HRoth - 2:25 pm on Jul 15, 2008 (gmt 0)

I do get customers who let me know that if I haven't shipped by X amount of days, they will take their custom elsewhere or they email to cancel their order. I don't hesitate to tell them that's fine with me. I have on my website that it can take me 2 weeks to process an order because I make a lot of the things I sell. Even so, I get things out earlier than that. This weekend I got a really angry email from someone who wanted to know where her order was--she had ordered it 5 days previously, and I sure did charge her card quickly! Like I was some kind of skeev. In fact, the card hadn't been charged yet, and I was in the process of printing out mailing labels including hers when I got this email. It made me mad. I responded with an email that was a bit hotter than I would ordinarily write explaining that if she wanted some crap made in a Chinese sweatshop, she could rely on fast shipping from Acme Widgets Co., etc.; quality takes time. After I sent it, of course, I was wishing I hadn't been so sharp. Then yesterday she emailed with an apology.

Sometimes people just forget they are dealing with another human being instead of a thing. I have been thinking about ways to emphasize the humanness of my biz as a response to that but also as a way to make the shopping feel more real, more like people are in an actual small shop instead of dealing with some faceless entity.