[jdandy]

Originally Posted by robfine

In the early days of shopping on the internet, the reason for doing so was to either find things you couldn’t find anywhere else but mostly because there was price competition well beyond what you could find in bricks & mortar stores. If you were willing to put up with a little inconvenience including sending back the occasional damaged or defective product that was part of “the game.” Not anymore. Now, the Amazons and others have gotten the convenience part almost perfected. But savings... buying on the internet, that’s pretty much long gone. IMO, instead of the internet being a marketplace where lots of dealers of various things competing based on price, the way it was years ago, it has become the place where everything is sold at retail. There are really no more bargains by shopping on the internet. So if you (me, we) are going to be paying retail, i.e., the same price we would pay walking into a store, we should accept no less than the quality of what we would walk out of the store with. As “free shipping”, I never once paid shipping on anything I ever walked out of a Best Buy store with or anything I bought from a local B&M audio dealer. And whatever I walked out with was not damaged in shipping— unless I bought in on a scratch & dent sale and then I knew what I was getting up front. You should accept from internet vendors no less than what you would accept buying from a local store. (Again, jmho).

Robert.......I agree with you. Even in the wild and wooly days of Internet shopping I still expected my purchases to be new and undamaged.

I have all but stopped buying records online. My last record purchases were from a well known Internet vendor. I purchased two albums at different times and both were defective, not from shipping but from poor quality pressings. One sounded like sandpaper on the lead in track of side A for about 10 seconds. The other album had extremely loud pops on nearly every track on both sides. Some of the defects were physically visible in the vinyl. I returned them at my expense ($14.00). The second copy of Shelby Lynn - Just A Little Lovin' still had some noise on the first track of side one but was considerably better than my first copy so I kept it. The second album, Houston Persons, arrived with loud pops on both sides again. I returned it at my expense ($7.00) and waited for a third copy to arrive. When it did it also had loud pops in two tracks on Side A, and three tracks on side B. I was so pissed off about this experience, the waiting for a replacement, and the added cost of returning albums that I haven't bought another vinyl LP since. I did not return the third copy of Houston Person (29.00 + $7.00 return, + $7.00 return). It sits in my studio where I occasionally play the few tracks on the album that do not have horrendous pops. The Shelby Lynne album ($34.99 + $7.00 return) gets played periodically, but the high-res download I have of the same album sounds better. So I have $43.00 in an unplayable Houston Person album, and $41.99 in a Shelby Lynne album that is less than perfect on the replacement. That's $15.00 shy of a C-note for two albums I am unhappy with. It sort of takes the fun out of shopping for LP's online. Having to jump through hoops with the vendor, drive to the post office to return items, and pay return shipping for defective albums isn't my cup of tea. At best it is anticlimactic.