Some Notes About 2017 Holiday Shipping Deadlines

**Our 2017 Christmas Shipping deadline has passed for free and priority shipping.  We may be able to arrange overnight or other special shipping if you do need something for Christmas.**

 

Key considerations for Holiday Orders:

• If you are ordering a large item such as a printer, we ship fedex ground.  Transit times are via the chart below.  Please contact us to confirm delivery time for large items before ordering.
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• Most of our smaller items ship via USPS.  They say that first class (free shipping) is safe if you order by 12/19 and Priority by 12/20.  We think those dates are a bit risky given all the shipping troubles we've seen this season.  Please contact us if you are ordering 'need by Christmas' items after 12/14.
• We've noticed quite a lot of delays in typical delivery times since the Holiday shipping season has kicked off.  It's annoying to you, and it's annoying to us, but it is the nature of the season.  If your package is still showing as in transit, odds are everything is fine, but please don't hesitate to contact us if it goes more than a few days beyond the estimated delivery time.
• We have seen a number of packages marked as delivered that were not actually delivered at that time.  In all cases, those were delivered the next day.  We are guessing that is overworked carriers scanning packages as delivered so that they don't get in trouble and then actually delivering the next day.  Bad stuff, but again, just something that seems to be happening this season.   What do do:  Check with your neighbors and leave a note with your mail carrier with the tracking number.  They do have GPS coordinates for every scanned package, so they can probably figure out where it was incorrectly delivered to pretty quickly.  If you don't get a resolution within a few days, then contact us and we'll help.
• On our end, we have discovered that the latest release of our shipping software is not properly syncing multiple package shipments to our website.  We are anxiously awaiting a patch for this.  In the meantime, if you have an order of multiple objects, especial

Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, kicks off Holiday shopping season for most Americans.  You saw our insane sales and you've seen some of our competitors lackluster offerings :P, but you may not have noticed the impact that this has on some of our most critical support people:  the shipping companies. 

Both my home and Printed Solid are fortunate enough to be on mail routes with pickups near the end.  This puts us in a nice situation where we can get the majority of packages ordered out the same day.  We only promise noon, but as many of you know, we usually do much better.  

This also gives us a view of how late the carriers are actually working.  We're fortunate enough now to have a wonderful USPS carrier who messages with us on Facebook.  When she's running late, she lets us know and we just leave the packages in front of our security cameras until she gets them.  I don't want to give specifics on how late she has been by, but I can say for sure that the hours that are being worked are pretty staggering.  

So, make sure to be extra nice to your regular carrier this season!