Deliveries

While our mail, such as it is these days, hopefully gets placed in the post office box with our assigned number, judging from the amount of incorrectly delivered bumf we hand back, one can obviously not count on it.

There seems to be not much you can count on these days, except unending bad news.

(All the more reason to appreciate what we have while we’ve still got it!)

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Pet food deliveries, however, come to the house courtesy of Fedex.

At least they usually do. Occasionally it seems that our boxes end up in the care of a substitute driver whose enthusiasm for the job is a little lacking. He apparently gets bored with the task, or perhaps being unfamiliar with the route, he runs short of time.

So our shipment gets dumped up by the state route near those post boxes, or at the end of our road. Once, they got delivered to someone else altogether.

We are hoping for a delivery today or the squirrels and birds may find themselves on short rations. However with all these piles of snow about, we are not counting on the boxes coming to the doorstep. And who could complain? At the best of times, delivery work is hard.

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All of that is a long way around to mentioning that we buy much of our cat and bird food from a company called Chewy. When I was fostering, we needed large quantities of food which made purchasing in bulk expedient.

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Perhaps now that our cat population is so reduced, we might revert to purchasing their food locally, but even in the small amounts we now buy, there is a saving and the fact is, I feel quite loyal to the company.

The few times there has been a problem with a damaged box or a missing shipment, Chewy has always responded promptly with replacements without ever requesting evidence.

Good prices and reliable service are no doubt the most important factors in choosing who you do business with but this company goes an extra step.

Online I filled out a profile for each of the cats and recently I updated a couple of them, indicating that we had lost Penny and Sophia.

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The other day a small box arrived in the mail containing two memorial stones.

Another time, I received a small painting of one of the cats done from a profile photo.

I also get birthday cards from the Chewy customer service team.

The items themselves are unimportant. It’s the effort that goes into them that counts and the message they carry, that this is a company that cares enough about its customers to invest in such an inspired team.

It is more than good marketing. It has heart.

They call themselves the Chewy WOW Team. I wanted to thank them for the memorials and in searching for a contact, discovered that they have a Facebook page where I read other stories similar to my own.

One Chewy customer lost her pet and called to ask if she could return leftover food for a refund to help defray medical and cremation costs. She was issued an immediate refund and was told just to donate the food to a local shelter. Next day she received a bouquet of flowers from the company with a sympathy card.

It is rare these days to come across a company that makes you feel good and the cynic in me fears that it cannot last. Yet I do hope that it will.

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An email just now announced that our delivery had arrived and as there was no sign of it anywhere in sight, we jumped in the car and drove down the hill.

There it was leaning against the old sugar maple at the end of the road.

No need for short rations – yet.

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