Terms /Purchasing - Shipping Schedule |
| We are a family business, not a multi-national corporation. This means that sometimes our best plans and intentions are interrupted by family things or other unexpected events. We LOVE to ship your items immediately upon receipt of your payment (and occasionally, even before we receive payment). But as with any printing oriented business, there are often unexpected delays. |
We have many, many thousands of reproduction manuals on the shelves and ready for immediate shipping. We maintain in-stock inventory for the most requested items. A high percentage of our customers have their items within 1-4 days after we receive payment. It's an imperfect art trying to balance stock and demand but we try. Stock of any given item may be depleted at any given time so new production would be required.
Of course every item can not be "most requested". So we also have tens of thousands of items that are requested infrequently or have never been requested before. Those will almost always have to be produced after your order has been received. |
USA and Canadian customers - In general, if you have not received your order after about 7 - 10 days, feel free to chew us out... but be nice! |
International customers - You will normally have your items in 7-14 days but it sometimes takes up to 3 weeks. |
There is a good chance that Payments processed on Fridays may not be able to ship until Monday. The reason?
The post office, our color-work place and our bank all close at 5 pm weekdays and noon on Saturdays. We are frequently attempting to get to all three right at closing time (tough task, huh?). We also frequently don't get to any of them which is quite frustrating. ALL payments processed past 11:30 AM Saturday have virtually no chance of shipping before Monday. |
Although we frequently work right through the weekends (as if they don't exist), we would appreciate you not *expecting* us to work 7 days per week. So to be nice... pretend that we take Saturday and Sunday off like most normal people. |
Here is how it works... usually | 70% of the time | Your order for most popular items are in stock and will ship the same or next business day after receiving payment. | 15% of the time | There is no current stock of your item (s) and we must do a new production run. It is still likely that your purchase will still ship the same or next business day after payment is received. | 14% of the time | There is no current stock of your item (s) and we must do a new production run... AND there is just *too much stuff* going on (possibly you know that story yourself). In that case we might not get a new production run done and your item (s) shipped for perhaps to 3 to 5 *business days* | 1% of the time | Is reserved to cover the *We-are-all-dorks-and-mess-up-sometimes* situations. In this case, your item hopefully ships before you write and call us nasty names. If we have somehow totally botched your order, we will research it and do what's right. | If your order includes an item that we have never reproduced before, then initial disassembly, detailing and cleanup is required before production can be done to our standards.. which is match that item's assigned Quality Rating. We try our best to keep it out of the lower 15% but don't always accomplish our goal. We hope you appreciate our attention to detail. |
If Color Brochures Are Involved | One exception to the above is when color brochures are a part of the order. | We really do try to maintain in-stock inventory for the most popular color brochures, but we can not do so for most because it would require an *extremely substantial* investment. So many color brochure orders will require new production. We do all our color-work off premises with a local business who provides us with direct access to their very high quality equipment. | Sometimes it is difficult to get away from here to go do the work, hence they may require extra days. We try our best to not let this be excessive. If you have any questions, contact us. |
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