The Daily Cow

Today I attempted vainly to buy an external HD from Office Depot for an hour and half. Because Office Depot's website crashed Firefox 10 consecutive times (and Firefox has never crashed on Ubuntu for me), I switched to Opera. But the whole process was fruitless.

The deal sounds good, doesn't it? Buy a small external hot-swappable hard drive for under 60 bucks and get free shipping. So I typed "1" into the quantity box and clicked add to cart. I was confronted with the page asking for my zip code so I typed in the zip code I wanted OD to ship to (94709, Berkeley), but it said "THIS ITEM IS NOT AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCATION."

Huh? I am not picking up the item at the store. I want it delivered to me. Why should it matter at all where I live, if this will be delivered from the OD warehouse? I did not understand OD's logic (probably because this particular part had none), but I typed various zip codes until I got one that worked (72701). I proceeded to check out the cart, and entered in all of my information. Upon clicking "Place Order" I was taken back to the check-out page, with the notice: "Your shopping cart may have changed. Please review." I glanced at my shopping cart and it hasn't changed, so I pressed Place Order again, and I was confronted with the same notice.

I did this several times on various browsers and even asked Tricia to do it on Windows, all to no avail. I just wasted a whole hour and half (now two hours including this) trying to understand what was wrong, only to conclude that OD's website either had an intentional hurdle (that's pretty much impossible to bypass, apparently) or a serious logical fault. OD, if you promise a deal, you'd better back it up--I'm surprised you still get business.

I hate you and all retailers who intentionally make it impossible (or nearly impossible) for customers to get what is advertised.