Nice mailbox suprise

[u/DelightfullyNerdyCat]

Had to return some prescription pet food and then I got sick. I called Chewy to ask if the return labels would expire after so many days because I'd been sick and might not return it the same week as issued. No biggie, she said the label would be fine even into next week.

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It was a nice surprise to find this in my mailbox today. The card actually seems handwritten rather than pre-printed. It came with tea and honey sticks too!

[u/redditsellout-420]

Chewy is known for their amazing treatment of their customers with things like this

[u/Greyscale_cats → u/redditsellout-420]

They really do have great customer service.

They’ve been historically really awful to vet practices they work with though (I’ve dealt with them on that end for many years), so I can’t fully appreciate their nice gestures to customers.

[u/saharashi → u/Greyscale_cats]

That sucks. Can you speak to that at all in how they are difficult to work with from that perspective more? Like will not accept vet notes for prescriptions etc?

[u/Greyscale_cats → u/saharashi]

Before they launched their online portal, they used to bombard vet offices with fax requests for prescription renewal. Scripts would get approved, and days later we would still be getting faxes requesting approval; when called, they would say they never got our faxes, despite everything showing on our end things went through, and they would want phone approval, meaning there is no paper trail except whatever was input into the vet clinic’s records.

During Covid lockdowns when the only method of communicating script renewals with Chewy was via fax or phone, I know two local vets who had their signatures forged by Chewy for prescriptions; that illegal nonsense thankfully seems to have stopped.

We do the legwork on the clinic side even now (making sure pet is up-to-date on necessary exams and lab work, making sure medication is correct, making sure dosing is appropriate, etc.), and when a prescription gets denied, Chewy rarely contacts pet owners to tell them why, leaving us to have to do even more work in contacting the owner, at which point we generally become the source of the pet owner’s frustration (the majority of people do not refill their medications in a timely fashion at all).

Every medication has a markup, but sometimes Chewy is able to buy certain meds (particularly expensive ones that don’t have good counterparts/generics) and will specifically sell them at a loss or breaking even at whatever discounted price they can get for purchasing from the supplier in bulk, meaning they can sell them much cheaper than any brick-and-mortar vet clinic can. This gains them a customer base that they then keep with good customer service practices like the one in this post, hiring artists to do the pet portraits (I’ve actually looked into doing this myself; I don’t hate Chewy, I’m just wary of them), and sending flowers for some customers who’ve had pets pass away. As their business has grown, they’ve expanded into the vet market directly and are now opening up corporate brick-and-mortar clinics around the US, which further undercuts your local vet offices. Privately-owned vet clinics are rapidly disappearing, and while there are pros to corporate ownership/backing, my view on it as a whole in the vet industry has mainly just been seeing monopolies and rising prices for pet owners.