In Praise of Employees with Brains

For the past two months or so, I've been ordering my groceries from Peapod. Love the prices. Love the selection, but I've had routine problems with delivery. The past two times, the delivery was made an hour beyond the two- or three-hour time slot. It took phone calls to figure out where my delivery was. Both times I was given a $10 credit, which I have to say I'll take, but that's not the point. During the last call with customer service, I asked the rep if there's one time slot or one day that's better than another as I am flexible as to when I get the delivery.

This was like asking for the impossible. Oh no, there's no difference -- they're all the same -- this of course was just an anomaly and we really care and are on time.

No, you're not.

So today I was getting a delivery between 4 pm and 6 pm. It's Tuesday. The driver called me at 3:45 asking if he could come early. He was a nice guy and I asked him the same question about one slot over another.

 



He thinks about it... and cocks his head... and his brain starts working and he tells me to not do Sundays as there are two shifts on Sundays and if the morning shift runs late then the afternoon shift starts late and stays late... The last two times my slot was Sunday afternoon. So he said that a mid-week day is really better so I'll stick to Tuesdays. He also told me that it sounds odd but that traffic is sometimes worse on Sundays than during the week. So we joked about Sunday drivers.

I was thinking later that a lower level person like a driver knows reality -- at least this one did -- and gave me a logical answer.