FREE SHIPPING - SUSPENDED AGAIN

Unfortunately, due to the recurrance of extreme delays in delivery of Media Mail packages, we are announcing that we are suspending our Free Shipping option until further notice. Hopefully, this will be a short time, but we really don't have any way of knowing. 

Why? Read on...

In March of this year, we suspended our standard free shipping because we found that the USPS was not hitting its own targets for delivery dates for Media Mail.

(Media Mail is a special delivery price for items like CDs, DVDs, books, magazines, etc and it is much much cheaper than First Class or Priority Mail, and the USPS states that these packages will be delivered anywhere in the 48 contiguous states within 7-9 business days.)

After a few tests in late April and early May, we found that Media Mail was being delivered to customers within a 7 day time frame, and so we reinstated a Free Shipping policy - with a warning that the free shipping option MAY take as long as 28 days, as was our experience in March and April. 

In the past 10 days, we have noticed that Media Mail shipments are not only being slow to be delivered, but we are even concerned that Media Mail shipments are not even being processed at the USPS locations. We have encountered a handful of shipments that were included in large shipments of mixed postage items (First Class, Priority and Media Mail) - and all of the other packages have been accounted for, but the items shipped Media Mail (Free Shipping) are still in "Pre-Shipment" mode, where the USPS claims that the package is not even in possession of the item. 

We ran across this same problem in late March. 

Here's the way an order that is being processed perfectly should look:

(in reverse chronological order)

April 1, 2020, 6:51 pm
Arrived at USPS Regional Destination Facility
WASHINGTON DC NETWORK DISTRIBUTION CENTER

April 1, 2020
In Transit to Next Facility

March 31, 2020, 7:51 am
Arrived at USPS Regional Origin Facility
JERSEY CITY NJ NETWORK DISTRIBUTION CENTER

March 31, 2020, 6:36 am
Accepted at USPS Origin Facility
GLEN RIDGE, NJ 07028

March 30, 2020, 12:52 pm
Shipping Label Created, USPS Awaiting Item
GLEN RIDGE, NJ 07028

Here's what happens when things aren't going so well: 

April 14, 2020, 4:54 am
Arrived at Post Office
STUDIO CITY, CA 91604

April 13, 2020, 2:26 pm
Departed USPS Regional Destination Facility
LOS ANGELES CA NETWORK DISTRIBUTION CENTER

April 13, 2020, 11:45 am
Arrived at USPS Regional Destination Facility
LOS ANGELES CA NETWORK DISTRIBUTION CENTER

March 30, 2020, 6:58 am
Shipping Label Created, USPS Awaiting Item
GLEN RIDGE, NJ 07028

You'll note that this package, if you were checking the USPS website, as we do daily, seems to not have arrived at the post office. Normally, a package is scanned immediately upon arrival, indicating the date and time it arrived. This second listing shows that there's a 14 day lag where it's invisible - and that the package technically never arrived at a New Jersey post office - it just magically appeared one day in Los Angeles, as if we drove there to mail it. (No, we didn't.)

We currently have a handful of orders in our system where there is no entry scan and we have mailed the package. We will be reaching out again to these customers and offering replacements and refunds.

And so...in the interim, we are stopping the Free Shipping option for the time being. None of our First Class or Priority Mail packages have experienced extreme delays.