Grateful Dead

dead.net the official site

I just spent a couple of minutes at eBay. In less than a fraction of the time I wasted in any one of my many attempts in trying to buy from deadnetstore, I found and paid for the Jerry Collection 2, even though it's still in pre-release. Should be able to get the new Road Trips discs there soon too. I can only suppose that the cavalier (again, trying hard to be nice about it) attitude to the customer displayed by Rhino/GD will hasten the day the Rhino decides to write off their investment in the vault and we no longer see these releases. That won't make me happy, but I'll know I couldn't have done a thing about it anyway.

They don't want my business anymore. I have been aware from the start (that is, the start of my attempts to order Road Trips 2/4 and Pure Jerry 9), that deadnetstore's new system might be very literal or sensitive (these are the euphemistic, nice terms) to card/address details. As I've said earlier in this thread, I'm in the UK. I should add that I regularly order merch from all over the world, via net commerce sites, and never, never have had the issues I have had with the new, broken (call it what it is) deadnetstore. In fact, before the redesign to break the site, I have ordered Every Single new GD and Jerry release from here with no issues. But now, no dice. I ended up getting RT2/4 and PJ9 from eBay, which most likely means that the person who originally bought those discs ripped them to their computer and resold them to me -- a lost sale to GD/Rhino. I have now spent several hours of my time fiddling with completing their web form and a half-hour international call to deadnetstore customer service, all in a vain attempt to get them to take my money for their product (RT 3/1 and Jerry Collection 2 now). The hilarity of it -- a 44 year old fan of some extinct band reading his card details to an underpaid boiler-room call center worker in India, via a UK-to-Maryland phone call, standing by while she duplicates my efforts in typing the data into the broken web interface. Then, after she inevitably gets the same message I've already seen, she apologizes that the transaction hasn't gone through and asks me to hold. Returning after two minutes, she tells me she can use an "override" and asks for my card details again. Pause. Finally, she tells me that the transaction is still "not completing for some reason." And the coup de gras, she tells me that it may yet go through, "if you recieve an email from dead.net in the next couple of days, confirming, then the transaction did complete. Otherwise, you may want to wait a few days and try to complete it again." Yes, that's really what she told me. So anyway, as I said to start, it has become transparently clear that Rhino/GD couldn't care less about losing my business. I'm taking the big hint from their clue hammer. I'll buy the releases from third parties from now on.

stay tuned for more of the continuing saga of not being able to order music from a Band, the other day I made a call trying to get some info from someone about something and got routed to India to a call center, talked to a very nice lady who could speak english and helped a lot and I was able to complete my call and get the info that I was seeking, so there are intelligent people who work at these call centers, just doesn't seem that any of them work for dead net. I guess just keep on trying, sooner or later, something's got to work. Thanks to Marye and all who do help, without you I doubt anyone overseas would get anything. So sad