Double Order

This week was a great learning experience week. It was very hot here in St. George, so I didn’t think I would get any orders. However, I underestimated how much people love eating baked good without having to heat up their own kitchen! On Thursday night I did get one order for Saturday.

The order came from an older lady named Luana. I asked her if she wanted  “one tray of two dozen, or one half tray of one dozen.” When she emailed me back, she wrote that she wanted two dozen. When Saturday rolled around, I had it in my head that she wanted two whole trays. So I woke up early and made her two trays.

She lived an hour away and it was really stormy that day. We had to drive through a very large amount of rain, hale and lightening just to get up the mountain where she lived! When we got there, she wasn’t home yet. However, her adult children were up that day for a visit. They took the cinnamon rolls and paid me the full $50. I didn’t think much about it, and neither did they!

Later in the weekend, my wife was going through the business emails and separating them from our normal ones. She read Luana’s email, and discovered that she hadn’t ordered a full two trays, but only two dozen (just one full tray). After thinking about it some more, we decided that we should take Luana back her money.

So we got back in the car and drove the hour back to her house. When I knocked on the door to give her back her money, they wouldn’t take it.  She said that they had given all the rolls away and they were happy because it gave them a chance to make friends and meet their neighbors. I asked them about five times to take their money back. But they insisted.

I learned a couple lessons from this experience this week. The first one: read each individual order to make sure that you are understanding what they want. The second: it feels much better taking a little loss financially, than to let things slide morally.