life and puppies

In pretty stark contrast to my experience with West Elm last week was the not-unexpected, but nonetheless outstanding, experience I had with Crate and Barrel, which seems intent on just killing it customer-service-wise. You see, it was the second night of Hanukkah when I realized that we didn’t have any candles to light the menorah. AO didn’t seem particularly troubled by this, but Bear likes that menorah so I thought I should at least try to remedy the situation. AO informed me that the candles are expensive, but I found these guys for under $8, which was even less than Amazon was charging. If it’s less than Amazon is charging it is de facto a good deal. Without doing the math, I assume 45 candles is what you need to get you through one Hanukkah season. But because I’m a sucker for free shipping, and I didn’t want to get caught candle-less in the future, I put in an order for seven boxes. That’s right. SEVEN BOXES. Because there’s a C&B in Milwaukee and the HQ is in Chicago, we usually get C&B orders within about two days. I figured we’d be lighting the menorah by Wednesday. Well, Wednesday came and went without a candle delivery and, when I checked in on the order on Thursday, C&B was telling me that they hadn’t even shipped yet. Eeks! So, I did what any good, non-Jew would do and I contacted the store by live chat to see if I could maybe go ahead and cancel the order because I really didn’t want 315 blue ombre candles to arrive after Hanukkah. But guess what C&B did? They said, “Hey weirdo, it’s a crazy time of year so you don’t always get your packages as soon as you normally would (except they didn’t say that part at all and instead just said the next part), but how would you like us to just upgrade you to overnight shipping? You’ll get those candles tomorrow.” And that’s just what they did. We got seven boxes of candles overnight-ed to us so that we could light that menorah for the three remaining nights of Hanukkah! And what did we do!?

We remembered to light it one of those three nights. But, now we have lots and lots of candles for several Hanukkahs to come. Thanks again, Crate and Barrel. It was a Hanukkah miracle.