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Oct. 10, 2009
Is It Here Yet?
Six to eight weeks. If I remember
correctly, that’s the amount of time it took for your item to
arrive at your house. In the mail.
I’m talking, of course, about
the things you used to send away for on the back of the cereal
box.
You had to send $2.95 and 8
box tops and the form on the back of the box to some place in
Michigan, or wherever the big cereal
companies were located.
If you wanted to enter a
contest, the fine print said that if you didn’t have an official
entry form then you could use a 3x5 index card and print your name
and address on that.
But the fine print on the
cereal box, and believe me, I was a fine print cereal box reader,
said it would take 6 to 8 weeks of delivery.
If you calculate the amount of
time it took you to eat all of the cereal to get enough box tops,
and then added 6 to 8 weeks to that, plus the time of mail travel
to and from each post office, you’re probably looking at 25 weeks
to get your prize, and that’s like half a year.
So the time estimate on the
cereal box teased you that it would only take six to eight weeks,
but of course, when you were actually reading the box of cereal,
this was in all likelihood the first box of cereal you had of that
kind of cereal, and then you had to eat eight more boxes. And that
required eight more trips to the store with your mom, and then it
required for you to actually be there with her and actually
remember what kind of cereal you wanted, and then you have to pick
that exact cereal out EVERY SINGLE TIME. FOR EIGHT WEEKS OR MORE.
AND THAT’S IF YOU EVEN COULD FINISH THE FIRST
BOX OF CEREAL THAT WEEK IN THE FIRST PLACE.
IT’S A WONDER ANY CHILD AT
ALL
GOT HIS/HER PRIZE.
Whew. But when that prize did
arrive, oh, what a day that was. I still to this day remember
something about one of the packages – the small brown
paper-wrapped box with treasure inside. What was it, you ask?
Can’t remember. It had something to do with going outside with a
rubber band /water balloon-propelled gizmo that you shot up into
the air and then a parachute opened and floated some type of
action-hero figure back down to earth.
I think it worked once and
then the cat pounced on it and we never saw it again.
Today, the internet has kind
of become the back of the cereal box. Think of each web page as
the back of the box advertising a product. The other day I was
checking out the web site of a favorite band, and noticed that
there was an archival video out from a German TV performance from
1965.
I checked out the ol' eBay and
found that the video was going for less than $10 (there’s only 7
or 8 songs) so I thought OK, we’ll try that.
But ordering things today is
much different than the days of box tops and official order forms.
Today, in the fast-paced internet world, you spend all of your
time on e-mail before anything actually gets placed in the regular
mail.
E-mails about 1) placing your
order 2) confirming your order 3) confirming your payment 4)
revising your shipping options 5) shipping your items 6) tracking
your items 7) confirming that the seller received your order 8)
confirming that the seller asked you to pay for the order even
though you already paid for the item and the money is already
deducted from your account (don’t forget about that e-mail) 9)
confirming that your item has been not backordered and/or has in
fact been shipped. 10) follow-up e-mail confirming that you did
receive your item and to leave feedback for the item that we sent.
And let's not even get into
the number of e-mails you need if god-forbid you have to actually
return something.
So I bought the $8 music
video, and the seller advertised free shipping. I thought that was
pretty good. But if you weren’t careful, you could easily select
“Next 5-minute shipping with “Insurance” (Insurance for an $8
item??) that would only cost $29.95. All of those check boxes were
conveniently automatically checked, by the way.
I calculate by the time I get
done reading and/or responding to all of my e-mails, and of course
factoring in the next time I’ll be able to actually go to my PO
Box and find the yellow card telling me that I have a package –
and then adding the time it’s going to take to actually get to the
PO when the counter is open (and the counter is not open on
Saturdays, you know….) it’s going to be 6 to 8 weeks before I see
my music.
But I shouldn’t feel bad. The
other day, I spotted a cereal box back in the lunchroom. There’s a
huge offer for free DVDs if you collect 47 tokens and 18 box tops.
And, the wait time is only 90 days, from the day they receive the
order.
If I start collecting now, I
can watch those movies right after my music video.
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