Phoeey on e-commerce

I got a gift card to a major online shopping site today. I had to change my password, since the one I thought was right no longer works. Registered, I went shopping. The major site didn’t have the album I wanted to download (Queen’s 1977 classic, News of the World), though iTunes has it. So I picked a song from the album, and went to buy it. It asked for my password, even though I had just entered it. Sigh. Then I have to check to see if it’s charging my credit card or my gift card, because it doesn’t tell me.  What happened to frictionless shopping?

A guilty confession: I am still hoping for the vision captured in those old Qwest commercials that promised we’d be able to walk into even cramped, cruddy stores and get access to the media we wanted, in Ionic or Doric. Instead, I either have to pick the friction of passwords and limited selection and downloading and burning or the friction of driving to stores and looking for things they don’t stock and coming away empty-handed. Maybe I should just be happy with what I have.