Macy's Website Asks You To "Wait Here A Few Moments While Other Shoppers Finish Up" - Consumerist Comments

Macy's Website Asks You To "Wait Here A Few Moments While Other Shoppers Finish Up"

mungojerry — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 01:11:46 EST

@Rhazlett - What an embarrassment that IT department is for Macy's. During the peak shopping season of the year no less!

mungojerry

Macy's Website Asks You To "Wait Here A Few Moments While Other Shoppers Finish Up"

RHazlett — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 22:19:54 EST

So, my buddy works in the back office of Macy's somewhere and I told him about this error a few months ago. He go the same error today on his own. Come to find out that the site was down for about 6 hrs and was showing this message and not one person at Macy's knew about it. Geez, I work for a non-profit and if the server goes down in the middle of the night, you better believe that about 5 blackberries are ringing off the hook that minute. Servers are cheap, new customers aren't.

RHazlett

Macy's Website Asks You To "Wait Here A Few Moments While Other Shoppers Finish Up"

fkarayan — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 20:31:02 EST

Can anybody say: Denial of service attack?

fkarayan

Macy's Website Asks You To "Wait Here A Few Moments While Other Shoppers Finish Up"

Rando — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 18:25:07 EST

@RottNDude: nope because people just call in and order which ties up lines...prob cost more

Rando

Macy's Website Asks You To "Wait Here A Few Moments While Other Shoppers Finish Up"

Rando — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 18:23:18 EST

It's actually been doing this for months...and it doesn't put you in line at all. It redirects you to the home page after 5 seconds, forgetting everything you were trying to do.

Rando

Macy's Website Asks You To "Wait Here A Few Moments While Other Shoppers Finish Up"

GothamGal — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 17:44:41 EST

I have gotten that page for over an hour while I was working in another tab. That's hilarious! Lines online, I love the new concept.

GothamGal

Macy's Website Asks You To "Wait Here A Few Moments While Other Shoppers Finish Up"

erratapage — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 17:30:40 EST

It happened to me, too. Just as I was looking at a really cute dress! GRRRRRR...

erratapage

Macy's Website Asks You To "Wait Here A Few Moments While Other Shoppers Finish Up"

halloweenjack — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 17:29:26 EST

To: Macy's, a.k.a. "America's Department Store"
From: America
Re: Your Shit

Get it together, kthxbye

halloweenjack

Macy's Website Asks You To "Wait Here A Few Moments While Other Shoppers Finish Up"

aaron8301 — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 17:16:30 EST

I'm getting the exact same page, and I've noticed that it does indeed auto-refresh every ten seconds.

Booo Macy's.

aaron8301

Macy's Website Asks You To "Wait Here A Few Moments While Other Shoppers Finish Up"

jeff303 — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 17:08:28 EST

@MFfan310: It's not just servers. It's bandwidth, real estate for the servers, maintenance, etc.

jeff303

Macy's Website Asks You To "Wait Here A Few Moments While Other Shoppers Finish Up"

Angiol — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 16:59:41 EST

@swalve: I'm from the Midwest, and "finish up" is perfectly legitimate here.

Angiol

Macy's Website Asks You To "Wait Here A Few Moments While Other Shoppers Finish Up"

swalve — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 15:22:26 EST

@MFfan310: Maybe it isn't. Ever hear of diminishing returns?

You don't know what the state of their IT infrastructure is.

swalve

Macy's Website Asks You To "Wait Here A Few Moments While Other Shoppers Finish Up"

SoFlaSnowMan — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 15:20:08 EST

Whoops -- looks like consumerist doesn't like embedded XML comments in the comment.

Take 2:

SoFlaSnowMan

Macy's Website Asks You To "Wait Here A Few Moments While Other Shoppers Finish Up"

swalve — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 15:19:32 EST

@STrRedWolf: I agree- let the people who are already there with full shopping carts ready to give them money have a good service experience. NOTHING is more maddening than doing up a batch of online shopping only to run into bad server performance when I'm done.

@savvy999: I'm not sure it is regional, but it might be "folksy" and signal a positive completion. Clean up, finish up, take up camp, sweep up, etc.

swalve

Macy's Website Asks You To "Wait Here A Few Moments While Other Shoppers Finish Up"

SoFlaSnowMan — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 15:19:09 EST

If you look at the source for this page, you see the following comment:

It has nothing to do with the server being too "crowded".

SoFlaSnowMan

Macy's Website Asks You To "Wait Here A Few Moments While Other Shoppers Finish Up"

MFfan310 — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 15:15:48 EST

Note to Macy's: BUY MORE SERVERS!

In this age of cheap dual-core everything, more computing power for your server farms is always cheaper than lost customers. Didn't Macy's have a problem like this on Black Friday 2006, and didn't Sears have several problems like this recently?

Oh, and there's no wait at websites for JCPenney... or Kohl's... or Dillard's... or Nordstrom... and the list goes on and on. Unless the item you're looking for is a Macy's house brand exclusive, chances are that you can find it elsewhere.

MFfan310

Macy's Website Asks You To "Wait Here A Few Moments While Other Shoppers Finish Up"

formatc — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 15:05:45 EST

What a very Heisenbergian story. Nothing to help an overloaded server like a swarm of Consumeristians checking out the validity of the story.

formatc

Macy's Website Asks You To "Wait Here A Few Moments While Other Shoppers Finish Up"

comopuedeser — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 15:04:52 EST

This makes about as much sense as a bank saying they've run out of space to store your money.

comopuedeser

Macy's Website Asks You To "Wait Here A Few Moments While Other Shoppers Finish Up"

STrRedWolf — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 15:02:53 EST

@bonzombiekitty: I'm with you on the other hand. Linux boxes can monitor how much traffic they're using. A monitor program could run every 15 minutes, check, and if it's over a certian threshold, flag the web catalog to hold new users (and not give out new session ID's in those yummy browser cookies) until an all-clear's given.

On the up-side, it's not a 5xx code from the web server, and traffic that's already in there can still shop w/o suddenly being shoved out the door by that comically-fat lady who takes up a whole isle in the perfume area (and buys the stuff by the gallon). :)

In the words of the Guiness guys, "BRILLIANT!"

STrRedWolf

Macy's Website Asks You To "Wait Here A Few Moments While Other Shoppers Finish Up"

Junco — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 14:24:52 EST

Wow. I'd much prefer to see a "we are experiencing technical difficulties" statement. Instead, I feel like I'm at the mall on Black Friday.

Junco

Macy's Website Asks You To "Wait Here A Few Moments While Other Shoppers Finish Up"

bonzombiekitty — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 14:01:15 EST

On one hand, it's bad business that they don't have the correct hardware to handle the load.

On the other hand, it might actually be good business in controlling the traffic flow. They might actually be able to handle an abnormally high traffic rate, but they may be under an even abnormally higher traffic rate than could have been reasonably expected. So they had, with good foresight, made a user friendly message that reports the (unlikely) eventuality that the servers have too much traffic.

However, there is probably some other problem as you wouldn't expect these messages to last very long for EVERYONE.

bonzombiekitty

Macy's Website Asks You To "Wait Here A Few Moments While Other Shoppers Finish Up"

glitterati — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 13:49:19 EST

10 mins...still waiting...

glitterati

Macy's Website Asks You To "Wait Here A Few Moments While Other Shoppers Finish Up"

Shadowman615 — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 13:35:31 EST

That *is* kinda odd. I think it's just there instead of a "down for maintenance" page. Has anyone actually been able to get into the site after waiting on that page?

Shadowman615

Macy's Website Asks You To "Wait Here A Few Moments While Other Shoppers Finish Up"

Bladefist — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 13:29:52 EST

I am guessing this is a generic error everyone is getting. To shut down the site for some, and allow the other shoppers to continue would be a good sum of code.

Bladefist

Macy's Website Asks You To "Wait Here A Few Moments While Other Shoppers Finish Up"

rmz — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 13:26:20 EST

As a developer, it makes me cry to see that someone actually thought this was a good idea.

rmz

Macy's Website Asks You To "Wait Here A Few Moments While Other Shoppers Finish Up"

savvy999 — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 13:26:18 EST

Don't know how others may feel, but "finish up" grates on my grammar detector somehow. I think it may be technically correct, but it still seems provincial. Like the Pittsburgh-ese "redd up", or the southern "fixin' to". Why not "please wait until other shoppers finish"?

In any case, it's just a high-fallutin' 503.

savvy999

Macy's Website Asks You To "Wait Here A Few Moments While Other Shoppers Finish Up"

Buran — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 13:18:10 EST

Send 'em a letter telling 'em you went to the competition that has a website that actually works.

Buran

Macy's Website Asks You To "Wait Here A Few Moments While Other Shoppers Finish Up"

clocker — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 13:17:02 EST

The least they could do is serve coffee and show some porn while you wait.

clocker

Macy's Website Asks You To "Wait Here A Few Moments While Other Shoppers Finish Up"

selectman — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 13:14:58 EST

@RottNDude: Maybe, but it's better PR to have a human-readable "server busy" page than just a 503 Service Unavailable page or something. It's also better to assume that user demand will one day outpace capacity and plan for that eventuality.

selectman

Macy's Website Asks You To "Wait Here A Few Moments While Other Shoppers Finish Up"

darkened — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 13:06:45 EST

I think thats their generic error message for the site, or generic server overloaded message.

darkened

Macy's Website Asks You To "Wait Here A Few Moments While Other Shoppers Finish Up"

RottNDude — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 13:06:19 EST

It probably cost them more in developer manpower to implement the fancy "wait in line" page than it would have to just throw a few more servers in the farm.

RottNDude