We continue to try and stay on top of the wildly erratic shipping status of a great deal of our orders. As we mentioned in one of our posts last week, our orders are normally shipped via USPS Media Mail. We adjusted and allowed our customers to choose the shipping option of their choice, with the warning that Media Mail is incredibly undependable since late March.
Most of our customers have still chosen Media Mail and we are keeping an eye on every order. First Class and Priority Mail orders seem to be reaching the customers on a regular basis. Media is still very erratic. For some customers, we have even upgraded the shipping, and we are offering free Priority Mail on some orders.
Here is a typical situation - if your order shipped from our warehouse on March 30th or 31st, we found that a large percentage of those orders simply disappeared from the USPS tracking. Normally, an item is scanned immediately upon being received by the USPS (called an arrival scan) and then scanned again when it reaches a larger distribution center.
For about 15 orders placed around March 26-28, and shipping on March 30th and 31s, there were no arrival scans - no scans of any kind.
Luckily, those orders have finally surfaced within the USPS system. That's the good news - the bad news is that they surfaced in San Francisco's regional distribution system. And only one of those orders was for a customer in California.
This is what you will see if you are one of those customers:
This indicates that we printed out a mailing label on March 31st. The local post office never scanned it in, and somehow 15 of the orders shipped that day were sent to San Francisco, skipping over local and regional post offices in the meantime. Supposedly now they are on the way to you - we'll keep an eye out.
In a different time, we'd be screaming bloody murder. But the USPS is understaffed and putting themselves in harm's way. But if you would like us, we will ship you a replacement order (if we can) and then ask you to send us back the shipment when it arrives at your home.
The tracking in general is pretty odd for Media Mail - we used to find out when an item was "out for delivery", which meant you were sent an email automatically informing you that the item was about to arrive at your home. Lately, we have only gotten updated tracking when the order had already been delivered - we apologize, we'll try and keep you updated on your package's location.
One last note - for packages north and east of New Jersey, mailed out in approximately the same time frame, these items have not yet shown up on the USPS tracking at all - and they were mailed on the same trip to the post office on those two days (March 30 and 31). We'll be contacting you about these orders.