Category: Economy

in praise of chewy

whbeebe1 Comment

I have been ordering my pet supplies (food) from Chewy ( https://www.chewy.com/ ) for a while now, prompted by the pandemic lock down last year as well as hearing good things from other pet owners I know who order pet supplies from Chewy. For a while I had a hard time being consistent as I usually ordered nearly everything online from Amazon out of habit. When I did order my supplies from Chewy they would sometimes take a while to reach me.

Then Amazon started to have a hard time getting the pet products I needed with other third-party sellers simultaneously starting to jack up the prices of pet supplies way beyond what they would normally cost; they started to gouge big time. This was the very same problem that happened with personal protective equipment, such as masks and hand cleaner, during the early months of 2020. It was outrageous behavior then, and even more so when pet supplies became the target of the gougers. That’s when I really started to look at alternative pet supply sellers including Chewy.

It turns out Chewy may have had a hard time getting supplies, but when certain items weren’t available they said so clearly, and when they came back in they sold them for the regular price until they ran out again. I know, I went through some of that. That honest behavior cemented me as a repeat Chewy customer.

Lately my Chewy experiences have gotten even better. Since the first of this year my Chewy orders have been arriving in a very short period of time. Chewy always seems to tell me two to four business days, which I find quite reasonable. I make sure to place my orders either Sunday or Monday so that they get to me no later than the following Thursday. But something positive is happening at Chewy’s shipping, because the orders are coming in two days, or even less. Yesterday I put in an order, and the order arrived today. My other orders have taken no longer than two days, which equals Amazon, of not beats them. But today’s order delivery was absolutely outstanding.

It just seems like buying from Chewy for all my little guys and gals is getting better and better. If you don’t buy pet supplies from Chewy’s already, I think you should give them a try.

sparse shelves at a publix

whbeebe
Figure 1: A frozen food section at a local Publix

I took this Tuesday of last week at a local Publix. I photographed this because I’ve noticed that the shelves all around the store have holes in them where there is no stock, while other shelves had limited stock spread across the front and pulled forward. I don’t know why at this time a major grocery store like Publix would be having stock issues. The store shelves were like this in 2020, during the height of the first phase of the pandemic due to panic buying. This time, it doesn’t feel like panic buying has set back in again. It just feels like the system that supplies us our groceries is breaking down a bit. It tends to stir the apprehension.

Commentary on the Photo

This photo was taken with my iPhone 11 Pro’s wide angle lens. It came “straight out of the camera” with no post processing whatsoever. The barrel distortion, especially in the outer thirds, is horrible. I haven’t seen anything this bad since I first started with interchangeable lens film photography back in the mid-1970s. I know that distortion like this can be corrected in-camera because my Olympus Micro Four Thirds cameras do it (as does the few Panasonic bodies I also own). Fortunately the regular and telephoto lenses produce much better photographs. But the wide angle? I use it only when it’s absolutely necessary, and I have no other choice because it’s all I have at the time. I’ve read too many times that the best camera is the one you have with you. Not if the camera you have with you is an iPhone 11 Pro using its wide angle lens.