The Magic of The Internet

Internet shopping has transformed the way we buy everything from food to electrical goods to second hand stuff to illegal stuff. It's driven down prices and forced the incumbent high street retailers to up their game. No question, it's really delivered value and choice.

Or has it?

Last week, in a couple of disastrous months the cherry on the icing on the cake was the diagnosis that our less than 4 year old dishwasher had suffered a massive internal failure and that repair was out of the question. That's the society we live in now. We throw things away and don't get them repaired because the items are so bloody cheap that the time and materials required to fix them would be more than buying something new. It's a different economic model to the everything that went before.

The first thing I did was use Google to search for some decent sites that would sell me a 60cm semi-integrated dishwasher on-line. The results of the search are a strange mixture of "shopping intelligence" sites and on-line retailers with names like Appliance City, Appliance Planet and Appliance Universe. Some well known names appear their as well, such as John Lewis, B&Q (Appliance Warehouse!), Boots, Tesco's and Sainsbury's. I tend to use either Ciao or Kelkoo as my intelligence sites to get the lowest price available, and so after doing some research I came up with the perfect model by German giants Bosch. I ordered one on-line from Sussex Appliances Online and duly gave my credit card details over and printed my receipt. Within 10 minutes a very jolly chap rang to thank me for the order but also to inform me that they didn't actually carry any stock and that Bosch had none of that model in the UK. None were expected until mid to late December. Hmmm....Christmas with nigh on 20 people for dinner and NO dishwasher? Not fucking likely. I thanked him and searched again. This time Empire Direct came up with the goods. A day later I get a phone call telling me the same thing. Order attempt number 2 cancelled then. Never mind, I'll try Appliance City, again no luck. I gave up on Bosch at that point.

Some more research followed and I decided on a Smeg (titter ye not!) model. Good reputation I thought and a good price with a lot if funky (I guess) features for a dishwasher. I ordered one through B&Q Appliance Warehouse from their website repleat with a background indicating a yawning great carbuncle of a warehouse somewhere...a white goods heaven in their eyes no doubt. Within30 minutes back came the call.....that's on back order with the manufacturer and might not be available until mid to late December. By now I'm getting a bit agitated....I have up to £400 to spend and no one wants to take the money in fair exchange, within a reasonable time frame, for a dishwasher to help spare the growing pile of plates and the arguments between me, Hellsbells, Kid and Pie.

I then order from Boot Kitchen Appliances. This seems to go well until the dreaded phone call from a nice Northern girl called Kerry (Katona...moonlighting from Iceland and being a professional mum?). Yep, you've guessed it...no can do Jack. To be fair to Kerry she was armed with some alternatives that were in stock from Electrolux, but they were dearer and the details were confusing and didn't quite ring true (no cutlery basket? surely not...) but at least she tried. I asked her to ring Smeg and get an answer as to when they'd be in the UK so i could decide whether to chance delivery before Christmas. The lovely Kerry agreed and said she'd call me on Tuesday.

After that call I decided to call Sainsbury's Kitchen Appliances before ordering to check if they had any stock ......an attempt to be proactive at last. A very nice northern girl called Kerry answered the phone and.........do you see what's happened here? Kerry works for Boots and Sainsburys! And probably all of the others I tried to order from. It didn't take long to see what had happened here...all of the top searches from Google and within Kelkoo and Ciao are for household name companies who back off the supply of the appliance to a company called DRL Ltd. DRL operate a fuck off great big warehouse in Bolton and supply that service to the names you and I know. They also supply the "sales" and "customer support" staff who with chameleon like stealth can change their employer to whoever they want depending on what number you ring. So, if B&Q ain't got it, then Boots won't. Neither will Sainsbury's, nor Tesco's probably.

You think you're being provided with choice, when in fact your new vaccum cleaner or washing machine is all coming from Bolton.

And the lovely Kerry will be whoever you want her to be.

There are other choices of course, but look into the T's and C's and you'll discover that quite a few are fronts for a single out of sight operating company. Trade Appliances Ltd operate under 5 or 6 different names so that depending on which search engine you use they increase the chance you'll use one of the front flash named gateways to get to them. If this was the world of TV, there'd be scandal in the tabloids at such a .....well "con" is too strong a word....but it is a smoke and mirrors device to deceive the ordinary punter.

Kerry did ring me back, and very sweetly said that Smeg had changed the code of the product and it was in stock. It's due next Friday, thank fuck. Unless of course , and knowing my luck, they've shipped the wrong thing and the code was right!

Later, ConsumerChamp Jack.