After years of sending you post-purchase emails asking you to rate and review your shopping experience at Hygge Home Goods, your local shop for cozy comforts, we are reaching out to let you know that while we value your business, we no longer value your feedback.
This new direction may come as a surprise. We used to beg customers for feedback. Remember our email subject lines? “We want your feedback!”; “Take a five-question survey, and we’ll enter you into a $100 gift card giveaway!”; “Share your opinions, valued customers, or else we’ll cry ourselves to sleep at night while you never give us a second thought!”
Back when we started selling hand lotion, potpourri, and whimsical calendars, our survey questions were earnest. “Did you find everything you needed?”; “How would you rate the in-store atmosphere on a scale of 1 to 10?”; “What else could we have done to make shopping at Hygge Home Goods the absolute highlight of your holiday season, even more so than any meals shared with family?”
We used to consider your feedback to be more valuable than gold. Now, we consider your feedback to be the source of our ulcers.
Truthfully, the feedback we received fell into three categories: not specific enough (“good”), weirdly specific (“I didn’t like the earrings your sales associate wore”), and specific in ways that make us sad (“I hate my dead-end job and your cash register is too slow and I’m going to take it out on you by screaming because you asked me if I wanted to pay five cents for a paper bag”).
Given that our small business is barely hanging on after COVID and that we are a husband-wife team trying to keep our main street storefront afloat while working ninety hours a week for 1/136th the salary of our previous corporate jobs, we can no longer spare the energy required to value your feedback.
We must also ask that you stop sharing your feedback about frustrations with supply-chain issues and USPS delays. We are a one-location store that sells weighted blankets, cinnamon candles, and fuzzy socks. The global market is out of our hands. You’d be better off letting your senator know that “the fact that the slippers [you] ordered on December 20 won’t arrive until early January RUINED Christmas for [your] tween.”
While we no longer value your feedback, we hope we’ll still be your first stop for finding the perfect gift.
Please note: Our popular seaweed-infused, puffy-eye-obliterating eye masks are out of stock and won’t be available for purchase until next year. Our staff (again, just my wife and me) used the last of the eye masks to calm ourselves after reading previously valued feedback that ranged from “not what I expected because I didn’t read the product dimensions,” and “why do I have to pay for shipping,” to “arrived broken, damaged, and without paying the workers who delivered it a fair wage.” While we believe the last email is actually feedback for Jeff Bezos, it caused a lot of distress here at Hygge Home Goods as we were reminded that Amazon is systematically destroying local businesses by driving down costs.
This holiday shopping season, we wish you joy. We wish you delightful gift exchanges. We wish you would stop sharing your feedback.