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Last night we placed an order for groceries from Whole Foods using their Amazon website. The order included alcohol, which required that I meet the delivery person at the door when he arrived in order to show him my ID. When the young man came to the door with our order, he was not wearing a face covering. As I’m a member of a demographic deemed at high risk of infection from Covid, I was understandably concerned. I resolved to notify Whole Foods the following day so they could take steps to ensure this young man isn’t making deliveries to other people minus a face covering. Little did I know that doing so would prove as time-consuming and frustrating as it turned out to be.

The following day, before calling, I first scanned the Amazon Prime website from which I had placed my grocery order the night before, looking for a phone number to call to lodge my complaint. I knew from previously having tried to make a complaint online in regards to an earlier issue that there was no means of registering online feedback on that page beyond choosing one of two checkboxes— “satisfied” and “unsatisfied.”

After circling the website several times in search of a phone number and only ending up, each time, where I started from, I called the Petaluma Whole Foods store and was told they don’t do home delivery from the Petaluma store and my delivery likely came from either the Novato store or the one in Coddingtown. I was told I could find the right number to report my issue by looking on the Amazon website where I’d placed my order. This had proved futile when I’d tried it before, I told them, as it had only led me into a feedback loop.

Determined to persevere, I then dialed the number for the Coddingtown Whole Foods in Santa Rosa, explaining my complaint to the person who answered the call. That person told me their deliveries were managed by an independent contractor and provided me with a number for the contractor—888-280-4331.

I called that number, repeating my story, and was informed they, too, were unable to handle my complaint, and that I needed to call Whole Foods Customer Care at 844-936-8255. Interestingly, that person offered to provide me either a “replacement or refund” to compensate for my ‘inconvenience.’ When I asked him exactly what that would look like, he didn’t seem to grasp the true nature of my question, instead only repeating his offer. I pointed out that, while it was generous of him to make me such an offer, I failed to see how accepting his offer would lead to correcting the behavior of the lax delivery person in order to protect others going forward.

I thanked him for his time and then dialed the number he had given me to speak with Whole Foods Customer Care—844-936-8255, where I was connected to someone named ‘Michael.’ I explained my issue to Michael, who told me he was unable to help me and that I needed to take up my issue with Customer Service at Amazon Prime Now. I asked him for the phone number to reach them and he said he couldn’t give me a number for Amazon Prime Now, saying I could find it on the Amazon website. I told Michael I had tried repeatedly to find a phone number on the Amazon website without success. When he still refused to provide me a number to call, I asked to speak to his supervisor but he refused to do so, despite several attempts to get him to comply. As I hung up the phone, my thoughts were teeming with unflattering pejoratives I felt like aiming at Amazon’s corporate management, if only Amazon corporate management provided a number for the airing of such grievances.  

It then occurred to me that I wasn’t certain the website I had placed my order from was the same website as Amazon Prime Now, so I navigated to it in hopes Michael was correct and I might finally find an opportunity to make my displeasure known to someone who could, hopefully, correct things such that the person who delivered my order would not needlessly place others at risk. Here’s how that went:

Primenow.amazon.com/storefront>Help>Contact Us>Call customer Service>Have Us Call You Right Now> (enter #) >Call Me Now

By following that thread, I received a phone call a short time later from a nice young woman named “Jenny,” who listened attentively to my account and offered assurances the matter would be forwarded to the proper channels so the delivery person would be told he needs to wear a mask and gloves in future. Jenny evinced an appropriate level of dismay upon hearing of the byzantine course of events I described in my crusade to report my concerns to an actual person.  The empathetic manner in which she handled my grievance went considerable distance toward the redemption of my faith in the prospect of treading those waters in the future.

Interestingly, I learned from Jenny that the number I had dialed to reach the aforementioned ‘Michael’—the young man who had told me he could not help me but refused to provide me a number to call to reach the mysterious Whole Foods department of ‘Customer Care’—was the same number one would dial to reach her.  Jenny, too, seemed to find that information interesting.

Jenny also confirmed that the Amazon Prime Now site is indeed not the same as the site from which I had placed my order but she explained that I could have reached her from there too by navigating to the “Whole Foods Market” logo, presented in green letters, at the top left of the home page, and accessing the drop-down menu beneath it. Had I done so, it would have revealed an option to click on ‘customer service,’ from which I could have either initiated a chat or selected the option of having them call me. Good information for the future!

For me, however, as I struggled in vain yesterday to find a way, any way, to reach a human being at Whole Foods, the obscurity in which the secret location of the link I sought was shrouded was strangely reminiscent of the location of an equally important piece of information sought by Arthur Dent in the ‘Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,’ which he deftly described as “on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’”—an apt analogy for “We Don’t Want You To Bother Us.”

But then, I guess if the business of dealing with Amazon’s customer complaints was made more user-friendly, Jeff Bezos’ wouldn’t be able to accrue his unconscionable wealth at such a breakneck speed. Poor fellow!

Tim Konrad

2020.10.11