The West Bend breadmaker I wrote about here arrived last week. It had all its mechanical parts, but for some reason it did not have the owner’s manual in the box. Dissatisfied with this, I wrote both to Amazon and to the manufacturer directly requesting one. Amazon’s only offered solution was to send me an entirely new machine, hoping, I guess, that the new one would include the manual. From its point of view this makes sense; it doesn’t want to send some picker out into the warehouse to cannibalize a product’s shipping container to get a new manual. It would rather I get the new one and send back the incomplete order.
West Bend’s customer service department, on the other hand, wrote me back the morning after I emailed them to say “We just put a manual in the mail to you.”
Based on that I was able to tell Amazon “Stop! Don’t send me the new machine!”
Today the promised manual from West Bend arrived. Congratulations to them for good prompt service to a brand new customer. I will remember that the next time I’m in the market for a kitchen appliance.
Most owner’s manuals these days are available online as pdfs. I routinely download them now, even the ones I haven’t lost yet, just because they’re much easier to find on my computer. But there’s no reason a new item shouldn’t have had one included, unless they’re routinely not including them as a matter of policy.
Oh, it’s available online. But it’s 68 pages long (22 pages in English), and I didn’t feel like using that much of MY ink to print something I should have gotten as part of the package. I wanted the original professionally-printed book.