company?

------
RevRal
Barnes and Noble: "We canceled your order. Fuck you."

~~~
RevRal
I can understand why my comment has been downvoted, but to clarify and save
face a little bit. . . .

I would feel insulted if, after corresponding with a company with that much
effort, the result was a big fat nothing.

To me, the 100 dollars would be trivial. I have an interest in keeping a good
relationship with everybody, even companies. It doesn't feel good for a
situation to have an outcome like this.

