We do a lot of shopping through Amazon. We love the convenience of our Amazon Prime membership, and even made the decision to get an Amazon rewards card.
Amazon is a great place to save some money, easily. Amazon more or less singlehandedly gave rise to the term showrooming.
We save even more on some of our staple foods with subscribe and save — automatic delivery of the same item at set intervals. We have a few more items that we're looking to put on that list, which could increase the discount we get on the entire order.
We talked, and Amazon listens
There has been the occasional hiccup with some of our liquid items getting damaged in shipment. Someone finds the leak in transit, and sends the item back, effectively canceling that order. We can get a bit ahead on the stuff we want — “go long,” in investing parlance — so in the end it's not a big deal.
We were convinced that the beef broth we get was due to inadequate packaging. The picture on the left is characteristic of how little padding the shipped box used to have. (This particular picture was actually the inner box in the picture on the right.) Only about at eighth inch of corrugated cardboard surrounding the coated paper boxes with two gallons of broth.
My wife had already written to Amazon a few times about this. But it's clear that this time around the they listened and “beefed” up the packaging. (Sorry, couldn't resist!)
Why did it take so long? (not that I blame them)
The ideal outcome (for us) would have been a response like this the first time we let Amazon know about the packaging:
“Oh, of COURSE! What were we thinking?! We'll go to our packaging engineers right this second and make sure this never happens again.”
Would that have satisfied us? Certainly, and then some! But I can see why the flimsy-by-comparison packaging happened for a while.
One damaged piece of packaging doesn't necessarily indicate a systemic problem. It could be that one of the employees in one of the logistics companies that Amazon uses was having a really, REALLY bad day, and took it out on our beef broth. Or, packaging sometimes fail under normal circumstances. It happens.
After this happens a few times — especially a few times with the same people, and the same products — then it's more than just a bad day, and it gets looked at in more detail.
But in order for them to look at it in more detail, it had to happen a few times. It must have, or we wouldn't have gotten a second shipment that was as flimsily packaged as the first.
What can we learn from the timeliness of this decision?
Let me be clear: I don't fault Amazon for not turning on a dime to improve the packaging on our order. It's not Amazon's job in life to ask “How high?” if we tell it to jump. Its job is to be profitable — which is in our interest, too, since we like the convenience of buying our stuff from there! Our job is to vote with our dollars (and to be reasonable customers).
In fact, there are several insights that come out of what happened here:
- Data collection is valuable. I have little doubt that Amazon stores a bunch of information about every last order that every last person has made on their site. It's that information that led them to improve the packaging on the broth. They didn't do it on a whim. Part of that data collection was our correspondence to them, but other parts were the messy boxes of broth that came back to them, descriptions of what happened in transit, the shipping company, etc.
- What can we learn? If you don't collect information, you have nothing to base decisions on except your gut. (Not that that's always bad, but it's certainly not always good!) Tracking your expenses helps you to find the sore spots in your budget. Baselining helps you to see whether a deal is really good, meh, or not so good.
- Data reduction is even more valuable. Even a company as large and high-tech as Amazon doesn't have the resources to chase down the root cause of every single problem delivery. They only investigate the ones that are happening a lot — the ones that are costing them the most. That's where data reduction comes in: Collect a lot of data, and look for the gems that will bring the most value.
- What can we learn? This is why comparison sites are great. Search engines are the biggest; the best ones magically get inside your head and give you what you're searching for, front and center, from the 34 million matches to your search term. Or, instead of hitting over a dozen rebate sites, why not check out a rebate comparison engine that puts the highest one on top for you?
- Profits are made at the margin. We as customers see that Amazon broke our package, or that it got here safely. Amazon, if it sees all of its packages getting to their destinations safely, will decrease the amount of packaging and cushioning until a few of them break. Saving two cents on materials is huge for Amazon, because they deliver hundreds of thousands of items a week, if not over a million, items per week.
- What can we learn? Just like Amazon pushed the envelope on its packaging until it failed, we can push the envelope on our personal finances until they fail. How long can you wait until sending out payment before it's late? How many emails per week can you send to a mailing list before people unsubscribe? How low can you get a seller to go before they just say “no?”
If you play safe, you may be leaving lots of profits (savings) on the table. But to know when to not play it safe, you need data, and need to find the right data in there. This is useful whether you're in business, or not.
The best deals, or the highest profits, are hidden in plain sight, right at the margins.
