Answering a Common Question

Here's the question that's asked the most by folks who call our Customer Service number: "Do you deliver to (insert city or state name here)?"

Yes, we do. As long as it's in the Continental United States, we'll ship it there. We'll even send stuff to Alaska and Hawaii, if you ask, but that's more expensive. I can even recommend a few things that we can ship to Canada, despite the customs delays.

This seems to be a tough concept for people to understand, and to me it's one of those collision points between the world we knew and the world as it exists today. Times were when any place worth inhabiting had a local bakery, and if you needed cookies or bread, you went there. Maybe they offered a regional delivery service, but you'd never expect a cake to travel from one side of the country to the other.

In the new online world, we deliver products from one end of the country to the other every day, but the experience creates an intimacy that makes the process seem local. If I'm in my house ordering croissants on my computer, they must be coming from someplace nearby, right? Not necessarily, but it's a good practice for online retailers to make it feel as if you're doing business with someone who's across town, ready to respond to your needs instantly.

That sense of closeness, combined with the traditional bakery/customer relationship, breeds the shipping question. I'm sure that most if not all of the online bakeries deal with the same question each day. I don't mind answering it, because it tells me that the customer understands that my site is a collection of local bakeries, and not a giant nationwide corporation.