You've heard the ancient anecdote.
A woman confronts a supermarket manager: “Your bananas are 59 cents a pound.”
“Yes, madam?”
“Well, at the store across the street, they're just 39 cents a pound.”
“Then,” replies the puzzled manager, “why don't you get your bananas there?”
“Because they're out of them.”
“Lady, we can do better than that. When we're out of them, they're just 29 cents a pound.”
That came to mind when we were trying to replace a burned-out printer, a Hewlett-Packard 750ix. You certainly know that printer models become obsolete faster than Gwyneth Paltrow's boyfriends, and that one of the byproducts is having a batch of printer cartridges that look like the ones in another printer and actually fit into the assigned slots but won't print, generating an infuriating “Improper cartridge” message.
That's just one of HP's annoyances. I've never understood its numbering system. Our 750xi replaced an obsolete model — the 1150. Uh…how can a 750 be a newer model than the 1150? It's as though Direct followed the Oct. 1, 2003 issue with the February 1998 issue.
So who could tell which printer might be a logical replacement for this one? Our little Lexmark, which cost less than the toner we use in it, chugs along nicely, but like many users, we're afraid of trusting major projects to a piece of machinery that wasn't overpriced.
Should I look for a more contemporary HP printer, probably with a lower model number? Naah…changing printers means changing “drivers” and connections and who knows what else, and paying a sniggering geek $75 an hour to plug the thing in. If I could dig up another HP 750xi, all I'd have to do was unplug the dead one and plug in the live one…a no-brainer, welcome on a tightly scheduled afternoon.
So I made an executive decision: Find another HP 750xi.
Lots of places to look. I tried the “search bot” MySimon. Great. It led me to several Web sites, and after digging through file after file, I couldn't find that printer on any of them. MySimon wasn't TheirSimon.
Sigh. So I went to Google, the old dependable. One of the sideline ads on the Google page said, “Hp750xi — Compare Price…Find prices, tax, shipping, store ratings, & reviews for Hp750xi. www.nextag.com.”
In the happy spirit of one of P.T. Barnum's fodder-followers, off I went to Nextag. Sure enough, here were some listings. The least expensive listing was at a company called PC Universe. Yippee! The phone number for PC Universe showed it to be in Palm Beach County, just north of me…and shipping was free. Let's grab it.
Hold on there. Click on “Buy at seller” and you get…a blank page. But at the bottom of the blank page are some links, one of which is “Contact us.” That's what I did.
The automated phone service kept asking me for the three-digit extension of my representative. Who? I finally punched a general number and after a wait, on came a nice-sounding chap who didn't have the foggiest notion what I was talking about. After telling him the “part number” — a formidable combination of numbers and letters (C8427A#ABA, just to prove my reportorial accuracy), a wait-wait-wait…then, “We don't carry that any longer.” Gee, Buddy, then why don't you edit your Web site?
Aaah, then let's go to our old friend Overstock.com. Wow, here's a giant photo of the printer, and it's 3 bucks less than at PC Universe. No time wasted. I clicked “Add to cart.”
Uh-oh. It couldn't be added to any cart. Instead, a strange message kept insisting I hadn't activated my cookies. At that point I was ready to heave my cookies, because nowhere — nowhere — on the Overstock site is a phone number, and “Help and FAQ” are a meaningless lumped-together lump.
I had to conclude, after battling that site, my time was worth a pauper's mite.
One of the curses of the World Wide Web is also one of the benefits of the World Wide Web: It's a bottomless pit.
I wound up at PriceGrabber.com, a search bot similar to MySimon. Yikes! Here's PC Universe again. No, thanks. But the next lowest price was from a company called Y2inc. Two “Yes” comments from me here: Yes, it cost about 30 bucks more. But yes, they not only confirmed that they had it in stock but didn't accuse me of misplacing my cookies.
And that's where my shopping odyssey ended. Transaction complete, payment through PayPal, shipment under way.
There's no moral to this story, but the immoral conclusion is that too many bid-niss organizations that depend on the Web's unique combination of three benefits — timeliness, accuracy and selectivity — pay no attention to their own online derelictions. Yeah, it's the Shoemaker's Children Syndrome, where all attention is to form and none to substance.
The PC Universe site is pretty and professional. Overstock.com sends provocative e-mails, enticing the recipient to a specific page on its site.
To both those worthy organizations and the unquestionably hundreds or thousands of others who ignore the less-traveled pages of their own sites: Hey, guys, we're out here. Kick us around once and it's unlikely we'll be back. When I see your price listings under MySimon or PriceGrabber, I'm now bright enough to go to another store that actually does have bananas.
Oh, and one other favor, please:
If you'll give us an escape hatch so we can contact you if we can't make your site function, that would be very decent of you.
Meanwhile, I'll wait patiently for Y2inc to slip back into the pack.
HERSCHELL GORDON LEWIS is the principal of Lewis Enterprises in Fort Lauderdale, FL. He consults with and writes direct response copy for clients worldwide. Among his 27 books are a just-published new edition of “On the Art of Writing Copy,” “Marketing Mayhem” and “Effective E-mail Marketing.”
