Malcolm Owen
A man who ordered a MacBook Pro from Amazon was shocked to find he was sent five pounds of dog food instead.
Alan Wood of Derbyshire, UK, ordered a MacBook Pro from Amazon's UK store for 1,200 pounds ($1,460) on November 29, as a computer for his daughter. However, instead of receiving Apple's hardware the next day, he instead received something completely different.
The package from Amazon instead contained two boxes of Pedigree dog food, consisting of 24 packets of "Mixed Selection in Jelly" flavors, reports Yahoo.
"You can imagine the look on my face when I opened dog food instead of a MacBook Pro," said Wood. He then explained that Amazon's support wasn't as helpful as it could've been.
"At first I was confident the mix-up could be resolved, but after speaking to Amazon customer service, they said they couldn't help me," said Wood. "That was unless I returned the laptop, which I never received, and even when I sent the dog food back to the warehouse, that made no difference."
The customer says he spent over 15 hours in calls to Amazon, including escalations to managers and transfers to other departments, "but every conversation ended the same way and they refused to listen to me."
An Amazon spokesperson said they have been in touch with the customer, apologized, and processed a full refund.
"I've been an Amazon customer for two decades and never had a problem with them before," Wood adds. "But this has been an extremely stressful situation, especially in my circumstance, and the way I've been treated has put me off ordering from them ever again."
It is probable that a combination of the physical size of the orders, Amazon's use of standardized box sizes, fairly similar shipping weights, and the strain of the Amazon shipping load since Black Friday led to a mix-up at the warehouse.
The dog food boxes each contain 1.2kg (2.6 pounds) of dog food excluding packaging, 2.4 kg (5.3 pounds) for the two. The remaining packaging are the pouches and two cardboard boxes, which don't add much to the overall weight.
At the quoted price, the man will have bought a 13-inch MacBook Pro, which weighs in at a much lighter 3.0 pounds, without any packaging. However, including everything in the MacBook Pro box, the box itself, the shipping box, and the packing materials, the weight can easily reach 5 pounds.
We can only speculate as to what happened at the warehouse, as Amazon has a famously sophisticated network and system for handling stock control and dispatch. However, it's entirely plausible that the two similar-sized and weighted boxes could've been accidentally switched before the label was applied, and sent out to the customer.
Presumably, the person that ordered the dog food and got a MacBook Pro has kept quiet about the whole ordeal.
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22 Comments
The other week (and this is absolutely not a joke), we ordered an HDHomeRun as a christmas gift for my mother-in-law, and received a rifle scope. Amazon was incredibly gracious and apologetic. But this seems like hired help for the holiday rush being under-trained and overworked, which leads to mistakes.
Amazon is great until it is not. I have had a similar experience as this article in the past, though not with a high value item as a MacBook.
It can be incredibly bureaucratic when things go wrong and Amazon delivery people don’t have the same capabilities as UPS, DHL, FedEx etc etc if items are lost.
If I can't find it locally I've been using Amazon from time to time, but now getting ready to go to dedicated sites/stores.
Especially since many places are making it easier to shop there by supporting Apple Pay in their checkout process.