Melville House Books

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s Kristen Millares Bolt visits the Amazon.comdistribution center in Fernley, Nevada, along with Jeffrey Wilke, the company’s senior vice president of worldwide operations, and finds ” thousands of employees are working feverishly in round-the-clock shifts to meet the Christmas-list demands of millions of holiday shoppers in the retail season’s busiest hours.” But in her report, Bolt notes that despite appearances at the distribution center, Amazon’s website itself “has turned away the potential revenue of crucial shopping days with its share of problems.” Mark Anderson, the “highly respected” publisher of the Strategic News Service‘s newsletter, tells Bolt, “The repeated problems I had on Amazon’s Web site while trying to do my Christmas shopping indicated to me that their system was deeply broken, and that the problems were not caused by high traffic on the site.” And Bolt reports a customer contacted her newspaper to report that she “may have seen another customer’s order information.” Echoing the words of company spokesman Craig Berman, who angered critics and analysts earlier with earlier denials of widely reported problems (see yesterday’s MobyLives digest), v.p. Wilkes tells Bolt, “The site is complex, and sometimes stuff happens.” Says Anderson, “Shame on them.”

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.