Some Very Expensive Yogurt

My latest rant at Amazon.com centers around a yogurt maker. It’s the 1-quart Salton I bought earlier this year for $10. I liked it so much that I bought my daughter one at $12. But when I tried to buy one today for my friend Deborah for her birthday, the price suddenly has been raised significantly to $89.99.

Anyone looking at this Web page can easily see it is full of mistakes. It’s fairly obvious when the list price of $24.99 is slashed that the resulting price should actually be $8.99. Even with inflation, the same item would not have increased to such an outrageous price in just a few months. Check out the other two offerings at $98.95 and $100,000.00.

I have always had a great deal of respect for Amazon and have always been pleased with both their products and their service. So I thought a simple phone call would solve my problem and I could perhaps receive the yogurt maker by Wednesday, my friend’s actual birthday.

The first challenge was how to actually talk to a person at Amazon. A simple Google of “Amazon.com + telephone number” netted this useful information.

I called 1-866-216-1072, still anticipating a helpful staff member who would quickly fix the pricing problem.

Instead I got someone in India who asked me a million questions before ever even pulling up the problematic Web page. Then she tried to tell me there was nothing she could do because the product was being offered by a third party, not Amazon. My complaint that it was appearing on their website had no effect whatsoever. In my frustration I asked to speak to her supervisor.

The supervisor gave me the same pat answer without even bothering to see the problem. When I asked what I would actually be charged if I ordered the yogurt maker listed at $100,000, she said “$100,000" and said it was out of her control. That’s the point when I hung up, shaking my head in frustration.

I even suggested to my husband that we order the $89.99 yogurt maker and just see what happened, with the option of returning it if indeed we were charged that amount. He wasn’t willing to take a chance.

A further look would suggest that for some reason there is a shortage of these Salton yogurt makers on the market. I shot off e-mails to Value-Warehouse, the $89.99 provider, and to Salton itself asking for some clarification.

At this point I still have no good source for a yogurt maker and am pissed as hell at the incompetence of Amazon, a company that has gotten a lot of business from us. They have outsourced this one past the point of providing the necessary customer service.