I wanted to thank everyone for their orders and support for the Black Friday sale! Also, I need share an urgent update regarding almost 50 orders experiencing shipping delays.
As I mentioned in the title, a massive thank you to everyone who has contributed to the continuously growing order volume over the last 3-6 months and the tremendous support during the Black Friday sale! To anyone who missed out another one to end off the year is coming soon! I am beyond grateful for each and every order and appreciate it greatly. As I have done over the last 6 years my mission is to continuously expand my output while increasing quality and minimizing turnaround time and will be adding an incredible new machine right after the new year, more on that coming soon! Admittedly, I had a few delays in the middle of the latest sale with anodizing logistics and a handful of orders had labels printed a couple days before shipping so I could group multiple orders by anodizing color otherwise I would have been drastically delayed, I promise I did the absolute best I could to get everything out as quickly as possible for everyone though it did delay shipping on a handful. The delay was due to the smaller size of my current anodizing system, I keep inventory of all my parts in raw silver aluminum and then I anodize them to order, that way each order is guaranteed the same exact shade of color anodizing which is the most difficult part of the process from batch to batch. So I found this system to be a major weakness with the steady influx of orders with a variety of color choices across the board, especially with the large quick volume increase for the sale. I also have brought on a friend part time to help me out, I am starting to train him on running the machinery and hopefully begin to run the production so I can focus on bringing new products to the store and create content and update the website, he came on board just in time to get slammed with orders so he got the crash course on cable management production but having him here really helped me keep things moving along and will be a big help moving forward with the new equipment in 2021!
I originally planned and began to film a video for this post, but when I went to turn my machine on this morning to begin production, the spindle variable frequency drive, or VFD, which controls the cutting head on the machine and makes its spin at the programmed RPMs began throwing a fault and triggering an uncommon error code that has little information available for me to repair it. I spent the entire day troubleshooting it today and should hear from the machine tool company support tomorrow morning, worst case scenario I will have to overnight a new one and cough up the money for next day air shipping to get back to running production. Luckily I believe I have stock for all in house orders so those should go out as scheduled.
This brings me to the main reason for the post here, USPS is experiencing compounded logistic issues, at least in Ohio, and specifically northeast Ohio, I am outside of Cleveland here and we have had more than a few news stories on the issues here in the last few days. Right now I have 50+ orders affected by these problems and its causing longer than usual delays. I want to ensure everyone at this point if a label was printed for you order it was dropped off within a day of printing it, many of these orders are showing that USPS is still awaiting the item and they already have them all. The last time I had a label printed with a few days delay went out by December 3rd. It puts me in a difficult position because according to the tracking data it looks like they haven’t shipped yet. I believe some will arrive without tracking even updating as that has happened countless times this year all year long, and others are just experiencing very long delays.
It puts me in a difficult position, and I would ask if you are able, to give the post office as much patience as you can in sorting this out, but I am of course willing and prepared to offer a refunds to anyone who doesn’t want to wait it out, I totally understand. If you need a refund and the package eventually arrives I would hope that you would let me know and I can send you an invoice for them or a label to send them back if they are no longer needed.
I wish they would have made notice of this before a couple days ago with a new banner on their site. Which you can see here. USPS Home Page
I also wanted to share an article written on the topic here from a local paper, Cleveland Scene. There was a backup of dozens of semi-trucks causing major traffic jams all because of issues with picking up and dropping off at the Cleveland main USPS hub. Cleveland Scene – Huge Backlog at Cleveland USPS Distribution Center Thanks to Covid.
Below is a video from local Fox 8 news Investigative Team, they look into the delays and the cause. USPS has been very vague and not going in depth on the issues. They are basically attributing it to delays due to low staff and Covid regulations compounded with a massive increase in online orders for Black Friday and all the holiday shopping this year. A friend in the shipping industry has heard that if there is any word of covid in a building they are shutting down entire hubs for days at a time or drastically limiting staff, I can’t confirm that for sure, but that is what he heard as he takes deliveries to the post office daily as a driver for one of the private shipping companies.
I hope this was at least informative to help with some questions that a few people were already having regarding the delays. As I mentioned it puts me in a tough spot, but if you are unable or unwilling to wait on USPS to work through their workload, I completely understand. Reach out via email at [email protected], or my website contact for, or via Etsy messages and I will get that sorted out for you! I apologize for this, I wish they were able to get a heads up about this ahead of time so I could have switched gears to promote FedEx or UPS for shipping, granted one of the main benefits of USPS is not having to spend 13$ on a 20$ order where shipping costs more than 50% of the order.
Again I want to thank everyone for their patience and support! Keep an eye out for another holiday sale coming up to round off the year! Just reach out via the ways I mentioned and we can figure out a solution to your delayed packages. Hopefully USPS gets in gear and gets more people on board even as temps to help clear out hese backlogged packages!
Thank you for taking the time to read through this. I hope to have more content out on a regular basis very soon!
- Jim Weist
- Clockwerk Industries
