A Little Grace Goes a Long Way — Especially for a Small Business Still Growing

We recently launched our online ordering app, and honestly, it's been a big step for us. The whole point was simple: cut down the back-and-forth. No more endless phone calls to confirm an order, no more playing phone tag to figure out what's in stock. You place the order, you pick a pickup window, we prep it, you grab it. It sets expectations on both ends — that was the goal.

What we didn't fully plan for was just how big that first real order would be.

What happened

Normally, when a regular customer wants to place a large order, they call us or give us a heads-up first — it's just how things have worked. But the app changes that dynamic on purpose. That's the whole point of it: you shouldn't have to call ahead just to order something. So this customer did exactly what the app was built for — they placed a large order, selected curbside pickup, and confirmed with us that they'd be by the next day between 4 and 5 PM.

They showed up around 4:30–4:40, still well within the window. And the order was big — big enough that our small team was still scrambling to get everything pulled, checked, and packed correctly. It wasn't ready yet. And the customer was upset. Not just a little upset — they went off on us.

We own our part of it

Let's be clear about something first: we're not saying we did everything right. If a customer selects a pickup window, our job is to have that order ready within it, full stop. We should have had it ready. That's on us, and we're not going to pretend otherwise.

But here's what we kept thinking about afterward: we were being held to the same standard as a curbside pickup experience at a store like HEB. And honestly? We get it — that's flattering in a strange way. But it's also just not an apples-to-apples comparison. HEB has billions of dollars in the bank, entire teams dedicated to fulfillment, and systems built over decades to handle exactly this kind of volume. We're a small halal supermarket watching our bank account down to the last few dollars some weeks, doing inventory ourselves, and figuring out logistics as we go.

We compare everything — except grace

It's funny how much we compare in life. We compare our kids to other kids. We compare how smart we are, how put-together our lives look, how savvy we are with money. Comparison is everywhere, and honestly, a healthy amount of it pushes us to be better.

But somewhere in all that comparing, we forget to extend the one thing that actually makes comparison bearable: grace. We hold a two-person small business team to the exact same standard as a company with thousands of employees and one of the biggest supply chains in the state, and then we're surprised when it doesn't measure up perfectly on day one.

Here's the thing — we want to be compared to HEB

We're not writing this to complain about being compared to a bigger store. Honestly, we love it. HEB is exactly who we want to be measured against one day — that's the standard we're chasing as we build out what a modern halal supermarket can look like. Being compared to them means we're doing something right, that people can even imagine us in that conversation.

We just ask for a little patience while we get there. We built this app, we tested it internally, and now it's out in the real world for the first time, learning from real customers with real orders. That first big order taught us more about our own process in one afternoon than weeks of internal testing did — and we're already using it to get better and tighten things up.

So to everyone who shops with us: keep pushing us, keep comparing us, keep expecting more from us. That's how we grow. Just give us a little grace along the way, the same grace you'd want extended to you while you're still learning something new. We promise we're listening, and we're getting better every single day.