Over a year has passed since we first landed in Lima and I am just sitting here with my sparkly pink emotional support water bottle truly wishing that it was tequila because nobody should ever have to raw dog these, let us call ’em, “life lessons”. Then again, if I were to drink every single time some absurd shit were to happen I would be a functional alcoholic sprinting towards a liver failure. So, instead of succumbing to the glorified generational alcoholism curse, let me tell you what I have to deal with on the daily.
In case you have never been in Peru, here is a quick run down: imagine that there are two giant store chains that sell multiple types of goods from a variety of stores. They have both on site locations as well as Internet stores. For the sake of this article, let us call them Crapabella and Crapley. Crapley is considered to be more expensive and offer more bougie choices when it comes to the products that it sells. I absolutely love Crapley. Crapley is love, Crapley is life. Crapabella offers more attainable items and offers a wide variety of Temu items that have been shipped here and are being resold for 5 x the price. However, have to give credit where it is due, there are often excellent discounts for hair care and household items that compete with other stores. It is a little bit rough around the edges, but there are plenty of good things. Not so great is their blatant personal data stealing and sharing with 3 other stores, but this is no Europe and GDPR is just a meaningless mush of random letters around these parts.
We had ordered from Crapabella countless times, however this was the first time we encountered a proper Peruvian delivery. Our order of three items was divided into parts and delivered in the span of a few days. The last item was a set of pillows, allegedly, coming from the Crapabella shop itself. Fantastic! First two items arrived at the speed of light, but it was the third delivery that will stay with me for a while. On the alleged delivery day I received a Whatsapp message from a random person who was claiming to represent a company that was unknown to us. He said that he needs to deliver a mattress to us and asked for our address. Not thinking much about it, I asked him if he had not mistaken the number as we had no orders for a mattress, would not be the first time when someone would try to scam us. That is when he began calling multiple times, sending voice messages and blowing my phone up. After stating yet again that we do not have any pending orders on a mattress he continued to call and harass us. This all ended with the fact that he actually did magically have our pillows (instead of the mattress that he was trying to shove down our throats) along with the delivery information, including our address. Happy to finally have this clarified, we left instructions to give the order to our front desk as Crapabella always does. Tell me why did this result into the courrier continuing to blow up my phone, taking photos and sending me photos of my personal information, including my Peruvian ID, my e-mail and our house as well as trying to fight our front desk and our neighbour who happened to be at the door? As the shitstorm progressed I made a (now looking back – an absolutely terrible) call to go downstairs to try to defuse the situation. The pillows were left at the front desk, the courrier had vanished, but STILL continued to blow up my phone. Having had enough I decided to file a complaint to Crapabella because this “service” was not okay even for a developing* third world country.
I have no idea if you, reader, have ever tried to file a complaint to a huge company and I do hope that this is not the case in other locations across the world, however in Peru, the system is intentionally set up in a way where it is almost impossible to leave a review or file a complaint in case you are wronged. Having fought with a Whatsapp AI bot for 9 times I was suddenly connected with a real person. Having explained the situation as well as adding all of the proof in the screenshot form I was told to check my e-mail as there will be an update soon. Sure enough, a ticket number landed in my inbox with a phone number that needs to be saved from which Crapabella corporate representative would call to provide an update. Few hours pass and guess what? A call from an unknown number! After picking up the call I was met with a mocking tone of voice asking me what the problem was. Being the naïve imbecile that I am, I was shocked because the last thing on the expectation list was mockery. After explaining the situation I hung up when the person started laughing. A solid thirty seconds later another call appeared on my screen, this time I was ready. Sure enough, Mr. This-Is-Peru** was calling again to tell me that I am making a problem out of nothing, does not matter that our neighbour and front desk were about to get a bruise or two. After asking him to confirm verbally that this indeed is the Crapabella standard, thanking him for his time in Spanish and calling him an animal in Russian, I hung up. My skin colour may be a pale shade of yellow, but my soul was blazing red at the time.
Normally you would think that that is the end of the story, right? Oh, but there’s more. Crapabella saga is a gift that keeps on giving, mon ami. The next day I received a Whatsapp message from yet another Falabella number asking me for the screenshot proof that I had sent to about 4 of their representatives at this point. Of course, I sent it again. Afterwards happened something that felt like a fever dream – I received a text in English. Can you imagine?!? ENGLISH!!! Promising me wild things such as receiving a survey afterwards for creating an even more detailed incident report. While I was preparing to get footage from the security camera, few hours passed and nothing came. Of course, I never received the possibility to create the incident report, it probably does not even exist.
I would honestly understand the mockery out of Crapabella corp managers had we asked for an apology, a discount or some kind of monetary compensation. All that we had asked is for them to check out the situation, talk to the employee (if he even is their employee because he did not claim to be from Crapabella) and make it so that he does not harass other people like this in the future. So much for trying to make this a safer place.
On the bright side, I learned a few new things. Most important lesson would be not to give a damn about trying to improve things here. Society as a whole is indeed rotten, lacks empathy and does not give a hoot about improving so neither should we waste our time and care on it. Time and time again over the span of this year things like this keep happening over and over again. It is just not worth it to fight for improvements to be made. The understanding that we as people, each and every single one of us, create our society and directly impact it is lost on the majority of these fools. If you ever do happen to land here for whatever reason may it be, be wiser than I am, do not waste your energy on this. Instead, make silly blog posts where you just laugh about this insane place.
*- These days the term “third world country” is not used anymore, the proper term is “a developing country”. Third world country fits as an accurate description for Peru due to the fact that nothing here is showing even a sliver of a wish to develop.
**- “This is Peru” is the most common excuse used when services and people abuse others. This is Peru, we can even beat you up and if you are a foreigner, you have 0 rights here, learn your place, gringo.
