U.S Wellness

We’ve done quite a bit of posting about where we get most of our groceries from, but we’ve left out one important part: meat. As you've seen in a few previous posts, we’ve been eating a lot of what Alaska has to offer, but we’ve also purchased 2 orders of meat since we arrived here in August.

Enter U.S. Wellness—a great company in the Midwest that sells organic grass fed meat and dairy products. We heard about the company from the teacher that Simon replaced, who had all good things to say about the company. So, upon our arrival we immediately put in a small order. Some of the things we purchased the first time: hamburger patties, 1lb packages of ground beef, sugar free breakfast sausage, Colby cheese, a round roast and chicken apple sausage links. We ended up with around 40 pounds of meat for around $400 shipped. That’s a great deal! The company doesn’t charge shipping and ships overnight with fedex. We placed our order, it shipped on a Monday and was on our front porch the following day! Great customer service and we would soon find out some of the best meat we’ve ever had.

Fast forward to October and we’re ready to purchase some more meat. We’ve decided to place an order with a co-worker this time because the more you buy the bigger discounts you get. Together we ordered a total of around 82 pounds of meat! That’s somewhere around $600 worth of meat. We placed our order and waited for the packing/shipping date to come out; looks like our meat will once again pack on a Monday and arrive on a Tuesday. GREAT! Tuesday rolls around and we don’t have a single package waiting for us at the post office. L Knowing how the freight planes work we realize maybe it missed the plane in the morning and we will have to wait until Thursday. We know from our previous experience that the box is well marked and should be handled appropriately by the carriers and placed in the chill/freeze section. Thursday afternoon comes and I head to the post office as soon as school is out----no packages. Simon calls me to say that according to the tracking the box is in GNU. I head back to the post office to double check with the Post Master to be sure we don’t have any boxes waiting behind the counter. She promises we’ve got zero boxes. I head back to the school and begin placing phone calls to Fedex to determine what happened to our box. I spend about an hour and a half on the phone with various carrier companies trying to determine who might possibly have our extremely valuable box of meat. No one has any answers for me Thursday, but I get promises of returned phone calls on Friday morning. After a half day of school Friday I start making phone calls around 12:50 to again try to locate the box. After around 45 minutes on the phone with several different carriers I locate the box! The good news is they have the box in the chill section, the bad news is they insist that we owe them shipping fees before they will release the box. I try to explain that we have already paid all of the shipping up front but they are relentless and insist that we will have to pay the shipping fees if we want the box to be picked up. Enter Simon—This is where he calls the meat company directly. He just so happens to get the owner of the company on the phone, nice guy who is immediately appalled and realizes that our meat has now been sitting in a cooler inside a cardboard box for much longer than the 24hr promised time period. He hangs up with the promise of contacting Fedex to get this worked out. His exact response was, “I’m on the case." Within about 10 minutes of talking to the owner we get a call from Fedex in Anchorage, and this time the person actually knows what they are talking about! The customer service representative immediately tells Simon not to give any money to the third party carrier, that she will get it all worked out. She works on the case for about an hour and a half calling to talk to Simon several times to get approval for decisions.
At one point, she tried giving us some advice, and the conversation went something like this:

FEDEX: I see here that Bethel is only about 100 miles away. Would it be possible for you to just drive there and pick up your box?
SIMON: Well, that's a good idea, except the only way we can get to Bethel is by bush plane.
FEDEX: Oh, you can't borrow somebody's car to drive there?
SIMON: No, you can't drive to Bethel at all. There aren't any roads.
FEDEX: No roads!?
SIMON: No, ma'am.
FEDEX: Well...how much does it cost to fly to Bethel?
SIMON: Round trip? About $400 per person.
FEDEX: Whoa! That's crazy!

Even people who live in Alaska don't always realize what life in the bush is like. Finally though, she gave the third party instructions for next day delivery to GNU. WHEW! We were super concerned for a while that our meat wasn’t going to get here or was going to get here and be spoiled. Thankfully, the meat arrived here in good condition and is now in the freezer just waiting to be cooked! Yum!