Learn from my misery: Don't buy a nook.
blog.fsck.com
blog.fsck.com
This is the easiest action you can do to deal the most damage. Anyone who processes payments knows that chargeback hurt a lot. Chargebacks are a consumer protection, so they are easy to do.
If a company makes a promise to give you X, Y, & Z at a certain price, they have to follow through. You have a few options, but chargebacks can be the simplest way to get there.
I've had to do this to a bank or two which was under the mistaken impression that I owed them money. Incidentally: a tact I particularly like, since I own shares of essentially any publicly traded stock by dint of owning broad index funds, is to send the letter to Investor Relations. Just say you're a shareholder (you are certainly not the most convoluted situation that results in getting invited to their shareholder meeting) and that you've had a problem, blah blah blah, please fix at your earliest convenience.
And for what it's worth, having used both a Kindle and a nook, I really want to like the nook more, but I just can't. The poor user interface and the bad taste from B&N customer support make me not want to use the thing.
Granted, I think we're probably getting half the story -- my experience with customers that type subject lines like "Help! multiple nook delays and broken promises" is that they are not always the most pain-free to deal with. (The easiest customers to support are the ones who treat it like it is all business. Incidentally, taking this tact has helped me with a megacorp or six over the years.)
However, the fact that something even remotely close to that story could happen shows broken CS policies. At my previous employer where I was a CS drone, I could have resolved the issue on any call: "Oh, we promised you a $100 gift card? I'm terribly sorry you haven't received it, sir. Can I make it up to you by issuing a $100 refund to your credit card, which will show on your bank statement within one to three business days?" Or at ANY point in the circus they could have said "I'm sending you a new Nook. It will ship from our warehouse within the hour and be hand delivered by FedEx tomorrow morning. When the first one arrives in a few days, do us a favor and just tell the delivery guy to take it back. Don't worry about the cost: we'll cover all the charges. We're serious about making you happy."
Obviously you don't want $8 an hour CS drones making that decision too often, but you can always just trust-but-verify their judgments. (I got flagged by the computer twice for being overly generous. My manager came over to talk to me about it. I said "A customer was unhappy. I resolved the situation." and got a pat on my shoulder. This was in a business with margins so thin you could shave with them, too, rather than high-end electronics which lock people into your purchasing system for life. Crikey, you think they'd fall over themselves trying to get that in his hands.)
Tack is the direction you are going.
The Nook itself is still a little rough around the edges - it just feels like it was a rushed job to get it to market, which it probably was. The good news is that most of the problems I've experienced with it seem to be software related. Biggest annoyances are not being able to go to a page (?) and the sluggishness of the LCD touchscreen. It's crashed a couple times formatting a book the first time in.
OTOH, the paging speed is good, the PDF support is adequate, and I've spent a fair amount of time reading on it without issue.
If you promise something, you must follow through. This is something that most companies just don't get: details matter. How you're treated on the phone matters. The ordering process matters. The pre-purchase information (web page) matters. Hell, even the box and shipping process matters.
And this is all before you even get to use the device. Imagine if you've gone through all of that. How could you possibly write a non-biased review? You can't, because all of the stuff leading up to the device showing up at your door completely ruined the experience.
These situations happen from time to time. I understand his outrage, but front page?
From my experience, kindle is a lot better than nook with just two reasons:
1. Amazon offers more books(especially programming books) than B&N.
2. Amazon offers cheaper books and it doesn't require you to join the Amazon book club. You have to join the B&N Book Club to get cheaper price which is always the same price that you get from Amazon.
Since I didn't have a phone line (yet), and the previous tenant didn't have a phone line either, the process seemed to be a tad more complicated than usual (for them). Anyway I ended up on the phone with one of their sale rep (obviously not French, my guess would be someone based in Marocco), who told me that it was going to take roughly 4 to 6 weeks to setup the phone line, and then everything would be fine. That's a very long time... but what do you want, they are cheap, and it's France, never expect anything to come fast.
2 months later nothing, not an email, not a phone call, nothing at all. Considering their completely useless customer service abroad, I decided to just forget about them (without canceling anything) and called one of their competitor (Orange, formerly known as France Telecom) : the most expensive, but 1 week later I had phone, TV and 8 Mbps internet for 44€ euros a month. 14€ more than Free, 10 Mbps slower, but at last I could stop "borrowing" my neighbor connection.
I never heard about Free again until one year and a half later, when I received an email roughly stating that "there had been an issue and consequently I won't get DSL from them". I will never know what went wrong, but I'm amazed that they reacted after such a long time.
I mean, one year and a half... I wonder. After such a long time they should have guessed that I don't care anymore ? What were they thinking ? It was way too late not to look completely ridiculous. It doesn't make any sense to me.
I'm going to remember that one. It was pretty good.
I really can't see a person doing this; there must be some wonky code that filters mail. All to make things more efficient.
It sounds to me like a large part of fulfillment was outsourced (not so unusual) and there was very little involvement from BN during the "channel design" (don't know what you call that, I'm not in the biz) and channel operation. Basically, some vendor was allowed by BN to screw BN and its customers.
The VP who denied the $100 gift card was probably staunching a hemorrhage of gift cards.
None of this is an excuse. But it sounds like BN actually hired well, at the point of customer contact.
Where I think this becomes a hiring problem is that I would expect that somewhere along the way that Barnes & Noble would have hired somebody who would actually do what they were hired to do - Customer Service. In my opinion, this issue was never resolved and therefore every representative who worked on this case did NOT actually do their job.
No representative (regardless of the process) should promise a call back if they don't actually intend to follow through. If Barnes & Noble had hired correctly, the system wouldn't have failed this miserably.
Personally, I prefer formats more flexible than PDFs, like plain text files.
DRM issues. Pricing issues. Platform issues. And, apparently, customer service issues. The ebook has a little more maturing to do, so for contemporary books I'd still stick with physical copies.
Reading plain text files is simpler to do across platforms. If an app on a mobile device just pays attention to the text then that's fine for functionality, I guess. But then I have a problem with the extra formatting being there, unused. Kind of like having a problem with unused CSS in a style sheet just sitting there.
Despite that, PDF, especially PDF-A, is the superior format for preserving published content.
I also can't help but thinking that this is not a friendly warning to others, but simply one more attempt to finally get something out of B&N by causing a public fuss.
Call me Mr. Cynical.
That said, most likely this particular post is a genuine complaint plus an opportunistic idea.
If it weren't someone that we all know, then that might be an issue. But Jesse has been around the hacker and entrepreneurial community for a long time, and has a reputation to uphold. If you've been to OSCON, YAPC, etc. you've probably seen him speak and possibly met him. He's not some random dude trying to cash in on this new-fangled Internet thing.
[edit] I mean human-generated writing, of course. . .
So, that's my blog post. The "Buy a Kindle!" links were very much a last-minute addition. My thought process was really more one of "It'd be nice to steer more cash away from this vendor who pissed me off." The "Oh. There is delicious irony in getting the $100 I was 'owed' by referring people away from B&N" thought came embarrassingly late.
My intent in ranting about B&N's poor customer service was to shame them into fixing it or losing customers.
By a strict interpretation of your words, yes, I totally realized that my blog post might get attention and decided to capitalize on it. I don't expect a whole lot, though. The number of Kindles people bought via links from my blog post puts the hourly rate for the time I spent on Savory and the other opensourcy Kindle hacking I did last year at about....what I'd earn working the drive-through line at Wendy's.
Who cares?? It's clearly marked, nothing deceptive about it at all. Complaining about affiliate links is becoming a cliché, like complaining about dupes.
You can clearly see the "tag=fsck-20", which means an affiliate link, just by hovering over the link.
Not to discount the OP's valid issues, but shipping and customer service problems have been evident with most every new hardware release that I can remember.
edit: plus at the end of 2009 i noticed that while the local B&N has a big Nook sales kiosk right when you walk in, staffed by a salesperson, when you go to buy a book the big Nook banners behind the sales desk have small 'sold out' banners taped across. obviously a bad sign.
I would feel insulted if, after corresponding with a company with that much effort, the result was a big fat nothing.
To me, the 100 dollars would be trivial. I have an interest in keeping a good relationship with everybody, even companies. It doesn't feel good for a situation to have an outcome like this.