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Special Requests
Ok, we admit it, customer service is not our strong point. We
think we ship a pretty nice plant, and we really want our customers to
be happy so they'll keep sending us money, but special
requests, such as shipping on a specific day, sending a message when
your order is shipped, providing tracking numbers, etc, are beyond our
capabilities. Shipping season here is total mayhem.
Hundreds of orders and thousands of plants go through here every week
in the spring,
on what is essentially an assembly line of sorts.
I like to pretend that I do everything around here,
but I have to admit that I occasionally get some help. When we
process your order, someone enters the order in the computer, later
someone pulls the plants, someone else checks them, another person
wraps them, someone else boxes them, and finally, another person
processes the shipment for UPS or hauls them to the Post Office. Each
order is passed from person to person, and trying to keep track of an
individual order is beyond our level of competence. If you order
during the winter, it may be months between order entry and shipment,
in the summer it may be days, or even hours. It all goes like
clockwork, except when it doesn't.
One thing I have learned over the many years we have
been doing this, is that any time we promise to do something special,
it doesn't get done. It's not that we don't care, its just that
at the end of the day, after the UPS truck has left, when we finally have a minute to sit down and
relax, we look over at the packing bench and there's that order that
we promised to get out that day. We know a phone call is coming, a
customer is mad, we're embarrassed, and all we can do is try to think
up some lie to try to explain why it wasn't really our fault.
We have even less control over UPS. Try telling the
people in your local distributions center that
it's important that your package be delivered by Wednesday.
We accept our
limitations, and we try not to promise anything we can't do. We just hate it when people get mad at us, so we do our
best. But please don't ask us to call you when we ship your plants or
make sure we ship them on Monday.
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