Warts and All

Can we talk for a minute about online shopping? You know, the Best Invention Since Sliced Bread for those of us with social anxiety and an aversion to strangers touching them?*

There are three main reasons to order items online instead of hauling one’s cookies into a brick and mortar store:

1. You don’t have to deal with people. For someone who’s done their research, knows what they want, and has little to no desire to deal with the lackluster customer service that retailers provide nowadays, this is incredibly compelling. If I have to deal with one more teenager rolling their eyes at me, I may actually snap.

2. No tax for stores that don’t have a brick and mortar shop in your state. Depending on the size of the purchase, this can be a sizable discount! If I can wrangle free shipping, it’s pretty much a done deal. I may even go into a store to do some physical research (think checking out the picture on a television), but I’ll go back home and still order online if it makes sense. (Size comes into play here, too. If I can get someone else to carry the 40-inch television up to my second floor apartment, I’ll take it.)

3. Immediate gratification. You don’t have to walk/drive to the store, buy the CD, rip it, and upload it to your MP3 player – you click and drag. Period. No driving, no wasted gas, nada, your valuable time has been saved – along with some precious money that would have been spent on fuel.

This is why I take umbrage, UMBRAGE DEAR SIRS AND MADAMES, at my purchase of Photoshop Elements 9 from the Adobe online store this weekend. I ordered it Saturday morning, all atwitter with excitement about taking our Christmas card photos of the kids** this weekend. I didn’t get download approval until today. Today! A full two days after I ordered!

In our world of instant gratification, of point – click – and use, this is totally unacceptable. I was forced to obsessively check my order status (on my order email account, different from my personal email account because I hate being spammed by stores) all weekend.*** I’m especially astonished about this from a software company! It’s insane! No one had to package my product, box it up, ship it out – they had to give me a serial number and link. How long can that possibly take?

/Veruca Salt†

*A word, Best Buy? You are on my list. No other store has the ability send me into a tailspin of anxiety and creepy crawlies over strangers bumping me, touching me, or inappropriately groping me on their way past me. I once made the mistake of going to a grand opening at a Best Buy, and I almost wound up rocking in a corner sucking my thumb.
**Oh, how they love dressing up for photos.
*** Yes, forced. It was like someone was holding a dull bread knife to my throat for two whole days! (See sliced bread reference at top of post. This is what’s called “pulling it all together,” kids. Can you believe you get to read this for free?)
†Did you know that a verruca is a wart? When I googled it to ensure that I was spelling it correctly, I remembered that it had a variation but wanted to confirm, I discovered there is a clothing store called Veruca Salt. I’d like to get in on that marketing campaign, but only if they’d let me “go there” with the whole wart thing.