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.