Category Archives: Shopping

Generally, I find that my car insurance company, GEICO, has among the most pleasant phone support folks I deal with.  And, fortunately, I don’t have to deal with them very often.

Today I called in to find out why my insurance rates had jumped 10%.  It’s not like I had an accident; indeed I hardly leave the house these days.  And the car is, to put it mildly, somewhat ancient, so it’s not as if its value (if any) has created a high risk.  But maybe GEICO has a model in which drivers of aging cars (even Toyotas!) are a greater risk to other drivers?  Or maybe it’s just aging, although neither one of us had a milestone birthday.  So what was it?

I called GEICO, got a phone tree, and eventually lost patience and demanded “Operator”.  So I got put in the operator queue, and told I’d be better off online (nope, tried that already) or I’d just have to wait for the next available operator. And the wait would be … 40 minutes.  40 minutes??? Fortunately there was a ‘call you back’ option, so I took it.

About 40 minutes later the GEICO robot called me back, and then connected me to a charming representative. She explained to me that the reason my insurance had gone up 10% is that, and I quote, “the cost of insurance has gone up.”

Charming as she was, she seemed puzzled by my suggestion that there was something circular in saying that the cost of my insurance had gone up because the cost of insurance has gone up. “Some people had theirs go up even more,” she added. “But they had accidents.”

Interestingly, the cost of insurance for a new car of the same model  would only be 25% more than the cost for my old one.  So it’s either about inflation in medical costs or other people’s cars. Or price gouging. I’ve read there had been a lot of inflation in car prices, with prices at least for used cars dipping a lot in the past month.  But I’m going to bet my insurance cost does not go down in the next six month period, not even with GEICO.

My last question was whether GEICO was passing on 10% raises to its workers.  That got a laugh. It’s not.

A couple of days ago I tried to add international roaming for a family member who was planning a short trip abroad to see relatives. It seemed to go through OK.

This morning I get an email from abroad to say there is no international plan on the phone.

So I call Verizon. The customer service rep is very nice. He can’t find any record of the order, but offers to re-set it. But every time he texts me a link to confirm his changing the service, I get a message saying there is an error.

After 32 minutes of this, he puts me on hold, comes back, says Verizon has changed the procedure and reps can no longer make these changes directly. Instead they have to walk the customer through it. So I go and repeat exactly what I did a couple of days ago.

I get to the final screen, hit “confirm”, and then I get this:

I would give them a point for honesty, except that I translate this to mean “never”.

(As I post this, I’m on hold again…47 minutes into the call and counting.)

Update: They sorted it after 55 minutes, 45 seconds…without me having to do it myself again….

For health reasons, I’ve been doing almost all the grocery shopping online.

It isn’t more convenient, because the shopping process involves a fair amount of following along as the shopper ignores one’s fallback instructions and either does or doesn’t text for instructions. (I think of it as “the world’s worst video game”.) Unlike in-person, I don’t get much control over timing, as the shopping will happen some random time up to 3 hours before the delivery time. And the delivery window is also only notional; I suspect that the ratio of would-be shoppers to customers has gone down and as a result my often sizable orders with good tips get grabbed early. Indeed, they are often delivered well before the window I set, which can also make for conflict with online meetings and the like.

And it is expensive: I figure between the app’s markup over the store prices, and the tip, I’m paying at least 25% more than if I went myself.

And it’s frustrating when some types of things that I think I could find in person are not offered on the app. [Yes, there’s a ‘special requests’ mechanism, but it is a bit of a pain.] And it’s also frustrating when stuff theoretically on the app turn out to be not available, although I imagine that this likely would be equally frustrating in person too, given supply chain issues.

Today, however, I experienced a new online grocery shopping problem–or at least one new to me.

Amidst an order with several items, I asked for this:
. 

I got most of what I asked for, but in addition to the chicken I asked for (or meant to ask for?), I also got (and got duly charged for), this:

Yes, I got FIVE chickens. Five. I didn’t save a copy of the original order (I sure will from now on) so I can’t prove I didn’t do something to cause the app to record an order for a record number of chickens, although I can’t see how I could have done that.

So now I have five chickens. Guess I know what we’re eating this week. And next.

Plus I have a new appetite for chicken jokes. (Bonus: Painful chicken jokes from Iraq 2004.)