1980s mail order and "Allow six to eight weeks for delivery" - why so slow?

Factual Questions
21

[QUOTE=Zsofia]
I ordered from their website on, I think, Monday, and if it wasn’t for the holiday I’d get it today.
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And I can go down to the local Sephora and get it today. However, that is not the case when you order via the infomercial.

If you pay attention to infomercials, many of them now have a web address that is functionally similar, but different, this allows the person who actually ran the infomercial to get the sale. Also I know from my exposure to this type of business that the addresses and phone numbers were blank on the main copy and each infomercial marketing company added their own info. I’m pretty sure with some digging, I could find one that has the address of my former employer/customer. The infomercial is often a jacket wrapped around the contact/sales info of the infomercial marketer.

While the manufacturer may have a ton of stock, that doesn’t mean the infomercial marketing company does. Heck, even Amazon’s basic shipping takes far longer than I think it should, I’m talking about the free shipping over $50 offers they make, if I remember correctly, it takes about a month.

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[QUOTE=elmwood]
I still have a hard time believing that most mail-order and phone-order before the Internet era involved drop-shipping and waiting for a manufacturer to build the item, while the post-Internet era fully stocked warehouses and one-week shipping are the norm. Was "six to eight weeks’ purely CYA? For those that ordered anything by phone back in the 1980s - what did you order, and how long did it take to arrive?
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I ordered lots of things, by mail and by phone in the '80s. Every place said “6 to 8 weeks” (except the ones that said longer), and I never had any order, even a mail order actually take that long. A lot of it was CYA, I think. Nowadays, if I order something online, the website will tell me it’s back ordered, and give me an expected shipping date. Sometimes I’m told even if I order by phone.If there are further delays, I’ll be notified (frequently by email)and given the option of cancelling. In the '80s, the company would have had to call me or send me a postcard if they didn’t ship within 30 days, unless they had already told me it would take longer.

23

Just In Time warehousing barely existed in the 80s. Most mail order manufacturers did indeed keep large stocks in warehouses. Remember, the infamous Thor Power Tools decision was in 1979, and the wording predated that. Manufacturers could depreciation unsold stock and pay taxed on the lower value, making it less of a burden to keep stock around.

The “six-to-eight weeks” was like what Scotty said in ST:TNG: you always give a longer time than normal in order to look good and avoid complaints.

In addition, the biggest innovation in mail order was not the Internet, but in bar coding of warehouse items. The process of finding items in a warehouse is much quicker now; it might take half an hour to fill an order that now might take ten minutes. The longer time meant things got backed up.

24

[QUOTE=MsRobyn]
As always, The Master has spoken on the subject of rebate processing, at least in the US.
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That report concentrates more on why out-of-the-way locations are used to process stuff, but it does say:

25

[QUOTE=Exapno Mapcase]
Here’s a secret. A lot of that stuff you ordered? It didn’t exist.

They’d wait until the orders came in. With the money. Then they’d make up a batch and send them out.

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I know this is GQ, and I also know the plural of anecdote isn’t data, but I understood this to be the case, in particular with those CD box sets which “aren’t available in the shops” and the charming pottery tat advertised in the back of magazines.

I’m desperately looking for a cite and will be right back. FWIW, it was explained to me that the reason for this is that if insufficient orders were placed to make it worthwhile, the money would be refunded.

tim

26

Doesn’t a lot of it have to do with times for cheque processing back in the eighties? Did fewer people use credit cards for mail order then, as opposed to online now??

27

[QUOTE=Auntbeast]

While the manufacturer may have a ton of stock, that doesn’t mean the infomercial marketing company does. Heck, even Amazon’s basic shipping takes far longer than I think it should, I’m talking about the free shipping over $50 offers they make, if I remember correctly, it takes about a month.
[/QUOTE]

No way. 5-7 days, I think, if everything is in stock. Nowhere near a month, at any rate. I use it all the time.

That’s really interesting about how infomercials work, though.

28

[QUOTE=Zsofia]
No way. 5-7 days, I think, if everything is in stock. Nowhere near a month, at any rate. I use it all the time.

That’s really interesting about how infomercials work, though.
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Zsofia,

I run a small online bookstore that sells through Amazon, so I spend a LOT of time on Amazon’s help pages.
I believe the poster you were answering was referring to Amazon “Free Super Saver Shipping”.
Details can be found here:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=527692
Note: [when using Super Saver Shipping] your order will take an additional 3 to 5 business days to ship.

That puts you out to 5 days just for it to ship. Some items ordered from Amazon will go via UPS Ground, USPS Media Mail or USPS Bulk Printed Matter Shipping rates, which is the domestic equivalent of slow boat service. (In fact, they take 4-6 weeks to Hawaii or Alaska, but we’ll leave that out of the equation.)
Your parcel will move at the speed of the USPS contract truck carrying it, which is 8 hours per day of movement at tractor trailer speeds with 1-3 days overhead for the USPS to get it to their regional hub.
Worst case scenario in the continental US would be, let’s say, Bar Harbor, Maine to San Diego, CA. You’re looking at 7 business days.
In calendar days, that 7+5 days could turn into 14 days with a weekend thrown in.
I’ll note that if they used UPS Ground you’d be looking at 5+5 days, with a final delivery time no more than 12 days from when you ordered.
Of course, your mileage may vary, but your experience will likely depend in part on your distance from the depot your orders are coming from.

Aside: The first “3 to 5 days” is actually Amazon having their suppliers send product via a contracted semi (which cuts down on costs via volume) to a facility that proceeds to bundle all your stuff for shipment as a single parcel. The trick is that they pay pennies per item to send tons of product from supplier to warehouse due to their not having to pay individually per parcel. The part they hate is actually having to pay per parcel to get your order shipped; that’s a lot more expensive than motor freight.

29

Incidentally, you may be talking about items that say “ships in 3-5 weeks.”
That’s time from your order to out the door.
That means Amazon DOES NOT have a supplier who has the item in stock, but has it listed as an item that they can procure.
If you order it, they’ll have to start searching to find someone who can actually fill the order, and sometimes they can’t do that at their quoted price, or at all. In those cases they’ll just cancel your order.
I know of at least two books that they absolutely CANNOT fulfill “direct from Amazon, NEW” orders for.
Both books are scarce and out of print, but due to catalog errors Amazon is showing “takes 3-5 weeks to deliver,” when in fact delivery time is “cold day in hell”. One shows as being $35 from Amazon, but you’re lucky to find it for less than $300 in new or even like new condition.

30

Yes, I’ve encountered that as well - definately out of print books being “3-5 weeks” or whatever. I tried it once and never did get the book. However, with things in stock at Amazon itself, I’ve never had free shipping take more than two weeks, absolute tops with the weekends and a holiday and dead presidents (I won’t forget that, Ford!) and everything. On the other hand, we do have a UPS hub at our airport, which may skew our results.

31

[QUOTE=Johnny Hildo]
Sorry, but I must call PURE. FUCKIN. BULLSHIT. on this charge. Cite, please.
[/QUOTE]
Man, calm down. :rolleyes:

32

[QUOTE=Musicat]
I was under the impression that ALL rebates are funded by the manufacturer. Is that not the case? I don’t see what difference it makes, anyway.

Since many refund policies give 10 or 30 days as the limit, that doesn’t justify holding up a rebate for 90 days. But the float does.
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I work for a retailer and we do our own rebates on certain products, so it does happen. We hang onto the rebate for four months to make sure the customer pays all the charges upto that point. Make sure they don’t ‘Grab the money and run’ so to speak.

33

[QUOTE=RealityChuck]
Just In Time warehousing barely existed in the 80s. Most mail order manufacturers did indeed keep large stocks in warehouses. Remember, the infamous Thor Power Tools decision was in 1979, and the wording predated that. Manufacturers could depreciation unsold stock and pay taxed on the lower value, making it less of a burden to keep stock around.

In addition, the biggest innovation in mail order was not the Internet, but in bar coding of warehouse items. The process of finding items in a warehouse is much quicker now; it might take half an hour to fill an order that now might take ten minutes. The longer time meant things got backed up.
[/QUOTE]

This bears repeating, I worked in a manual production inventory environment for a few years that was eventually converted to barcodes and scanners. When we started, finding a piece of inventory was literally, pull out the binder, and flip pages looking for the pallet it was on. If you remembered what area of the warehouse it was in you could narrow it down and start checking the pallet sheets for that area first. Once you located the page, go get a forklift driver to pull that pallet down for you, that might take 20-30 min for them to get around to it. Once down, dig through the pallet looking for the item, may be as many as 50 different items on a pallet, and plenty of times someone neglected to properly log the removal of product prior to your search. So you get to make a correction and place another request for another pallet to be brought down that supposedly also contains that product.

Bingo! You remove said item, note change in quantity on the pallet sheet on the pallet as well as the pallet sheet in the binder. Then you toss it over to assembly. There could be hundreds of these pulls to a single order. Then you cart it over to shipping for them to box it up, write out a label, fill out the bills of lading, and queue it up for to pick up.

All told it was not uncommon to see orders sit for a few days because several shippers offered significant discounts for larger pickups.

When it takes 20-25 man hours to pick parts, assemble, and process for shipping you tend not to even bother releasing the order to the warehouse floor until the check clears, and before the 80’s that could be several weeks by itself.

Warehousing and production supply chains have been evolving at a rate similar to the world of computers because they are massive information handling problems. So moving from 4-6 weeks to tomorrow morning is a hell of an improvement.