Omaira Gill :
Courier companies drop when you shop, at least in Greece. Today, after a very long time, I lost my temper. Having two small children eats into a huge amount of my time and the result is that online shopping has become my new best friend. The downside is that it is still a concept in its infancy in Greece.
So when the Greek equivalent of Toys R Us opened an online store, I was all over it. Dirt cheap paper plates? Check. Bulk orders of cotton ear buds? You can never have too many of those. And that window squeegee looks useful. I’ll order two.
As anyone with small children knows, a venture into a store of this nature, the sort that is like a mini market on an enormous scale, toys crammed in along with lots of other convenient items, is like undertaking an epic odyssey. I also like to tell couples I know who are considering taking their children to visit this establishment on a Saturday afternoon to be careful before they take the plunge. The combination of confusing layout, pixies-on-acid store music and an endless cacophony of screaming children is, in my opinion, the best contraceptive available to man.
There is no such thing as “I’ll pop in for five minutes” with these stores. Stepping through the doors, all concept of time and space disappears. They’re like casinos for parents – little natural light and no clocks. Before long you have forgotten what it was you came for, cheap plastic goods all screaming at you for attention while your toddler smears an as yet unpaid for chocolate egg all over his face and your baby decides now is the perfect time to remind you of his lack of bowel control.
Imagine my delight, then, when I could finally shop for bargain convenience items without even leaving my home.
But if I thought the experience would save me some stress, I was sadly mistaken. The target of my wrath, what brought me to the brink of simultaneously combusting, was the courier company, which I shall refer to as The Worst Courier in Greece to preserve their completely undeserved anonymity.
If online shopping were a movie, courier companies would be the bad guy. They tend to range from the fantastic to the exceptionally bad, with very little in between. At the top of the tree are the big names, usually international, which care enough about their reputation to try and keep customer discontent to a minimum. Anyone who can shop online can, after all, leave a disgruntled review on any number of sites, and you’re more likely to make a noise about bad service as opposed to good.
No such luck in Greece though, where the public has yet to realise the power of online reviews. And so there is no incentive for service providers to try and do a good job. And the courier company so unfortunately employed by this store, obviously know this.
After one attempted delivery where I was admittedly out, they allegedly made a second one. I won’t bore you with the details, suffice to say that after a few moments on the phone with a representative who must have been getting light-headed from the thin air she was breathing atop her high horse, who acted like it was the courier company that was paying me for the privilege of service and not the other way around, I was so irate that I began throwing things.
The conclusion was that I would have to go pick up the parcel. My parcel would be held hostage at The Worst Courier in Greece’s headquarters until I was able to do so. This completely goes against the whole idea of online shopping. If someone has shopped online because they didn’t have time to go to the store, they certainly will not have the time to go running around town picking up parcels. Even as I think these thoughts, I can almost hear The Worst Courier in Greece rubbing its hands together while laughing maniacally at having ruined my attempt at saving some precious time.
All of this seemed to have been beautifully orchestrated by the universe as some form of Greek tragedy, a lesson equivalent to my mother’s finger-wagging advice that there is no such thing as a free lunch. I don’t like shopping, you see, and ultimately it would seem that there is no such thing as stress-free shopping.
Omaira Gill is a freelance journalist based in Athens.
