By Esther C. Baird
First published in the Chronicle & Transcript Sep 23, 2020
Like everyone out there, we do a lot of our shopping online these days. It’s faster, easier and pandemic-friendly. Unless we’re trying to get back-to-school clothes for teenagers who must try things on or their lives will be ruined. Fortunately, that’s allowed in a few stores. Unfortunately, these stores are the ones that smell like an incense candle fell into a vat of cheap body spray — a new reason to be thankful for our masks.
But I digress, my point is that we buy most of our stuff online.
Now, you may or may not know (or care) that the water bottle scene is an ever shifting target. Just when you buy the hippest water bottle for your child, the industry reinvents itself and nothing will ever be the same again because there is your offspring: with an old water bottle — clearly killing turtles, off-gassing cancer fumes and generally not being cool.
These days the bottle du jour is a metallic one with a snazzy double layered wall that makes your water doubly wet. They come in every color under the sun and weigh about 500 pounds. If you fling one into the car, you are likely to knock someone unconscious or at least shatter a window.
But our eldest decided she wanted to buy one and she found a sale online. Fine. It was her money, her ridiculous water bottle that did what the many zillions of other water bottles we already owned did, namely: it held water.
But then it came, and it wasn’t quite right. Yes, it was heavy, and yes it was teal, her chosen color. But it was a harsh blue teal instead of the softer, minty teal she’d ordered. Plus the lid was slightly too narrow and the logo was close, but wrong.
Oh and also, the package came from China.
I don’t mean there was a small ‘made in China’ sticker on it, but actually the mail had Chinese stamps on it, from the country of China, and all the packaging was in … Chinese.
She’d been scammed.
We went back into her browser history and figured out that while she had begun on the real site, she’d been misdirected to a fake site for payment. We were able to use that proof to generate a fraud report from the real water bottle company and our bank eventually, and thankfully, returned her money.
“Well you won’t make that mistake again!” I said to my daughter knowingly. “Now you’ll always check and double check the URL each time. You know what they say, ’if it seems too good to be true … ”
I didn’t finish, since that would be obnoxious.
It was an important lesson for her to learn and I crossed ‘teach about internet scams’ off my parenting list. So young and impressionable. Big sales and flashy ads were an enticing, but obvious, ploy.
Which reminds me, really it’s rather remarkable, you won’t even believe this, but my favorite brand of shoes went on sale later in the summer.
“It’s incredible!” I exclaimed. “I mean they are on a really deep sale.”
I normally buy my shoes at Marshall’s, but I’ve splurged on this one brand because they exist in that magical world where both comfort and style coexist.
And here the price was — so low! New shoes! On sale! I couldn’t wait to wear them.
Except … oh, Regular Reader, you see where this is going. My shoes came. From China. With Chinese stamps. In a Chinese bag. The logo was off center by just a bit and the soles were black instead of the trademark gray with a blue stripe. Plus the glue holding them together was visible and sloppy and utterly disappointing.
In my case, the real shoe company wasn’t issuing letters of fraud. Their position being, I assume: Duh! Don’t buy fakes!
My husband and daughter stared at me.
“You have to check and double check the URL.” My husband said in exasperation. My daughter sighed, “If it seems too good to be true …”
She trailed off, you know, not wanting to be obnoxious.
OK, then. Good lesson. Sometimes you can really hammer a point home by demonstrating what not to do. (Even after that point has been hammered once already — who’s counting?) Shopping online can be dangerous. Shopping during a pandemic is possibly, doubly so.
But my real takeaway is that parenting is full of shining proud moments when you can show your kids what real-life dumb mistakes look like … and how to spot the fakes.