competence?

Where I live it is necessary to drive to get pretty much everywhere. The road we live on is very busy, so sometimes I feel like I'm taking my life in my hands just to get our mail out of the mailbox across the road. Thankfully, our driveway is a bit long, so the house is a bit out of the way of traffic. This means there is a lot to shovel after a snowstorm, and what it also means is it is a pain to get to the store. The very closest store to us is a convenience store, but it doesn't carry much of anything I need, so it's not really convenient - and therefore it doesn't really count. The closest real store is about a ten minute drive away.
As a result I keep an ongoing list of what I need, so when I do drive to the store I won't forget something. There is nothing quite like driving ten minutes to the store, walking around and picking stuff up, then ten minutes back home, only to discover that I didn't pick up X, Y or Z. Not to mention that my sons are not big fans of shopping - unless it involves toys.
Fortunately, it is less than ten minutes to drive to my local post office. Mail order is a very good thing! I have become extremely fond of shopping online. As long as the shipping charges are reasonable and I can get a good price for something I need, I will no longer drive any further than the post office to get it. Usually this works out extremely well.
Lots of people I talk to (not online ;-) still seem to be very hesitant to shop online - in fact my own mother still does not have internet at her house. I got over that hesitation quite a few years ago now. I bank online, browse online and have purchased everything from clothes to plane tickets online, and have researched and booked quite a few vacations online too. On the whole, I have had very few problems and even some very pleasant surprises along the way. The winter coat I got from Lands End a year or so ago had the zipper fail. I was so disappointed at first, but then I checked online and they still had the same style available. I contacted them through their website. Lands End guarantees their products - and they told me I could return it and have it replaced. All I had to do was pay for shipping. OK, so far so good, and I sent the coat back to them. Well, I am happy to say they replaced it no problem - within a couple of weeks. I was delighted...but the thing is the price for that particular coat actually went down - so get this: Lands End sent me a check for the difference between what I paid and the new lower price of the coat! I got the new coat and a refund! The refund was about $20 more than what I had paid for shipping the coat back to them. Is that great or what?!?!?! Needless to say I'm very impressed with Lands End customer service. I have also had excellent experiences with LL Bean - just in case you are wondering where I shop.
I have tried other shopping services with less successs. Just over a year ago I got a phone call from a company that delivers groceries - boxed stuff, canned goods, paper products, meat (frozen) and other frozen food. I figured if there is another way I can make even fewer trips to the store, I'm all for it, so I decided to give it a try. Last year it worked out reasonably well. The people we dealt with were very pleasant and the cost seemed OK, quality was very good - and we are very fussy about our meat. Ah, but sadly the good part of this story ends there. This year, ownership and management of the company have changed, and not for the better I might add. They called us repeatedly to place a new order for this year - I was annoyed with the number of calls we received. Needless to say we had to wait until we had enough room in our freezer to make room for a new order. When we did indicate we were ready we dealt with the same person who came to our place to put together our order, so that part was fine. Beyond that though, things have been a mess this time around. The delivery people brought the wrong order - I got such a creepy feeling when I realized that the boxes I was opening were someone else's food.... Then when the delivery guys finally showed up with the correct order a couple of hours later, I discovered that quite a few items were still wrong, some things were missing, and that they had also substituted lower quality items than what we ordered. They are supposed to fix any problems right away. After several phone calls back and forth with various people at this company, and about a months's time a delivery truck is supposed to show up this afternoon with 'part one' of the corrections to our order. Hopefully at some point this mess will get straightened out, but I am pretty sure I will not deal with this company again. It's not saving me any time, and after all this trouble I would be fine with going to the store and picking up the correct stuff myself! The current view seems to be that change is seen as a good thing - continuous improvement and all that. In this particular case though, change was not a good thing for this company.
Oh how I wish there was a Garden Grocer here! In Orlando, when we go to DisneyWorld there is this delightful online grocery service I have used numerous times to place grocery orders online. Their service is impeccable, and reasonably priced too.
I guess I'm also not as big a fan of shopping and dealing with things over the phone compared to dealing with things online.
Maybe it's too much to ask for everyone to be competent.