I am happy when a store manages to sell me something.

Usually what happens to me is that the store doesn't have what I want (I spent three days in December trying to hunt down a USB DVD drive in Dublin), doesn't understand what I want (I was also looking for a Firewire 800, not USB 2, hard disk), or the clerks are simply not interested in selling my anything (it has happened to me that a clerk apparently decided that my question is simply not interesting and then proceeded to serve the next customer, who spent considerably less money than I was trying to spend).

I work as customer service at my job and it's no piece of cake. People call assuming you are some kind of genius who has every person in your database memorized and can give them an answer to their problem almost before they can finish telling you whats wrong. It's kinda funny really. People love thier privacy yet somehow they want us to know everything about them so they don't have to explain anything or give details about themselves. they just want to pick up the phone, dail the number and when someone picks up they want to say "I need help" and Bam! a solution is given instantly.

But the only thing worse is my boss. I'll never understand her expectations for the service we provide. She wants us to help fix the problem without telling the person they made a mistake. We are not suppose to say anything negative about the issue, we can't say we don't know, we are not sure or we can't help. Heck, even when we get calls from people who dialed the number wrong we have to provide some kind of assistance. We are close to being seen as miracle makers. I understand trying to provide the best customer service we can but sometimes the expectations are too extreme.

Amen!  When I started using the internet for virtually all my shopping (about 10 years now), I was shopping price. I found some great sites.  But as time went on, the price difference was not so big.  Yes, a few pennies here or there, but relatively the same.  Then I had an experience a couple of years ago with a couple of e-tailers.  Amazon and Deep Discounts.  The latter screwed me over royally and while there was not a lot I could do, I just wrote them a letter telling them to keep the money they stole from me, and I would never do business with them again.  And I have not.

Amazon on the other hand was a different story.  I bought a gift for my wife.  WHen I gave it to her, she liked the idea, but wanted a different model.  Grrrrr (well she is a woman ).  So I returned it.  because there was nothing wrong, Amazon said they could not refund the shipping.  No big deal.  But then when the return was processed, I was amazed at how fast (a lot of places "hold" your return to get some float out of the money), how easy and how well it went!  So much so I wrote them a letter thanking them for the experience.

And they sent me one back thanking me for the letter and then refunded my shipping!

needless to say I shop Amazon almost exclusively.  And they have just about anything you want.

My experience with Amazon was universally good, except for the fact that they have no Irish site (we use the UK's with a different currency) and refuse to ship computer games to Ireland for some reason.

Bummer.  I know I am spoiled living in the USA.  Never thought about their foreign offices as I have run into their UK store a couple of times as well.

Ireland is only independent from the UK when it costs us more to be independent.