Showing posts with label my shit list. Show all posts
Showing posts with label my shit list. Show all posts

Saturday, September 19, 2009

On My Shit List (edited): Places that don't provide assistance to AE or AP addresses

Right now, top on my shit list is Ebay. They just did a new "improvement" that requires any address entered into their system to choose their state from a pull-down tab. Great, fine, it spares all those idiots who can't be bothered to type two letters into a state field. Great, right? Not so much. Because nowhere under United States is there "AE or AP, Armed Forces European/Armed Forces Pacific" or any variant thereof.
And unlike many places that have the pulldown tab and a manual entry tab, Ebay has been idiotic enough to eliminate the manual entry completely

After spending a lot of time on the phone arguing with the helpdesk person from India that Armed Forces Europe existed as a state, that the US Postal Service would confirm that they cheerfully deliver to it every day as a state with no extra shipping charges, and that they deliver to inside the United States, she finally pointed out that if I wanted to count "APO/FPO" as a separate country, I could make it happen.

What does this mean, aside from the fact that ebay is full of retards? That military people currently serving overseas buying from Ebay are going to start running into problems with idiots who insist that they're buying from outside the country and should be paying international rates, despite the fact that it doesn't cost international rates to ship to APO/FPO.

It's short sighted and stupid. I can tolerate it when small companies just learning the internet ropes make this mistake, but when a major, multi-billion dollar company makes this mistake? It is flat-out offensive.

Anyway, so I decided to start a list. I'm looking for contributions as well, so anyone who finds another company who does not offer support to military members stationed overseas by:
not allowing them something so simple as a manual tab
refusing to ship to APO addresses
does not acknowledge that APO addresses count as part of the United States for shipping purposes

shall be listed here, and hopefully be a little bit shamed.