A well known apparel retailer, which we won’t name here, because it will spoil potential surprises to NTWN gift recipients, has an interesting policy at the check-out page of its online store.
For a fee, you can have your gift wrapped, with a personal message to the recipient inside.
As any gift we wrap looks like a hybrid puppy-ancient mummy, our self-wrapped gifts either frighten young recipients, or disappoint them that they did not get a puppy. That’s why we take any opportunity available to leave the gift-wrapping to the pros.
So here is the pro’s policy: if you order more than one gift, you can have all of them wrapped for a fee. But, when the gifts are delivered to you, since they are all wrapped, you will have no way of knowing which gift is which. We confirmed this with the retailer’s customer service number employee, who confirmed the policy with her supervisor. Finding this out before ordering was great news for us, because we avoided the problem of receiving a box full of gifts with personal messages inside, that we would have had to unwrap, and then re-wrap into the shape of puppy-mummies!
3 More Ways To Make Ordering Things Electronically Confusing
1. Require a complex log-in process to order pizza, with a 16 character password, including upper-case and lower-case letters, and letters with accents and umlauts. Is pizza fraud this much of a problem, and why do we insist on spending 20 minutes filling out online forms to order a pizza, when we could just use a dumb-phone to make the call and order it faster?
2. Require a captcha code for anyone ordering prescription glasses online. You thought your vision was bad when you got your prescription – just wait until you try to figure out whether the wavy, cuordoroy security image is a capital letter “O,” a small letter “o,” a zero, or the Emoji emoticon for the Man in the Moon!
3. Make it really easy to order “cyber gifts” like cyber-machetes while accidentally swiping the wrong zombie in a touchscreen game. Because the easiest thing to buy online should be “nothing,” especially when you really never intended to buy nothing in the first place.
