Yesterday we received an Amazon package - another small, nondescript brown Prime box, much like any other, addressed to my husband, no return address. This in itself wasn’t surprising. Since the Pandemic, we’ve tended to exploit our Amazon Prime free-shipping privileges to buy a lot of online supplies, thereby avoiding in-person shopping. For better or worse, especially with the holidays, our Amazon purchases have increased.
But this box did not turn out to be another order of Fancy Feast cat food, hair glop, or batteries. It was an Amazon Echo Show 5 Smart Display Home device, retailing for $89 (now $44, with prices slashed since Christmas). My husband had not ordered the device, nor had I. For that matter, it contained no gift receipt or message. Now, we already have two Echo Dot devices in our home, which we use frequently, by commanding “Alexa” to play songs of our choosing from AWS. Additionally, we have four Sonos speakers, two of which have Alexa voice activation, which we also use for playing music.
An engineer by trade and natural technophile, my husband eagerly unwrapped the device and plugged it in. Surprisingly, the device showed registration to a “Megan Andersen,” whom neither of us has heard of before. My husband entered his own name instead and continued with the device setup - e.g. American English, EST timezone, location, etc. We then watched in fascination as the device circled through a buffet of choices on its display, inviting us to request the weather forecast, listen to a story about California extending its pandemic restrictions, use the voice of Samuel L. Jackson, watch a video from Panama, etc. Reasoning that we don’t have much need for the device, since we already have two Echo Dots and four Sonos speakers, my husband suggested we might use it for its clock display - maybe as an alarm clock that would wake us each morning to NPR’s Morning Edition.
However, as we ran through the list of people who might have sent it to us, even texting a couple of them, who confirmed they weren’t the senders, we began to feel a little uneasy. When I noticed the display also included a video camera, we decided to turn off the camera and ultimately unplug the device. Finally, my husband “chatted” online with Amazon Customer Service, who claimed that the device was a gift from someone, placed on December 17th, but due to confidentiality reasons, they couldn’t identify the sender. They assured my husband they would email the sender, asking him or her to contact us, so we could thank him/her for the gift. Meanwhile, he searched his Amazon order history to confirm the device hadn’t been ordered from his account.
Ten or fifteen minutes later, my husband received an email from Amazon Customer Service, beginning “Dear Megan..” It went on to request that the mysterious Megan identify herself to us so we could properly thank her for the gift. Then my husband received another email from Amazon Customer Service, this one addressed to him, indicating that the sender had been contacted via email. As if that wasn’t strange enough… I immediately wondered why the first email had gone to my husband. He assumed he had been copied on the email, but if Amazon wanted to protect the person’s privacy, why had he been copied on an email that identified the sender’s first name?
He returned to the “chat session” with Amazon Customer Service, asking if the sender was indeed one Megan Andersen and asking Amazon to name the city from which the gift was ordered/placed. Amazon Customer Service confirmed that the sender was Megan Andersen (a pseudonym, we wondered?), but again, due to confidentiality reasons, would not name the sender’s location. They also offered to return the gift and give us a credit of $5 for our “inconvenience.”
Separately, my husband trolled linkedIn and Facebook for anyone with the name of Megan Andersen or first name Megan he might know, and came up short. In parallel, I used voice activation to request Alexa to provide our notifications, just to check if this package was on the radar as one of our orders (it wasn’t). But to my great surprise, Alexa added, for the first time ever, “I don’t recognize your voice. What is your name?” (I didn’t reply).
After running through the possible scenarios of who this mysterious person could be, how they obtained our name and address, and why they would send us something, I thought of one plausible explanation: The sender was Amazon. A case of truth stranger than fiction? Disclaimer: Yes, I’m a fiction writer, but I dabble in historical and contemporary fiction, not sci-fi, dystopian literature, mystery, or fantasy. In my mind, this explanation clicked. First, that would explain why the email account associated with the mysterious sender was my husband’s own email address and therefore why he received the email addressed, “Dear Megan.” Second, it would explain why Amazon Customer Service (who I’m sure knew nothing of what had truly happened) was nonetheless authorized to offer us a credit for our inconvenience. (For receiving an unwanted gift? Really?)
Most importantly, it would fit Amazon’s crafty, somewhat unscrupulous business style and practices. Using Big Data analytics, they could target Amazon Prime customers who do a lot of online shopping via Amazon, and own Echo Dots (but not the Smart display model). By sending the device the week before Christmas, they could masquerade it as a Christmas gift, hoping the recipient would simply “accept the gift horse without looking it in the mouth.” Now, why would they do this? I can think of a few reasons:
Collect tons of marketing data about select Amazon users’ habits, specifically in communicating with the smart display model - perhaps encouraging them to become further entrenched in the Amazon eco-system
Write off (hundreds? thousands?) of these Echo models (Echo Show 5), which have since been replaced by the newer Echo Show 8, for tax purposes, or perhaps in an attempt to unnaturally prop up the product’s purported year end sales (to make it appear that more sold than not).
Who within Amazon would do this? If I had to take a wild guess, I suspect the Amazon Product Management or Marketing team of the Echo 5 was behind this. Of course, it could be my background influencing this conclusion - I’m a Senior Product Manager and Marketing Manager with nearly 30 years in the high tech industry. Or it could be I’m getting more and more paranoid. Or..it could be I really need to write something like this crazy scenario into my third novel, which will focus on a high tech startup. Even if truth isn’t stranger than fiction, this experience has given me some… great ideas.
Update 1/4/2021: Mystery explained! The Echo 5 was a gift from my husband’s new employer, HPE (Hewlett Packard Enterprise). Who would have thought? No note of explanation, but apparently the wife of an employee in his group sent the devices, on the manager’s request, to all the departmental employees. So I jumped the gun and let my imagination run wild. :) Made a cool story, anyway.