Roaming Bison Ranch

** Dropping it to one-star review following business response. Managing customer expectations is part of any business. If delays are so common, please note that in the shipping guidelines so there are no surprises. Also, it’s not the customers’ problem the business is understaffed and underperforming. Lastly, typing a word “sorry” doesn’t take a whole lot of time. Neither does responding to a text following up on the cancelation status. The same person texted back at lightening speed last week when asking if we wanted to reroute the order to a different address. Then went silent when we asked for the refund status. Shocking to get an email something will be delayed a whole week and that’s just business as usual. If delays are so common and should be expected, make that clear to avoid surprises. We would never have even bothered to order had we known there was a decent chance it would be delayed by a whole week, at least. Since it sounds like the dry ice issue is pretty frequent in the busy summer when no one’s tending the business. Clear communication and expectation management doesn’t cost a lot. ** We were looking forward to trying the bison from here. We were visiting the area for a couple of weeks from the east coast and placed an order online, with full expectation that if we liked what we tasted we might continue ordering even when we got back home. Unfortunately, we can’t speak of the meat since we never got it, but can attest to the poor customer service we’ve been dealt. We placed an online order and the guidelines said orders would be shipped on Monday (and in case of a delay, Tuesday), to be delivered on Wednesday. We didn’t even get a shipping notice until Wednesday, and were charged that day. Then over 24 hours later, midday on Thursday, got another email saying the order hadn’t been shipped after all due to lack of dry ice. Well, then you shouldn’t have charged our card if it hadn’t actually been shipped. And the delay in communication was long (they didn’t even notify us the same day when the shipping didn’t happen). Not to mention there was no modicum of apology for the delay. The notice came in a deadpan tone saying “it wasn’t shipped and will ship next Monday.” That’s a whole week’s delay. Not even an apology from the business was quite shocking. We’re all in the client service business, and I can’t imagine operating with this kind of attitude/mentality. We let them know that unfortunately we’d need to cancel the order since we were only in the area temporarily, and shipping to our home on the east coast would cost $50 more (I was surprised they didn’t offer to just cover the $50 shipping difference since it was on them the shipping was delayed). They confirmed, but then went silent for a whole week - full 7 days - before actually processing the order cancelation and refund. And they only did so AFTER we had to follow up again in the meantime (and not hear back for days) and escalate the issue with our credit card issuer. Every step that happened in this process killed any of our remaining desire to order from here ever again. It’s a shame since we could’ve become long-term customers as we’re trying to buy more meat directly from ranches.