Deathly Hallows Special Edition Story

Considering the incredible popularity of my previous post on the 6th Harry Potter book, I knew I had to post something about the 7th when I read an interesting story about its delivery at Kottke.org. Essentially, Amazon.com offered guaranteed release-date delivery:

If you qualified for guaranteed Release-Date Delivery, in the unlikely event that you don’t receive it on Saturday, July 21, we’ll refund the cost of the book. … All copies that qualified for Release-Date Delivery should be delivered by 7:00 p.m. in your time zone.

But when UPS didn’t make the deadline, they added an excuse to the tracking site:

NOTICE LEFT

They claimed that they attempted to make a delivery, but nobody was home. I wonder how many people bought the excuse and blamed themselves! Fortunately, Amazon.com did honor their refund promise. Presumably the people who received the book late get to keep the copy they got, so I wonder how much this is costing them. I guess it wasn’t too widespread, and mostly occurred in far away places scattered around the US.

Here’s the neat box they shipped in. Kind of makes me wish I’d gotten it.

I’d also posted a list of Harry Potter books long ago. Here are some recent posts from my other blogs you might find interesting:

iPhone Interference Detected Warning

Why Information Security is Hard

Run Starcraft in window