I felt I needed to let all my fellow shooters about this. On Thanksgiving I found out about an online pre-Black Friday deal on ritzcamera.com. The deal was sweat. Buy three Sandisk 4GB Extreme III CF cards for $60, send in the mail-in rebate, and get $60 back. Three free 4GB CF cards? Sign me up!
I received the order confirmation shortly after, and then about a week later I received another email regarding my order status that stated they were currently out of stock, but would ship my cards to me as soon as they received another shipment. At this point, I still felt relatively at ease.
Then another week passed. I decided I should check the shipping status on their site. When I punched in my order number, the response came back that my order had been canceled. I didn't receive any communication that this had happened and no reason for the cancellation was given. My first response was to check my bank account to make sure they had at least put the money back. The original transaction from when I ordered was gone, as if it never happened. I wrote an email to customer service that has yet to be answered.
The next day I was perusing sportsshooter.com and looking into a message board thread titled "Very disappointed in service". I didn't even think it would be related to my problem, but I still like to be awares of people who conduct bad business. Sure enough the entire thread consisted of people who had also been equally screwed by Ritz Camera. A few lucky ones had talked to customer service reps and managed to get some cards out to them. One even provided a contact phone number, which I quickly dialed, politely explained my situation, stated that I knew some people were still getting the cards, and asked if anything could be done.
The answer was no.
Debbie Whitecotton, the contact that was on sportsshooter.com, simply flat out refused to fulfill my order.
I understand the concept of supply and demand, but it's just bad business to send someone not one, but two order confirmations, a week apart, and then cancel the order without notice. I hope Ritz Camera folds with the bad economy.
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