All a man in California wanted from Amazon was some Northern Quilted toilet paper. But besides the simple paper product, he ended up saddled with an Amazon driver's broken-down Sprinter van — and Amazon won't splurge to take it away.
The headache started four days ago, when the Amazon driver who dropped off the goods was still in his driveway 15 minutes later, "struggling to get it out of his driveway," according to Vice. The property owner, who goes by the pseudonym "Captain Lou" for the article, asked the driver if there was a problem, and the driver said the van had been on the fritz all day.
From Vice:
About an hour later, Lou left to pick up his daughter from a football game and noticed the van was still in his driveway. The driver was gone, and so were all the other packages. …
Saturday morning Lou's daughter came into his room and told him that the truck had turned around in the middle of the night. "So sure enough, about 8 o'clock in the morning, somebody came and started the truck and drove it out into the street," Lou said. "Apparently it was not capable of going anywhere, so they just put it right back into my driveway—but 180 degrees from where it was the night before."
Whoever turned the truck around wasn't as considerate as the first driver and Lou couldn't quite squeeze his own car down the driveway after the repositioning. "So I went and opened the door to the truck, and sure enough the keys are in the truck and I just moved it over about five feet," he said.
Trying to resolve the abandoned van issue with Amazon has been a bureaucratic nightmare. Customer service offered a form asking him to check the box that indicated his problem. But there wasn't a box for abandoned delivery trucks. He then finally got a hold of a "befuddled offshore agent," who was polite but way out of his league, ending the call with nothing accomplished. Eventually Amazon told him to just tow it, but Lou decided it's not his responsibility to call and get it towed, and besides, they now need to first donate $100 (as per last Twitter post below) to a food bank for every day the van sits on his property.
And thus, an Amazon van–Amazon customer showdown has begun.
