Happy sight! I love getting packages in the mail, now which one do you think contains the 3TB Hard Drive and which one the Spudz Microfiber lens cloth?
< Update: March 15, 2012 So as you’ll see in the comments below, Adorama contacted me and explained what and why this all happened and I wanted to give them proper credit for some excellent customer service in trying to remedy this particular situation and for their future customers. It’s not everyday that you see a company make a “Mea Culpa” so big kudos to Adorama! I’m plenty satisfied with their response and plan on using their services in the future. I’m going to keep this post up as I think it serves as a lesson in what not to do ie: ship delicate things poorly, and also what to do ie: contact, explain, and remedy the problem as Adorama has done. >
I hope you’ll indulge me a momentary rant about something that happened to me this week. I ordered several photo accessories including a new 3TB hard drive to use as a backup for my ever growing library of images (curse you 16mp RAW files) after an online search I found a decent price on Buy.com for a 3 TB Seagate drive, as it happens it’s actually sold and shipped from Adorama which is an awesome photo store in New York, I’ve ordered several pieces of gear from Adorama in the past and I’ve always been impressed by their service, but yesterday I was less than impressed.
By pure coincidence I also happened to receive the same day my new Spudz microfiber lens cloth from Alpine Innovations. (Ordered through Amazon.com) It’s a cool little lens cloth in a handy pouch that has a clip so you can hang it on your bag or camera strap and have it with you at all times, it’s small and light. So which of the packages do you think held the delicate piece of computer hardware and which the 2oz microfiber cloth?
Ooh look how well that's packed and protected! Plenty of bubble wrap to ensure nothing shifts in transit.
The 2 oz Spudz!! Amazon.com knows how to ship!!
Well how about that delicate piece of computer hardware, you know the one with delicate platters, spring loaded spindles and electronics that are not designed to absorb shock?
Seriously Adorama?! That's how you ship a Hard Drive cross country?? A soft envelope and small bubble wrap bag?!
Where’s the box!!?
Both merchants offered free shipping so there’s no reason that Amazon had to use a big box like they did, that Spudz would have been fine in an envelop and in fact when I opened the mail box I was sure the envelope held just that.
Well there you have it, my Spudz lens cloth packed ultra well and my expensive Hard Drive tossed into an envelope.
Adorama should be ashamed of itself! Take a hint from Amazon.com and use a box!! If it’s too expensive to use a box for free shipping then let me know and I’ll pay for a box. As it stands I’m more than a little leery of using the hard drive now, I certainly won’t be putting anything I don’t already have backed up a few times on it.
Thanks for letting me vent…<shakes head again in disbelief>
Howard
New D7000 user 
you can use seagate’s SeaTools (free from their website), and do a full check of this disk.
if it won’t pass, you can just return it as a faulty item, and they will have to replace it with new one.
Great tip, thank you so much!! I’m keeping my fingers crossed…
How frustrating! My step mom ordered some dishes once and they came shipped in a box too big for the order with next to no packaging inside. Every single one was broken. Don’t know who is packing this stuff, but you think they’d employ a little common sense…guess it’s just not that common.
Heather that really stinks! I just listened to a podcast the other day talking about common sense and how it can destroy us (turns out it’s not so common after all)
Please accept our apologies for this oversight. We have started to use a new packing machine and all items that meet a certain criteria of dimensions and price will automatically go via this machine that uses that white film you see in the pic with our logo on it.
This machine does 3 times the amount any human packer can do, but unfortunately it doesn’t know what should go in a box and what should go in the machine.
The employee feeding the machine wouldn’t know either, because it is wrapped in bubble wrap so he would never have known it was a hard drive.
It is company policy that employees are to NEVER open an item on the floor. They can call it out to management and they can inspect something if needed.
If you can email me with your order number we will ensure that this item is coded in such a way that it will never be packed in this way in the future.
Of course, if there any problems please let me know and I’ll have a pre-paid label emailed so you can return it for exchange or refund.
Once again my apologies, and I look forward to hearing back from you.
Helen Oster
Adorama Camera Customer Service Ambassador
Helen@adorama.com