It’s a lovefest by mail, and I wasn’t prepared for it.
Online sellers seem to be in desperate competition for five-star reviews, and it shows.
It all started when I discovered an app for buying secondhand clothes. It’s one you’ve probably heard of, and I had heard of it before, but I hadn’t used it until recently.
I discovered that this app was a great place to find old but never-worn clothes that I like that you just can’t find in stores anymore (at least, the stores within driving distance that I go to), such as boiled wool or merino wool sweaters, and plain, tailored cotton button-up shirts.
In fact, in looking through the offerings on this app, I’ve come to realize that my fashion sense is stuck in the 1990s or even 1980s. Those wonderful wool sweaters I love are only found by brands such as Tally-Ho and listed as vintage.
This app has a catch, a psychological trick, which worked on me (as I’m sure works on many) until I finally put a stop to myself: a one-cp purchase. The app stores your payment information, so when you see something you like, you can get it right away without having to hunt for your pocketbook and get out your bank card.
It has algorithms so that any time you open it, you see new listings of the stuff you’ve been buying or looking at.
And then – whoa! How the sellers love-bomb you.
Items arrive directly from the people selling them, not from the company. Most of the items arrive wrapped in pretty tissue paper, or sealed in impressive looking plastic bags. Many of the papers or the bags are stuck closed with a pretty sticker.
Many come with friendly notes on lovely stationery. The notes might be written in regular ink, or in fancy gold ink, or in green ink. The i’s might be dotted with hearts instead of dots. Or there will be a heart at the top or the bottom, or a hand-drawn smiley face.
These items arrive by mail practically immediately. I got a note in the app from one of the sellers that she could not get to the post office that same day because the roads were bad due to an ice storm.
No problem, I wrote her back. I’m not in a hurry for a shirt I bought on a whim. Whenever she gets around to it is fine.
She wrote back in effusive praise at my kindness and understanding.
She wrote back a day or two later that the roads were still bad. I replied that it was fine; no hurry. (In fact, I didn’t even remember or care what shirt I had ordered from her.)
One day this week, on my porch was a box wrapped in Christmas paper. It had mailing labels and postage attached to it. Ripping off the paper revealed a regular mailing box. When I opened that box, there were more gift-wrapped items inside and a fancy card. One of the wrapped items was the shirt I think I remember ordering, and the other was another shirt.
The note was written the cheerful, bubbly type of writing that I for sure couldn’t pull off. It was a lavish apology for being late with the shirt and a whole additional shirt to boot, to thank me for my patience.
Lord have mercy, the level of stress this woman must have felt about my giving her a bad review on her sales because a shirt that I didn’t need and didn’t remember ordering arrived more than 2 days after I clicked on a button in a moment of inattention.
These people are not surgeons or obstetricians. We don’t depend on them to react immediately to save our lives.
But the stakes must be awfully high.
They fall all over themselves with pretty wrapping paper and cute stationery and adorable stickers and friendly notes in clever ink colors with neat handwriting.
Though this app company is bombarding me with emailed reminders to leave a review of each and every vendor, I have not done the first one. It’s a hassle. Though you can buy a vintage wool sweater with a mere tap on your phone screen, when I tried once to be good and leave a review, there were instructions to go to this screen, then choose that option, then go to … Argh. Too much work. Easier just to delete all the emailed reminders.
Do ya think that’ll get me in trouble? Are there reviews for buyers, too, such as “Ignores all requests for feedback and does not send thank-you notes”?
