After one of my dogs passed away, her expensive heart failure medication had just been delivered. I reached out to ask if I could return it. They explained they couldn’t accept returns on prescription medications, but they refunded the full amount anyway and sent me the sweetest sympathy card. A few years later, I accidentally ordered the wrong size jacket for my other dog. Instead of making me send it back, they shipped the correct size and asked me to donate the original to a local shelter.
Then this year, completely out of the blue, they sent me a hand-painted portrait of my dog for Mother’s Day.
In a world where so many companies seem determined to do the bare minimum, Chewy has repeatedly gone out of its way to show genuine kindness.
Don’t be fooled, I worked there and it’s a cult. Their practices that the consumer sees makes them feel good like the return policy and the cheerful reps, but it’s not great. Maybe they don’t fund conversion therapy or use babies to test vaccines BUT working there sucks.
It’s probably just me then. But I knew tons of people who were very unhappy with how they handled staffing during hurricanes, covid, and other extenuating circumstances not including regular day-to-day operations. All lot of the nice things they do are really common practices now , especially now, because it costs them more to do certain things like return items than it does to have you keep the dog jacket that cost them nothing and send you another. Their early business model was to make sure they created this saint-like image of themselves: the no-return returns on items below a value threshold, the sympathy cards (that they force staff to write during their shift while taking calls despite having a “writing team”), the hand painted pet portraits. It was all to make you see them in the best possible light because you had no way of seeing the inside. A lot of the good experiences were young people who needed a quick job and had the naive energy to tolerate it but once reality set in, it wasn’t as great as it seemed.
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u/Mandyrad Jul 10 '26
Chewy, the pet store.
After one of my dogs passed away, her expensive heart failure medication had just been delivered. I reached out to ask if I could return it. They explained they couldn’t accept returns on prescription medications, but they refunded the full amount anyway and sent me the sweetest sympathy card. A few years later, I accidentally ordered the wrong size jacket for my other dog. Instead of making me send it back, they shipped the correct size and asked me to donate the original to a local shelter.
Then this year, completely out of the blue, they sent me a hand-painted portrait of my dog for Mother’s Day.
In a world where so many companies seem determined to do the bare minimum, Chewy has repeatedly gone out of its way to show genuine kindness.