"Just Pay Shipping and Handling..."

Instead of my usual "Wordless Wednesday" post, I thought it might be nice to actually type something here for a change. (I have been under the weather again -- yes, there is indeed a physician visit in my near future -- and that has made posting difficult.)

An acquaintance of mine works in an establishment where there is a coffeemaker dedicated to keeping staff well-caffeinated. He told me that this particular machine (they apparently last about two years each) cost less than $15 and had been in near-constant use for over a year without any problems. It was easy to use: remove the filter basket assembly, dump the used paper filter & coffee grinds out of it, drop in a new paper filter, drop the assembly back into the top of the machine, use the machine's carafe to pour water into the reservoir, spoon coffee into the paper filter, and press the obvious button on the front of the machine. Voila -- a few minutes later, the carafe would be full of hot coffee free for the taking. This procedure was very well known among the staff of several departments.

Or so he thought. A few Mondays back, he discovered that someone who did not know the procedure had tried using the machine over the weekend and threw away the entire filter basket assembly along with the used paper filter and coffee grinds.  (Just to clarify, this assembly is a large, solidly-made plastic bin with a large and obvious metal spring & valve assembly underneath that, according to my friend, definitely does not look disposable.) Without it, water runs too quickly through the paper filter to brew the coffee properly, and then just drops through a large hole over the carafe, splashing hot, weak coffee over an area roughly two feet in diameter.

After the inevitable grousing, search for the guilty party, complaining among the staff, and so on, my friend realized the coffeemaker was a major national brand that was sure to have spare parts available. A quick Internet search later, he had all the information he needed to order the missing part.

And then things got... all together now... annoying.

The manufacturer listed the filter basket/flow control valve assembly on their website for $8 in change. My friend, wise to the ways of online commerce, quickly ran a second set of web searches using the specific part number (a good hint to keep in mind, readers!) and was rewarded with two lower prices: a food service reseller listed the identical part for $6 in change, and a restaurant supply house listed it for a mere $4.50.

Happy to have found the part so easily, my friend completed the online order and stopped in horror just before the final mouse click: once shipping and handling had been added automatically by the vendor's website, that $4.50 part was suddenly going to cost him roughly $16.00 -- a 350% increase in cost and several dollars more than the original cost of the entire machine! Needless to say, that final mouse click was to close the browser window and not to authorize the credit card billing.

My friend then went to the site offering the part for $6, thinking they could not possibly charge as much for shipping & handing as the first vendor. He was correct, after a fashion; the final price (again not available until just one mouse click short of finalizing the sale) was roughly $12.50 -- a 190% increase in cost and a few cents more than the original cost of the entire coffeemaker. The manufacturer's online pricing proved no better, ending up a few pennies higher.

Needless to say, my friend has started asking co-workers for small donations toward the purchase of a new coffeemaker (hopefully of a design that makes it more difficult to dispose of non-disposable key components).

But let's all back up for a moment and look at the annoyances inherent in this sequence of events. (To save time, I will skip over the obvious annoyance of someone throwing out the coffeemaker's key component.)

1. The original manufacturer lists this one component of their product for roughly 50% of the total cost of the product;
2. The manufacturer's price is obviously highly inflated, since other general vendors are selling the identical OEM component at discounts of up to more than 40% as their regular price;
3. One of the online vendors insisted on collecting local state sales tax despite their being based elsewhere in the USA and this state not requiring such taxes under those circumstances;
4. All the vendors are charging shipping & handling fees that at best double the actual price of the merchandise being sold (at least in this case); and
5. All the vendors' websites hid the total actual cost of the merchandise being sold until the last possible second.

My friend and his colleagues have voted with both their feet and their wallets: they are not buying another Hamilton Beach coffeemaker, and they are not buying from that manufacturer's website or any other that charges such high fees for the privilege of shopping there. I will do the same, and urge all of you to follow suit. Maybe, just maybe, we will be able to convince online vendors that doubling (or worse!) the cost of their merchandise is not an incentive to buy from their websites.

Otherwise... well, prepare to be annoyed...