As someone who bought a lot of mail order stuff in the late 80’s and 90’s, seeing the shipping times for items was always a shock. Four to six weeks seemed to be the norm but some things specified six to eight weeks, usually magazines or periodicals.
Why did it take so long? I understand the time needed for mail to arrive at the destination, be processed, packed, then shipped back to you was lengthy but 6 weeks seems awfully lengthy. Magazines made even less sense for them to take 8 weeks to get to you since it’s not like they needed to ship something to you that was that difficult to process.
I lived in Los Angeles and things still took forever to reach our house via the mail despite being in a “shipping hub”. I would think it would only take a week for the order form to arrive, a week to process it, then finally another week to ship. Why did it need 2-6 extra weeks?
like when you cal lfor a pizza and its always 45 minutes even though you could walk there in 15
most of it is/was padding … they gave themselves a week or two in case it didn’t get shipped outright or the printing messed up and they had to do it and for things they couldn’t control like weather or post offices losing things
Also, they waited for your payment to clear which could take 7-14 days
And it looked good when it came early "wow sears got it here in a week when the other guys took a month "
A monthly magazine only comes out every 4.5 weeks (roughly). So if you miss the shipping cutoff for a given month by just a few days you’ve got to wait another 4 weeks to ship it plus delivery time. Magazines are shipped in big pre-sorted bundles to take advantage of cheap periodical rates. Shipping a single magazine is expensive. Shipping thousands of them together with hundreds going together to the same area drops the cost significantly.
In the olden days, UPS was mainly a B2B (business to business) shipping company. Yes, they did residential deliveries, but they didn’t seek out the business. They used to require that every parcel be signed for, but made residential deliveries during business hours when everyone was at work, making it awkward. And if you weren’t home when the UPS man came, you had to drive 50 miles to their depot (which was also open business hours) to pick up your package. And FedEx had not acquired RPS yet, so they had no ground service, only their expensive express service.
So the only economical method to make residential deliveries was the Post Office (now called USPS). What was then called Fourth Class Mail (Parcel Post) was a really low-priority service for the Post Office. A cross-country parcel could really take weeks to transport and wait for a long time in sorting centers for the Post Office to get around to sorting them. Plus shippers would also wait to accumulate large shipments and ship them all at once so they could take advantage of bulk rates.
When UPS became serious about residential delivery, things changed. FedEx acquired RPS and built a ground delivery division and the USPS saw their business dwindling. Then USPS got serious about parcel service. They built a network of bulk mail centers separate from their letter-processing operations. Parcels no longer just got the leftover scraps of resources, but became a service on their own with performance goals to meet. And companies like SmartPost and SurePost (later acquired by FedEx and UPS) arose to bundle small shipments to get discount rates and move the packages outside the traditional systems.
I asked this in a thread many years ago. It was even worse in the 60’s and 70’s. Getting something from Sears or JcPenney took forever. Might be why their Christmas catalogs came out so early.
Buying something out of the back of a magazine really took forever. I sent away for something in the spring when I was in third grade and when I finally got it I was in 4th grade. True story.
One reason might have been a lot of products were made in the USA instead of China and other places. Companies didn’t have warehouses full of cheap goods and production was limited to only cover immediate demand.
Much of that speedup was automation and computerization, which didn’t exist ~40 years ago. Heck, 50 years ago there was only one delivery service, the government monopoly. With no competition and a guaranteed profit, why worry?
As far as magazine subscriptions, the mailing list is frozen as a batch far in advance of the actual shipment, ready to go. This was especially true when labels were printed separately and trucked to the shipper, before electronic delivery.
Some products aren’t produced at all until enough orders accumulate to make a batch run practical. May seem unethical, but it’s done.
Not so. Companies did have warehouses for their goods because it took time to set up manufacturing for them. Better to have a supply of them on hand than to have to reconfigure things to fill a small number of orders. It wasn’t until the Thor Power Tools ruling that warehousing became a problem.*
A bigger issue was transportation time and slower communication times. If you placed an order with Sears, it would take 2-3 days to get to them. It would take longer to process the information. A check could take over a week to clear.** Credit cards took a few minutes longer than now; that adds up. Humans were involved in all aspects that are now computerized, and pulling items was not automated.
*The IRS ruled that warehoused items could no longer be deducted from income, so the cost of warehousing jumped considerably.
For me it was a submarine that was propelled by baking soda. I mailed in two cereal boxtops and a quarter. Waited impatiently for over a month to arrive. Which made it priceless.
Let’s say the factory line can produce either widgets or gidgets. Once they have orders for 100 widgets, they can gear up the line to produce widgets. Then, when they have orders for 100 gidgets, they switch the line over to gidgets, and produce those.
You’re also believing that the companies involved had legions of clerks ready to open mail, process orders, and get the shipping information down to the shipping department so they could get your order out the door. That was not always the case. Your mail order may have gone to a “fulfillment house” which opened the mail, (often for many different companies) grouped it into appropriate batches, and forwarded each batch to the appropriate companies. Oftentimes the companies would wait until they had X number of orders in hand to process them.
Companies like Sears and Montgomery Ward were about as state-of-the-art as could be. But if, like me, you were ordering the big box of Civil War soldiers out of the back of a comic book. . . well, anticipation just made the whole thing more exciting.
For some of those TV infomercial products, the long time for shipping was because they would manufacture the products after they got the orders. Rather than having a warehouse full of inventory ready to go, they would collect orders and then manufacture the products to meet those orders.
and if you ever special order a car/truck, those have the same 6 week or so wait. the reason for that is that car companies typically have 4 weeks of production already “booked.” They know what they’ll be building on any given day in the next 4 weeks, suppliers have received forecasts so they know what parts to ship when, etc. and they can’t just insert a custom order. So when the dealer puts in your order, it has to wait to be included in the next build plan. Once your car’s number is up, it only takes about 2 days to build it. the remainder of the time is waiting for it to be tagged “OK to ship” and transported to your dealer.
Often they weren’t even manufacturing, just ordering. I recall that at some point the 4-6 week notice was prompted by credit card companies that didn’t want to deal with customers trying to void the transaction if they became impatient.
Also, they are making good money off those shipping and handling fees, sometimes all the profits they make from a sale. There were also companies using the first order as a way to start sending you catalogs with other goods and there was an excellent rate of return business that way. The internet kind of ruined that plan, catalogs are pretty close to dead now.
It is indeed efficient for the manufacturer. Yet borderline misleading. How many advertisers included wording like, “We will ship your order as soon as we have enough [del]suckers[/del] orders to justify making the product we advertised. As of now, we have no stock and no definite plans to make any whatsoever. We don’t even know if we can make it because we haven’t done it yet. You might get one, or you might not. So send your order in now, and we’ll all find out!”
And if they said that, how many would they sell? The public assumed the advertised item was sitting in quantity on a warehouse shelf, just like in retail stores, which wasn’t contradicted anywhere in the “buy it now!” ad.
In 1980 when I was collaborating with someone in Cleveland on a book, first class mail in either direction between Montreal and Cleveland took a full two weeks. Even special delivery took a week or more. Then we discovered the miracle of data networks. The post office discovered it too and have since learned how to deliver mail faster. If first class mail was so slow, how much worse was parcel post?
I still don’t see how it could be construed as misleading. If the advertisement says “Allow 4-6 for delivery” then the customer knows that up front.
My former company made fairly sophisticated electronics. There was a published delivery schedule. Parts were shipped same or next day, some equipment took 3-5 days, some 7-10 days, and the largest, most complex items could take 4-6 weeks.
Some of it is just slack built into the schedule for market segmentation reasons.
They want to make sure that if they get a bunch of mail orders at the same time as a major distributor puts in an order, they can fulfill that order faster and let the mail orders wait until they have some extra production/shipping/clerk to open the mail/whatever capacity.
The fact that someone submits a mail order is a signal that they’re willing to wait a long time for whatever it is, because even in the very best case it would be ~1 week to get the mail order, transmit it, and ship back the item. If you needed it fast, you’d just go to the store.
