online shopping – Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com

If you happen to be doing some Christmas shopping, and you’re at a website you’re not familiar with, and their checkout screen looks like it uses this template:

Back out immediately and do not make the purchase, as the site is likely a scam. Note that in this particular case I’ve added this item at random to create a shopping cart, but I have reversed a charge against Helli Shop, as it’s become more and more clear that they never intend to ship me the dice I ordered and upon closer examination (which I finally did today, after disputing the charge with my credit card company) the vast majority of their wares appear to have images stolen from other sites, including occasionally actually leaving the watermarks from the other sites on the image.

Why am I warning you about the template and not about the specific site? I’ve made one other order from a (different) site with this exact same template, and the item I ordered did arrive, but it was junk, and it shipped direct from China. Helli sent me tracking information six weeks ago using the same Chinese shipper, and the tracking information hasn’t moved from “item ready for shipment” since then. Those dice are never coming.

(It’s only $30, so if my bank refuses it’s not the end of the world, but I’m also changing some passwords too.)

Today, I was looking into a Christmas present for my wife, and noted that the template for checkout was the same. I backed out and did some more research on the site, and sure enough, all sorts of reports of either never receiving the items they’d ordered or in one case receiving what was supposed to be a “king-size” blanket that ended up being the size of a napkin. I also chased down a couple of the reviews from major magazines that they’d claimed to have for their product, and sure enough none of them seemed to actually exist.

So, yeah. Buyer beware, or even better, don’t be a buyer in the first place. I’d guess if I looked into it more deeply that all three sites would turn out to be registered by the same people, and they’re using this template for all of their stores. Avoid.

(Note, for those of you coming in through a link, that there is an update to this post.)

I warned you that today would be whining.

I read a lot, right? I read widely, I read voluminously, and I read fast. I’m on something like my 95th book of the year; anyone reading this by clicking through my Facebook feed is already aware that most of what I use Facebook for is keeping track of how much I’ve read, an experiment that will last through 2013 and then end forever. When you read as much as I do, and you read because you love books and not because you love stories (and this is not an unimportant distinction) you find that you end up spending lots of your discretionary cash– the majority of it, in fact– on books. This hobby, unfortunately, is getting more and more difficult as time goes on. First a perfectly good Barnes and Noble moved from a great location to the mall, which sucks. Then Borders exploded. Then Barnes and Noble decided to commit slow suicide-by-Nook; every time I go in there (and it’s been quite a while) I walk out insisting that I’m never darkening their door again and they’ll certainly be closed in a year.

I feel like this latest time I’m right, by the way, but that’s a different conversation.

This leaves me, in a town with just over a hundred thousand people, with one viable bookstore– the Notre Dame bookstore, which luckily probably isn’t going anywhere anytime soon since it really doesn’t much need to turn a profit. However, it’s inconvenient to get to, so most of the time I’ve been ordering everything from Amazon.

I do not like ordering anything online. I’m hellaciously picky about the condition of my books, for starters; the book I’m reading right now, in fact, would have been left on the shelf because there’s a small tear in the corner of the cover. They’ve shipped me three different books recently with huge stickers on the back that I had to peel off, a huge pain in the ass. And then there’s the books that I wouldn’t have bought if I’d seen them in person because you’ve gotta be kidding me.

This, children, is Neil Gaiman’s newest “book.” Note that 1) it is tiny, and 2) it is hardcover, and 3) — and 3 is a bit of a stretch, I’ll admit it– it’s got those annoying-ass shaggy-cut pages that absolutely no one likes and why the hell do they keep doing that.

177 fucking pages. The book is called THE OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE: A NOVEL, because if it didn’t have the words “a novel” in the cover you’d sensibly think you were dealing with a novella. That’s because it’s a novella. A hardcover novella. A hardcover novella that I’ll read in an hour that the multimillionaire bestselling author thinks people should spend twenty-six dollars to own.

(I know Gaiman doesn’t set prices. And I got it for $16 after discounts. All the same. Shut up.)

I like Gaiman’s writing a hell of a lot, so ordering his book completely blind didn’t bother me at all. But had I seen this thing in a store it would have stayed on the shelf and I’d have waited for paperback because– again– you’ve gotta be kidding me. $26 for 177 pages is insane. For a book that’s gonna sell a ton of copies, and not, say, some obscure academic-press book, it’s madness. It’s even big, wide-spaced print. So the manuscript he submitted had to be beefed up to get to 177 pages.

I have no doubt at all that I’m going to enjoy the story– again, I really like Gaiman. But this is bullshit and ordering things online is bullshit.

What I’m going to have to do– because this isn’t the first time I’ve gotten burned by this nonsense– is start paying serious attention to things like the dimensions and page counts of the books I’m reading, which is information that Amazon makes available but it isn’t like they put it front and center. That’s the “…and I’m stupid” part of the title of this piece, because this totally could have been avoided. But you know how else I could have avoided this? Buying the fucking book in a store. Online is bullshit and I hate the future.

Ah, what the hell: pictured below are the other two books I ordered along with the Gaiman. THE THOUSAND NAMES was actually the most expensive in terms of what I paid, but all three were within a dollar of each other. The cover price on the Hosseini is two bucks more than the cover price on the Gaiman book, but it’s over twice as long. THOUSAND NAMES is over five hundred pages.

NEVER LET THE FACTS GET IN THE WAY OF A GOOD RANT EDIT: It turns out that the son of a bitch was effectively a limited edition release, because it’s already out of print and has been out for like a week. I have a John Scalzi book of similar dimensions that I ordered deliberately for basically the exact same price. So.. uh… never mind?