Always winter, but never Christmas

[vovat]

I recently put in an order at Amazon, and they told me, "Please note that your items will take an additional 3-5 days to ship." Never mind that all of the items are supposed to ship within 24 hours. So where do the additional days come from? I understand that, during the holiday season, the actual shipping is going to be slower. But all Amazon has to do is put stuff in a box and send it out. There's no reason why there would be such a delay on that, yet there usually is. I think it's just an excuse for them to be lazy.

The good news is that bethje and I finally got to see The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe today. I have to say that it was better than I thought it would be (and I wasn't expecting it to be bad). It was quite faithful to the book, and I think Narnia came across as pretty real. The first thing that really impressed me was Mr. Tumnus' cave. The visuals were really quite impressive. The centaurs, for instance, were much better than the ones from the first Harry Potter movie. (I have to wonder if they're going to keep the bit from Order of the Phoenix about Firenze teaching Divination in the fifth movie. I think it would be unlikely that Lavender Brown and Parvati Patil would find the film representation of him to be cute.) I mean, it HAS been a few years since that movie, and special effects technology has improved, but I get the feeling that the Narnia designers had more idea what a centaur was supposed to look like (or at least what I think a centaur looks like). The computer-animated creatures came across as pretty realistic, rather than fake-looking computer graphics interacting with real actors. And Aslan looked like a real lion, but also a likeable character. I also liked the Beavers' domestic squabbling, which I think made them buyable as characters, and as a couple. Really, I can't think of anything particularly weak about the film. I might have liked to have seen more of Aslan's restoration of the statues, especially the giant Rumblebuffin, whom I remember pretty well from both the book and a television adaptation of The Lion that I saw on PBS years ago. I did think it was amusing that the lion Edmund drew on still had the drawing on him when he was restored to his flesh-and-blood self. I'd definitely recommend the movie, especially to fans of the book.

What wasn't so cool were the previews that we saw before the movie. Hey, look, more computer-animated movies with animals voiced by celebrities. Wow, another inspirational story about a sports team that overcomes the odds to win the big game. Also not cool was the fish I had at Applebee's afterwards. I used to like the fish there, so I guess they must have changed it or something. Beth suspects they might have started buying cheaper fish.

Comments

[aliste.livejournal.com]

Whenever I choose the "Free Super Saver Shipping" from Amazon it tells me that it'll take 3-5 additional days to ship, but my order usually ends up shipping immediately anyway, so I always get the free shipping, because why pay if it's going to come just as fast for free?

In sum: I hope Amazon is lying to you like they always do to me. {g}

[vovat.livejournal.com]

It's true that Amazon's estimates are almost always wrong. There have been cases where the stuff got to me a lot faster than Amazon said, and other cases where it was a lot slower. I do know there seem to be a lot of delays in December, though.

Does anyone ever NOT use the Super Saver Shipping? I mean, there are some orders where you can't (if the items are coming from a third-party vendor, for instance), but I just can't imagine paying a bunch of money to get an item slightly faster. I do have to wonder if Amazon tries to dissuade people from using the Super Saver Shipping by sending out items later when someone chooses that shipping method. I wouldn't be surprised, but I have no real evidence one way or the other.

[aliste.livejournal.com]

I do have to wonder if Amazon tries to dissuade people from using the Super Saver Shipping by sending out items later when someone chooses that shipping method

I've always thought that must be the case, because (as our own comments show) otherwise nobody would pay. There has to be some perceived benefit for spending the extra money for people to bother.

[colleenanne.livejournal.com]

Whether or not it ships in 3-5 days, I think it's unrealistic to assume an entire corporation the size of Amazon (which runs a pretty efficient ship) is looking for an exuse to be lazy. I think that's almost anthropomorphization. hehe.

[vovat.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I guess that was poor word choice on my part.

[bethje.livejournal.com]

No, I don't think it's lazines. I think it's more of an incentive for you to lay down the money for the S&H. But really, the problem isn't shipping, which is always fast. The problem is the handling. Since they don't profit from the super saver shipping, they purposely take more time to put the crap in the box. If you paid for shipping, they'd put the crap in the box faster, y'know?

[vovat.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I know. But that seems like false advertising to me. They're advertising different shipping rates when what's actually changing is the PACKING rate. But then, I suspect there's a lot of dishonesty when it comes to "shipping" charges. Obviously it doesn't cost anywhere near as much as some companies charge to ship something, especially considering that companies that ship a lot of things probably get a discount rate from the shipping company. It's similar to Ticketmaster's "service charges." The extra money is probably not going to shipping, nor is it going toward anything that could reasonably be considered a "service." It's just money they're charging because they can. They're not fooling anybody. So why not just go ahead and call it that? It would still be irritating, but damn it, it would be HONEST. {g}

[leolapyre.livejournal.com]

Hey, look, more computer-animated movies with animals voiced by celebrities. Wow, another inspirational story about a sports team that overcomes the odds to win the big game.

Seriously. Movies are becoming pretty trite.

[vovat.livejournal.com]

Becoming? {g}

I think one problem I have with all the computer-animated movies isn't just that they all have such similar concepts (because, really, recycling plots has been a Hollywood tradition since the conception of the motion picture industry), but that they all LOOK the same. It's like, after the first few Pixar films, people got it into their heads that that's what computer-animated movies have to look like. But then, The Polar Express was done in a style that was quite different, and I thought from the previews and commercials that it looked creepy. So animation style isn't the only issue, but, you know, it's AN issue.