Shashi Warrier | The pitfalls of buying online

There’s technology, for instance. Online buying terrifies me. I resisted it with some success until covid came along. I made excuses like, “It’s not the same as seeing or feeling something before buying it,” and, “You’ll never find fruit as good as you’ll find in the market,” and so on.

Covid changed all that. Risking the dread disease by going to the market was more frightening than buying things online. Besides, my wife Prita wasn’t afraid of online shopping. She took to it like a duck to water, and soon we were getting along comfortably. We didn’t even have to see the young men who delivered the goods: they simply rang the bell and left the goods on the table in the porch for us to collect. Practically everything we needed was available at our doorstep, and, while dining out was impossible, our favourite restaurants delivered, so we hardly felt the lacks.

Covid receded, but Prita liked purchasing things from the comfort of her sofa, using her cellphone for all her shopping. Despite my urging, she continued with the practice because it was so convenient. And then came the time when her phone began to misbehave. It froze from time to time, and worked very slowly. “It’s three years old,” she announced to me one evening. “Getting slower by the day. Time to get a new one.”

“Let’s go,” I said.

“Where?” she asked.

“To the shops,” I said. “Don’t you want a new cellphone?”

“No way,” she said, settling into her favourite easychair with the phone in her hands and her thumbs racing. “Not while this still limps along.”

A half-hour later, she announced. “See what I got?”

“What?” I asked.

She showed me the deal on an online shopping site, one that promises to deliver anything from A to Z: a new phone, faster and shinier than her present one, at a reasonable price, and, besides, a rather good trade-in value for the old one. “Excellent,” I said.

“See?” she said. “No need to go out. And not just that, we know it’ll arrive three days from now.”

“Terrific!” I said, shrinking from a future in which I depended on her for all my purchases.

The next day, though, we had to go out of town for a few days. “What about your phone?” I asked.

“No worries,” she replied. “The delivery boy will call to confirm if we’re home, and we’ll tell him to bring it next day.”

But the delivery boy never called. Instead, when she followed up, she got a message on the online site’s app that the delivery boy had tried to call but failed to get through. “Nonsense!” she fumed. “He never called! What terrible service!”

“Right,” I said. “So what do we do now?”

“Complain, of course!” she said. “Right now! We can’t let them get away with this!” She settled down on the sofa and found the customer relations page of the Internet marketing site, where, after going through several options, she managed to click an option that requested a callback.

They called soon after. She explained what happened, and, after a brief silence, her voice went up. A minute or two of shouting got her a better response, and very soon it was clear that there was nothing left to do but cancel the order, which she did. When she tried to place the same order again – it was a good deal, after all – she discovered she couldn’t exchange the phone. After another chat with customer service she found that the site had registered the IMEI number of her phone on a barred list so she couldn’t put it up for exchange it for another ten days. Another shouting match followed, after which it was taken off the list.

“When will it arrive?” I asked.

“Four days,” she said, naming the date.

Four days passed, but the phone didn’t arrive. She asked again for a callback from customer service, and cancelled the deal once again. “I give up,” she said. “I think I’ll stick with this phone for some more time.” She deleted a lot of her data and removed many apps she didn’t use regularly and got it working a little faster and more reliably than before: its performance was just about acceptable.

A few days later, our ancient toaster failed to come on. This had happened before, and we thought a few thumps at strategic points would revive it, but this time it really seemed to have given up. No amount of thumping worked, so we bid it goodbye and decided to replace it. “Let’s go to a shop,” I said. “We can get back in an hour or so, and there won’t be the tension of whether they’ll deliver the thing or not.”

“Right,” she said, and we set out. We found a shop just fifteen minutes away, and were back home in just over half an hour with a brand new toaster for which the shopkeeper gave us a ten per cent discount.

“That was short and sweet, wasn’t it?” I asked, gloating just a bit.

She must have caught that, because she whipped out her phone immediately. A minute later, she was showing me what she’s found online. “Look!” she said. There it was again, the a-to-z shopping site, carrying exactly the same toaster we’d just bought, but at half the price! “Short, sweet, and expensive!”

You just can’t win!