My Mother-in-Law is an Online Shopper

That’s not my mother-in-law, by the way. That’s just an image I swiped from one of those “we’ll save your credit” ads.

My 70-something mother-in-law was complaining about Kmart being open on Thanksgiving Day and said she’ll never buy from them again. I told her to get used to it, because merchants had started running Thanksgiving Day specials online as well. And if the competition is going to be open online on Thanksgiving, your business may want to follow suit.

But then I got a minor shock: She said she shops online. Though she seemed to be a little skeptical about online tactics, she seemed to somewhat get a hang of it.

She told the story of her Haband experience. She’s put an item in her cart, and then “they would put two in instead,” she innocently said, as if someone from Haband was purposely making her buy two instead of one, “and I couldn’t get it out of my cart.”

Here’s the key: She then said she clicked on customer service to find out how to remove the extra item from her cart. At the time I thought she meant live chat. Instead, she clicked on “customer service,” and sent an e-mail to that department.

I don’t know how quickly they responded, but it sounded like it was instantaneous, and they gave her directions on how to remove the item.

But “then they put four of them in my cart and I had to have them do it instead.”

Then she went to pay and they told her she wasn’t using a valid credit card number “and my credit card is valid.” Of course, anyone can be off by one digit, enter the wrong CVV code, wrong expiration date, etc.

She may not have had the greatest online experience, but the bottom line is she’s learning. I don’t know if my 80-year-old mother will ever take the e-commerce plunge, and my 81-year-old father hasn’t touched a computer since he left the workforce about 10 years ago.

My mother-in-law is willing to try the channel, basically because she’s been a catalog shopper. She’s not about to call a toll-free number to buy direct if she doesn;t have to.

My parents are a different story, I think. They seem to shop local, if they shop at all. The one thing that may interest them in the future would be grocery shopping online, as they both have a hard time getting around. But even then, I could see my mother balking at giving her credit card number online… and that’s thanks to my mother-in-law, who’s pretty much sending every one of her e-mail contacts 85th-generation warnings that the Y2K bug is coming.