Vintage anniversary sale at Powells

I saw this and ordered three books from them, and the third one appeared on the checkout screen as free, but when I got the shipped notice last night, they left it out:

PARTIAL NOTICE -- One or more of the items in your order is unavailable at this 
time.  We apologize for this inconvenience.  To compensate, we've shipped the 
available items at a reduced rate.  If your original order qualified for free 
shipping, the order has been shipped free of charge.
You have -not- been charged for the missing items. Please note that the
unavailable titles have not been placed on back order, so at this time
your order is effectively closed.

bastards. The Big Sleep is unavailable in trade paperback?? even if it is, they should be shipping it to me when they get it, instead of just closing my order. how have other people's experiences with Powell's been? I ordered from them once years ago and that went fine...

I order from them once or twice a month. They are slower than Amazon, but I like that they are real book people, not just a huge retail site. Their site has lots of reviews and recommendations. I've had the occasional order glitch such as the one you describe above. I think their back order system is screwy, too. They've dropped books from my orders without asking me first what I wanted to do. Another nice thing is you can call Powells and get a person to help with a problem, should you so desire.

Yeah, see, it's a real store, so sometimes you make an order, and before they fill the order, the book is bought by a real person. Their prices aren't totally automatic either -- if you go through the used copies of some book, the prices will be different, sometimes because of quality, sometimes just because they were priced by different people. So it probably makes things much easier for them to just cancel that part of the order.

Since they reduce your shipping if it's not available (and keep it free if you had ordered enough for it to be free), it seems fair. And they do warn you about it on the site (though you might need to read closely for this).

Anyway, all my Powells encounters are in-person. But the fact that you can search their catalog to see which branch to go to is sweet, and their "remainders" have been legendarily wonderful.

I sent them an email explaining what happened and asking them to address it. I'm sure there's a good reason why they couldn't fill my order, but I do expect them to let me choose a free vintage paperbook as that's the sale they're advertising -- buy 2, get 1 free.

Oh, is that what happened? They didn't have your free Vintage? That makes sense then.

I'm impressed, they already sent me a nice email apologizing and they're sending me a copy for free.