The funnelling is real, pervasive and most sheeple don't care!
Yesterday, i was traveling to find a discontinued laptop on clearance. I foolishly thought the mobile website view on my phone would match my home computer's view of the product page.
No!
And while i called around (my husband was driving us for errands & day out), i searched.
The CS phone bot is uniform across all branches/stores and is a gatekeeper pushing us all to chatbots for help.
If you get a live person, they instruct you to "Just download the app!" They also have no idea how to check inventory without looking at their own phone to check their app. Nothing like walking over to check the shelves.
No phone service has been more aggravating and aggresively inept than the now, ever present AI.
BTW, online purchases to hold for pickup tequire creating an account. No more guest check-outs. They want full permissions to bombard your cell phone (required!) email (required!) and address with junk for eternity.
Cash. That's a comfort, but only 1 of the 8 registers at the store accepted cash. 🤯
Hadn’t heard the term “funneling” before but it is a good descriptor. Your descriptions fit with what I am seeing in Japan. This is getting scary, fast.
Funneling is just a picture in my head from a waterpark ride my hubby & i took the grandkids to visit.
After shouldering a waterpark mat and climbing a go-zillion stairsteps, one is seated, grabbing the mat's side handles. The gum-chewing teen attending the ride releases the mat (with the frantic passenger clinging desperately) into a waterchoked tube, plunging ever downward until ejected into the waterfall of a giant funnel. Then the fun begins. The mat begins the spiralling descent and naturally separates from the waterlogged passenger, who flails and skin-burns his/her way into the exit chute.
Depending on momentum and luck, all members of the party get beached at the exit pool safely together.
You wrote this so well. I don't have any retail apps, but yesterday I ran into the app-centric customer service rep that you describe. After a struggle on the phone with AI, I reached a live person, as I was trying to find out whether the big-box store Home Depot (which I'd rather not patronize, but I'd run out of other options) had the item I wanted in stock, so that I could drive 1.5 miles to buy it and carry it home. (P.S. The item is warming, and the cats and I were cold.) From the website, I could glean only by which date I could receive the item if I ordered online, and a) it was shipped to my home, or b) I picked up at the store. The customer service rep advised me to look on my app for information, and he didn't know what to say when I replied that I was using the Internet on a c-o-m-p-u-t-e-r. Of course, he acted like there was no way he could check the stock by employing his legs. To be fair, though, he may not have actually been at the store, even though the phone number I called was local. The end result was quite good, though: I posted on the neighborhood website, Nextdoor.com (which is also an app!) to buy a used heater or borrow one, and within 15 minutes had received a reply. And 10 minutes after that, a woman drove up with her heater to lend me.
What's funny is, I had been home only about an hour after giving a Nextdoor post-er who was looking for used moving boxes a ride to U-Haul to pick them up. So it was a "both ways" day.
Nextdoor isn't just for buying and selling. People ask a lot of questions about home repair and other stuff; others give recommendations; others promote themselves; others recommend So-and-So who turns out to be their partner.
If you have the ability on a laptop I implore you to check your credit company bank information on that instead of the stupid "app." I say this because I know beyond any shadow of a doubt that what appears on say Bank of America's online site on my laptop versus Bank of America's online site on my phone app is different...and usually for the worse on the app. Good luck!
Thanks. That doesn’t surprise me. Websites do not show the same on different devices either at times. Maddening. I just go into the service counter when I have questions. No problem for me as until recently I made the monthly trip in to pay my bill in cash.
I hope that the recent total power outages in Spain and Portugal might calm the push for digital / APP based / cloud everything.
I remember reading about the man prosecuted for blocking ALL radio transmissions to an entire airport with a cheap blocking device he bought from Amazon.
He only wanted privacy and ended up in serious trouble.
I'm surprised that it doesn't happen more often, as it would show how flaky the digital infrastructure really is.
You would think it would, it certainly should. But I haven’t seen any evidence that it has. TPTB don’t care. I hadn’t heard of the case you mention. I know those devices are illegal in the U.S. but many businesses in Japan have them, or at least used to.
The funnelling is real, pervasive and most sheeple don't care!
Yesterday, i was traveling to find a discontinued laptop on clearance. I foolishly thought the mobile website view on my phone would match my home computer's view of the product page.
No!
And while i called around (my husband was driving us for errands & day out), i searched.
The CS phone bot is uniform across all branches/stores and is a gatekeeper pushing us all to chatbots for help.
If you get a live person, they instruct you to "Just download the app!" They also have no idea how to check inventory without looking at their own phone to check their app. Nothing like walking over to check the shelves.
No phone service has been more aggravating and aggresively inept than the now, ever present AI.
BTW, online purchases to hold for pickup tequire creating an account. No more guest check-outs. They want full permissions to bombard your cell phone (required!) email (required!) and address with junk for eternity.
Cash. That's a comfort, but only 1 of the 8 registers at the store accepted cash. 🤯
Hadn’t heard the term “funneling” before but it is a good descriptor. Your descriptions fit with what I am seeing in Japan. This is getting scary, fast.
Funneling is just a picture in my head from a waterpark ride my hubby & i took the grandkids to visit.
After shouldering a waterpark mat and climbing a go-zillion stairsteps, one is seated, grabbing the mat's side handles. The gum-chewing teen attending the ride releases the mat (with the frantic passenger clinging desperately) into a waterchoked tube, plunging ever downward until ejected into the waterfall of a giant funnel. Then the fun begins. The mat begins the spiralling descent and naturally separates from the waterlogged passenger, who flails and skin-burns his/her way into the exit chute.
Depending on momentum and luck, all members of the party get beached at the exit pool safely together.
Fun!
My grocery store in the US now has additional digital only savings on some items only if the customer uses their app.
The local baseball stadium is now a totally cashless facility.
Funneling in progress 💯
This is terrifying.
You wrote this so well. I don't have any retail apps, but yesterday I ran into the app-centric customer service rep that you describe. After a struggle on the phone with AI, I reached a live person, as I was trying to find out whether the big-box store Home Depot (which I'd rather not patronize, but I'd run out of other options) had the item I wanted in stock, so that I could drive 1.5 miles to buy it and carry it home. (P.S. The item is warming, and the cats and I were cold.) From the website, I could glean only by which date I could receive the item if I ordered online, and a) it was shipped to my home, or b) I picked up at the store. The customer service rep advised me to look on my app for information, and he didn't know what to say when I replied that I was using the Internet on a c-o-m-p-u-t-e-r. Of course, he acted like there was no way he could check the stock by employing his legs. To be fair, though, he may not have actually been at the store, even though the phone number I called was local. The end result was quite good, though: I posted on the neighborhood website, Nextdoor.com (which is also an app!) to buy a used heater or borrow one, and within 15 minutes had received a reply. And 10 minutes after that, a woman drove up with her heater to lend me.
Is Nextdoor the new Craigslist?
I liked something called Freecycle, but my rural location doesn't support the framework of the necessary give and take.
Glad you got warm! Nice to find a real Good Samaritan.
What's funny is, I had been home only about an hour after giving a Nextdoor post-er who was looking for used moving boxes a ride to U-Haul to pick them up. So it was a "both ways" day.
Nextdoor isn't just for buying and selling. People ask a lot of questions about home repair and other stuff; others give recommendations; others promote themselves; others recommend So-and-So who turns out to be their partner.
If you have the ability on a laptop I implore you to check your credit company bank information on that instead of the stupid "app." I say this because I know beyond any shadow of a doubt that what appears on say Bank of America's online site on my laptop versus Bank of America's online site on my phone app is different...and usually for the worse on the app. Good luck!
Thanks. That doesn’t surprise me. Websites do not show the same on different devices either at times. Maddening. I just go into the service counter when I have questions. No problem for me as until recently I made the monthly trip in to pay my bill in cash.
I hope that the recent total power outages in Spain and Portugal might calm the push for digital / APP based / cloud everything.
I remember reading about the man prosecuted for blocking ALL radio transmissions to an entire airport with a cheap blocking device he bought from Amazon.
He only wanted privacy and ended up in serious trouble.
I'm surprised that it doesn't happen more often, as it would show how flaky the digital infrastructure really is.
I read that there are solar events that can shut down the grid of the entire world. Last time it happened there wasn't that much to shut down.
That is true too. Yet, we keep shifting to all electric.
You would think it would, it certainly should. But I haven’t seen any evidence that it has. TPTB don’t care. I hadn’t heard of the case you mention. I know those devices are illegal in the U.S. but many businesses in Japan have them, or at least used to.