I suppose this is as frustrating for Bachmann, trying to establish a brand/product line name, as it is for the poor hobbiest scrounging the internet for the odd piece of track, or in this case, 'Street.
Despite a large inventory of 'Streets track, when I tallied up what I had against what I need to complete my current 'Streets project, I found I need quite a few of various types of track - straights, transition pieces, curve to curve straights, etc., etc. Having completed the list of what I needed, what I thought would take maybe ten minutes on a single website oo buy took over two hours because:
- Its in short supply - some items like transition pieces, etc., are hard to find
- I never imagined so many ways to spell "E-Z Street." The official name, at least as in the WBB catalog, is E-Z Street -- one dash, one space, singular not plural. Easy to remember, particularly for vendors, you would think, given that Bachmann has long had E-Z Track, which is spelled in the same manner. But no, in the course of two hours of hopping around the internet and using google and Bing, etc., I ran into variations including EZStreet, EZStreets, EZ Street, EZ Streets, EZ-Streets, EZ-Street, E-Z Streets, E-Z-Streets and even Easy Street. I also found a couple of items using "Super" instead of "EZ." Generally, Google and Bing are smart enough to figure out minor mis-spellings and fetch hits anyway but they often list anything not exactly like my spelling or mis-spelling farther down the page. Still, I had the most success only when I started deliberately mis-spelling the name in the various "wrong" versions above.
The real problems began when I got to any internet retailer's own site. I found two packs of 10" straight on Amazon Prime withmy first google search, but Amazon's own site search enginethen told me it had nothing else in EZ Street. Turns out it had a lot, but some was listed under and would only come up with various mis-spellings, and I eventually discovered tha Amazon had most of what I needed, much of it through associates that would only come up when I searched its site for spellings as specific as "Williams by Bachmann E-Z Street" or some other \slight variations of that. One popular internet model RRing site brought up different sets of products for E-Z Street and EZ-Street, but asking for either would only get a partial list of items the store had clearly entered into its database with that mis-spelling.
Anyway, after two hours of tedium, and trying every combination, I managed to buy everything on my list.
