Big company or small mom & pop shop, all of us make mistakes.

This is a lesson for all of us to learn from Amazon and the Post Office:

My daughter Tiffany and her husband, 2 kids, a dog and a few cats live out of town.  Her birthday was Saturday and I used Amazon to send her a couple of gifts.  The book I ordered was on her Amazon wish list, and I added a surprise Starbucks gift card to the order.  Everything was supposed to arrive Thursday the 10th, 2 days before her birthday.

Friday night, I’m chatting with her on Facebook asking if her book arrived and it hadn’t.  I checked my Amazon account and the order and noticed something was screwy, but it also said it should be delivered by Saturday.

Wrong.

Tiff and I do some investigative work and we find out the mailman messed up and sent her book back to Amazon.  The post office apologized.  Imagine that. An, “I’m sorry,” from the “government”.  Okay, I know, the U.S.P.S. is a hybrid-government organization and it was really a person who works for them who apologized, but that was good enough for us.

Except, we are still missing a book that I paid to have delivered and I can’t find a way to remedy the situation with Amazon.

contact

I press the Contact Us button, decide to try the chat option and in 10 easy minutes another order for the book is placed and her book is on its way.  Late, but that wasn’t Amazons fault.

Lessons learned:

  1. Own up to mistakes and apologize.  (Thanks USPS Mail Carrier,)
  2. Even if you had nothing to do with the mistake, do what you can to fix it.  (Thanks Amazon.)

Back to the question, How do you handle screw ups?