So, where to shop now that I'm no longer shopping at the CNL?

Spent a couple of hours looking around for a replacement DVD retailer for the C & L Internet Club.

I really should have done this ages ago, but let a misguided sense of loyalty to a company which repaid that loyalty with bait and switch tactics keep me from taking my business elsewhere, and sooner.

It turns out that they're not that good a retailer either. They really haven't changed much in six years, if DVDTalk forum goers are anything to go by.

And their prices pretty much suck unless you're a walk-in customer who shows up at their inconvenient X% off times.

Even anime, which is supposed to be their specialty, is cheaper elsewhere if it's not on clearance or during their big once-a-year sale.

I was pretty surprised to find out that DVDBoxOffice, which has somewhat inflated regular prices to account for the fact that they offer free airmail shipping worldwide, often had cheaper "regular" prices for certain titles, like the Utena and Rurouni Kenshin boxsets.

The prices drop further when you consider that if you live outside of Ontario, or wherever they have their shipping centre, you only pay the GST and they have a long-standing arrangement with Visa, giving people who pay with it 15% off with a shopping cart coupon.

And all this from the convenience of one's own home, without having to walk down from poorly planned overpass onto a busy highway to trudge over to CNL's out of the way warehouse and getting one's shoes crusted with yuerrk from the walk and being treated like a criminal once one gets inside the doors.

Admittedly, the bus routes have changed in the past year, so that now there's a stop right outside, but that only makes it marginally less inconvenient to get to and from.

Another place that looks good for Canadian DVDs is CD Plus. Again, free shipping within Canada, no PST if outside Ontario, and while their regular prices aren't that great, they've got a nifty selection of Canadian-made DVDs which the CNL mostly doesn't stock, and the free shipping/reduced taxes offsets the difference.

For francophone DVDs, I've been buying from Archambault, which is quite decent. They have very fast pack and ship time for stuff in stock, give free shipping over $35, offer 10% off with Visa coupon, and will ship things as they come in at no extra charge. I try to load my orders there a little and get a bunch of stuff at once.

Of course, the prices for most DVDs in Canada is ridiculous, since a lot of times, the MSRP seems to assume that they're using an exchange rate based on the peso, as far as I can tell.

Best places to shop for big studio DVDs is, of course DeepDiscountDVD. They briefly had a Canadian site last year, but that died due to their selling at a discount from the Canadian MSRP, which, as I've already mentioned, are ridiculous.

But they had really good prices on Canadian-made titles, which I regret being unable to get because I was mostly broke and horribly distracted last summer. I wish I'd been able to buy something while they lasted.

They've since merged their operations to ship CDs and Books and other stuff as well, so I hope they keep up their habit of holding the bi-annual 20% off DVD sale. Now that I've finally got a little more in the way of disposable income, I intend to make up for lost time.

They've kept the flat rate Canadian shipping, which I think is a good sign, so far.

Amazon.com's also pretty good. They actually ship from inside Ontario, so while they'll charge PST and for shipping, your purchases will bypass Customs. And they tend to have a rotating list of 50% or better off of Box Sets and the like, which usually takes the prices down to about two-thirds of what you'd pay on Amazon.ca or elsewhere.

I haven't shopped there myself, but the RightStuf seems to be pretty good. Their non-discount prices are high, but they offer weekly sales, a bargain bin, have some sort of club card where you can save 10% off even the weekly sale items.

Plus, they offer free shipping to Canada on orders over $150, which seems a bit much, but when you consider the inflated prices of anime to begin with (which is why I only ever buy the stuff on clearance or in sets, since there's no way I'd pay $30 a disc for a measly 4 half-hour episodes, repeat until the series is complete) and the fact that you could put the bundle you saved from their regular Canadian shipping of $7 for the first item and $2 for each following into buying even more stuff, I'd say it works out.

I stupidly chose to pass up buying a bunch of DVDs which were much cheaper at the RightStuff, even factoring in shipping costs and customs/taxes, in order to get them at CNL's Anime Clearance Sale instead, under the impression that I was Supporting Local Business While Earning Valuable Customer Reward Points.

But C & L's notion of customer loyalty goes only one way, and it's not in the direction of the actual paying customer.

So, yeah. Lots of places to buy which are infinitely better than shopping at the CNL, which you should avoid.

Practically the only advantage that I see is that if you really need to inspect your DVDs in person before purchasing and know exactly what you're getting into and buy the right item at the right time and are sure you'll never have any problems whatsoever with it and don't mind being treated like a dried-up cash cow if you don't buy often enough for their tastes, then yeah, you can still shop at the CNL.

But I really wouldn't advise it.

Frustration and Participation, redux

First, let's get the participation part out of the way.

I've been slowly contributing to Wikipedia, mostly correcting a few typos here and there, nothing major.

I think I might have more of a niche on the Wiki Commons. There's a bunch of flags which are fairly simple in design, easy enough for me to convert from PNG to SVG by hand, and a pleasant enough way to get reacquainted with basic geometry while doing something useful.

So yeah, I'm enjoying being a productive member of a virtual society.

Now for the frustration:

Well, I went to the C & L Internet Club on Saturday to finally get an explanation for why they arbitrarily cancelled the DVD I'd earned with my Rewards Points. And it was an arbitrary cancellation.

Apparently, they have a rule that if you don't buy something from them every 180 days, you forfeit the Rewards Points you've earned with every purchase as a loyal CNL customer. Since you have to login to go beyond the front page of their website even for basic information, and therefore nothing's indexed by Google, if this is a recently made up rule, they have perfect deniability.

Even if you're on the mailing list, they never bother to inform you of things that might actually affect you as a customer and not make them money. C & L is happy to send you weekly sales notifications exhorting you to buy, buy, buy, but not bother to add even a brief notice at the bottom of said notification telling you that they're going to expire their Rewards Points program in January and replace it with a new one, tough luck if you get screwed.

No, I had to go to the C & L website to find that out.

The thing is, if they'd bothered to notify me of this in any way, I wouldn't be quite as upset. I'd still be upset, yeah, but I'd have accepted it.

Instead, what they did was keep a broken system which kept telling me every time I made a purchase that I now had this many total points to spend, which was happy to accept this many total points as valid towards redemption in the checkout, and process this many total points towards my redeemed DVD.

It took the actual human being processing my order to go into my records, have a look at my account and decide that:

"Hmm… despite substantial recent and past purchases and a long term and uneventful customer history, you didn't make the four hour round-trip transit ride to our warehouse in the middle of nowhere and buy a piddling $7 clearance item within our stupid 180 day limit, though you did drop $XX on us the day before the limit and a further $XX just two days after, and bought $XXX worth of stuff that year alone. No Rewards Points redemption for you, you technically unloyal customer."

Frankly, that's an incredibly petty thing to do, deliberately going in and checking to cancel manually and claiming that all the information they kept presenting you is actually false, when they can't be bothered to fix their own system for over two damn years to get it to show the correct amounts to their customers, instead choosing to take advantage of the customer's trust in order to lead people to believe that "Hey, if I just buy this, this, and this, I'll have enough extra points to get that!".

I mean, it's three goddamned days! And I bought another, non-free thing to ship at the same time, which I rather regret now, since their shipping for a single DVD is Not Cheap.

I'm not sure they don't do it on purpose, since their checkout system seems designed to mislead. Practically every place where you have to enter shipping/options info and press a "confirm" button on the same page will take you to the next page where you can actually, y'know, confirm that the shipping and options you've chosen are correct.

Not the C & L. No, their "confirm" button is really a "place order" button and will process your credit card directly.

God help you if you got something wrong, because your only hope is that their cancellation request form will go straight through to someone who'll cancel your order for you before the shipping department makes good on its policy of shipping all in-stock product on orders received before noon the same day they're placed.

Occasionally I wonder how many non-walk-in customers they actually have.

Between their deceptive checkout process, their "no returns accepted on products except those which we have decided are defective" policy[1], and rather uncompetitive pricing [2], I'm hoping that their kind of business practices are a turn-off to most people.

Because one really shouldn't patronize places that mistake customer lock-in for loyalty, and who really only want to reward you with the shaft.

I now regret recommending them over the years. I used to promote them as a worthwhile local business through which you could get some pretty good stuff if you were willing to put up with a few annoyances.

But now it's not just the annoyances one has to put up with, but their double dealing, double standards of incompetence.

A mistake is only ever acknowledged if it works out in their favour and at your expense.

None of the information you get from your printed receipts or your account information on their website can be trusted or relied upon, because they'll just change things for the hell of it.

Frankly, their business practices are on a par with those of the late DVDSoon.

God only knows how many more of their customers they've pulled the disappearing points trick on.

I used to buy most of my non-French DVDs through them, but no more.

I just hope that none of the people I sent their way got screwed too badly by these lying weasel people.

[1] Although it may be possible to return unopened product, provided you're willing to pay the $9 restocking fee that was quoted to me the one time I asked in case of having bought a duplicate season of LFN, naturally, right after my purchase had been rung up.
[2]Unless you're a walk-in customer during their rare decently discounted Customer Appreciation sales, which is usually about a 2-3 hour span in the morning or evening in which they'll graciously grant you around 14% off, on the better days, for having spent your time and money getting to their warehouse during what most people consider work or leisure hours.

Frustration and Participation

First the bad:

Went to the C & L Internet Club over the weekend. That was a waste of time, as there were no managers in. Sent in my case via their web contact form on Monday. Still no reply.

Similarly, no reply from Mediasonic regarding their SmartDrive $10 rebates. Asking around the NCIX forums. May have to contact their customer support, as the rebate promotion was offered in exclusive conjunction with NCIX purchases.

Also, the Visa thing. Gearing up to mail the envelope this weekend. Hopefully I get my money back.

Now, imagine my best Professor Farnsworth voice: Good news, everyone!

As a paranoid/protective reaction to the imposter "alexanderthedrake", have dusted off my old en/fr Wikipedia accounts.

Today was unusually productive. I scanned and uploaded a cover image for The Shaw Alphabet Edition of Androcles and the Lion, added Barbara Hambly's latest historical novel to her bibliography, and added a brief piece on George Bernard Shaw to the Simple English Wikipedia.

Not bad, considering that I've only just figured out how to use my login for more than stalking my favourite article.

I look forward to contributing more.

CNL screws up again

So, the C & L Internet Club, through which I've gotten a lot of DVDs, is cancelling their customer rewards program.

I had until the end of the month to pick out an item covered by my existing rewards points, and have it shipped to me.

In addition, they have a "Deal by the Day", which is basically the day's deeply discounted DVD.

They charge $7 for shipping up to 5 DVDs at once, so I thought I might as well wait for a nice DBTD to turn up and spread out the shipping cost.

CNL, however, does not allow one to apply one's points simply by picking out the item in the shopping basket which is supposed to be redeemed.

No. They make you put in a separate order, check a box to say that you'd like it to ship with your regular order, and also check a box when placing the regular order to say that you've placed a rewards order to be shipped with said regular order.

I did all that. Did they ship me my free DVD?

Nope.

Checking my account on their website, my paid-for-with-redeemed-rewards-points item was invoiced and cancelled a full hour before they invoiced and shipped my now overpriced "Deal By the Day".

And it's not due to them running out of stock, or my filling in the boxes incorrectly.

The DVD which I want is still on the shelf, according to their database.

And I've got copies of the order confirmations, showing that the relevant bits were ticked correctly.

I never received a cancellation notice.

And when I try to checkout again, my points are gone.

I'm going to have to email them.

I hate it when people require you to trust them, but can't even be bothered to try not to screw it up.

Incidentally, if you're shopping through their website, the "confirm" button on the first page of the checkout does not allow you to confirm that your information and options are correct before proceeding to give them your money, but instead, processes your credit card directly.

I found this out the hard way.

You have been warned.

Since when did I move to the Twilight Zone?

For practically forever, I thought my handle was pretty much unique.

It's a pun on my real name and a certain historical personage, and it's not the sort of thing that's a common, much less popular choice.

In fact, if you google for the individual components, unquoted, what you get is pretty much me, alongside some other people who just happened to get some combination of “Alexander” and “Drake” as part of their presumably real names, not necessarily in that order.

So I'm pretty much the only “Alexander the Drake” everywhere I go which accepts 17 characters and spaces for usernames. For those places which don't, I can usually be found as “ATDrake” if the accept capitalization, or “atdrake” if they don't or it's a url/email account.

Now, I'm not “atdrake” everywhere. On popular services where lots of people are bound to use some variant of their initials and last name, it tends to be taken by the time I sign up, and while it's a little annoying not to be able to use the abbreviated form of my handle, I'm used to it, though I still occasionally curse whoever got it before me.

So imagine my surprise when I idly check if “atdrake” is taken on YouTube (it is, no surprise there), check if “alexanderthedrake” is free, and discover that lo and behold, instead of getting the usual “username does not exist” error message, it leads to an active profile signed up for several months ago.

Given the time frame and depending on how generously YouTube counts their "months" (i.e., if a week into things is rounded up to "1 month ago"), I'd suspect someone of doing or encouraging it as a malicious prank, but there's also a Yahoo profile for an account which doesn't seem to be mine which hasn't been updated since late 2005.

So, I'm right now wondering just who in hell this other “alexanderthedrake” is and why he chose to be known as such.

Also, must plan a creative campaign to reclaim my name, now that I've got competition for it.

This is either the annoying crown to a incredibly bad year, or an unpromising start to what looks like might be an even worse one, depending on which calender one goes by.

Sometimes I think I should ask why God hates me in this manner, but it's probably because I'm an atheist due to crap like this.