At the beginning of this month, I got a Groupon for something called BarkBox.com. Basically, you pay a subscription fee and they send you treats and toys appropriate for your dog’s size every month. Groupon offered a discounted rate for the first 3 months, so I thought I’d give it a try.
Sometimes it’s hard to find new and interesting dog toys and treats, and man can toys be expensive, which is especially painful when the dog kills the toy in one sitting. I thought it would be cool if I found out about new toys, that were picked out according to your dog’s size, so might last a while. It would also give me incentive to chuck some of the old toys that look a little worse for ware, since more are coming every month.
The regular subscription is $72 for 3 months. I can’t remember the other subscription rates, but I thought, at that rate, it’s $24 a box. It’s hard to only pay $24 and get decent stuff.
After struggling through the signup process, which was no small feat with Firefox and NVDA, I got all signed up, or in their words, pupscribed (har har har).
My first box arrived, and I was pretty impressed. In the box was 2 toys, 2 small bags of treats, and a beef trachea chew thing. In the box is a sheet describing all the contents within, complete with codes if you find out your dog just love love loves a certain item. I’ll have to figure out how I would get my hands on those items, but I’m sure that will be easy to do. I’ll also have to figure out how to tell them to stop sending a certain kind of treat if I found out it doesn’t agree with Tans, also something probably easily solved.
Tansy was also impressed…she almost climbed in the parcel box to get it. She has beaten up one toy, but it’s still very much alive, and demolished the beef trachea thing. I’m pretty sure there’s no way I could buy all of that for $24 at the pet store.
So I think I’ll be a long-time subscriber. That’s a pretty neat idea. I just want to make two comments about the experience.
- Knock off the adding of pup to words. It’s cute a couple of times, but lord on a pogo stick, this is too many. I do happen to like the term “frequently arfed questions” though.
- Although I could get through the signup process, it was no picnic. It would be nice if the form was made of standard HTML controls that everyone can use, not…whatever the heck is going on there. I shouldn’t have to simulate a mouse click to choose whether my dog is small, medium or large. There are radio buttons and other things that work just fine.
But those are my only two criticisms so far, and one of them is just a small thing. I hope I’ll be a happy customer, and Tansy will be a happy pupstomer, *cringe*, for a long time.
