Improvement Insights Blog

Ordered a snowthrower as a wedding gift for two day delivery. Eight days later it was delivered to someone’s home (not mine). How can we mistake-proof these kinds of problems?

“One of the guys in my office is getting married this June and so I got him an early wedding gift: a snow thrower. So I ordered it from Amazon. I ordered it on Monday, it was supposed to arrive on Wednesday; two days shipping on Prime.

“Then on Wednesday I get this notice that said, “Well, it’s sort of delayed.” So then it said maybe Friday, but of course on Friday it wasn’t here, and they tried to deliver it on Saturday, of course, which is when we’re closed. Then Monday was a holiday, so they decided not to deliver it on Monday, and even though I got into the tracking app, there was no place to say “Can you deliver it on Monday because it’s supposed to snow Monday night?” There’s no place to give any feedback or anything like that. And then come Tuesday, they delivered it, but they delivered it to a residential address on Albion Street, which is probably half a mile from the office.

“If you look at the sticker it does not say “Albion Street” on it, it says “Colorado [Blvd.]” It’s like, can we not read the little thing on here? It’s got a little barcode. It seems to me that if you had a thing that was scanning the barcode, it could also note that geographically you’re not at the right place. It should be able to tell you that you’re a half a mile from the delivery location that it’s supposed to go to, right? Isn’t there a way to mistake proof these things so that they just don’t happen? We have the technology; it exists already. All we have to do is figure out how to plug it in so that that’s how it works.

“So something that’s supposed to take two days took eight days. It’s like crazy making to me. So some poor woman actually put it in her car, drove it to our office [building], found somebody there to talk to and come find us, and then we go downstairs to pick up what she had delivered to her house. While that was sweet of her, look at the hassle: her hassle, my hassle, all the other hassle that was involved around this. It was just dead wrong.

“This is the kind of stuff that I think we have to fix in America, and we have the tools and technology to do it, right? I mean, GPS exists. We can just use it.

“So that’s my Improvement Insight for this week. Let’s start mistake proofing everything we do. Let’s go out and find something to improve this week.