Delays, delays, confusion, progress

Blog entry for August 2021

Or possibly "Coronavirus update five"...

And now it is August, so we have the annual O-bon holidays. Confusion reigns: because of the rescheduling of the Olympics, the public holidays this year were set after the calendars had been printed, (and we didn't notice) so orders from our suppliers are disrupted, while the manufacturers all take different days off, this year spread over weeks 2 and 3 of August. The result will be delays in getting stock, particularly of new puzzles.

More delays: The postal system is hugely disrupted worldwide, although there are big variations from country to country. The SE Asia direction seems least affected, so orders to Singapore or Australia are almost at normal delivery times. At the other end of the scale, we have had huge delays to North America in particular, with surface taking up to four months, and an airmail package reported as arriving after 11 weeks!

Confusion: well, it is certainly confusing, the wildly different selections of mail services which are operating or suspended. For a number of countries, particularly in South America, there is simply no available service at all, and then there is Canada to which everything except (untracked) airmail "small packet" is suspended, so no real economy (surface) and no express (EMS) either. I'm sorry, but it is taking me many times the normal effort just to provide the options in many cases.

The one bright spot on the horizon is that I am making progress on moving the shop to a separate .com domain; this includes a new checkout system to offer whatever options really are available for each destination. Where possible, you will be able to complete the checkout normally, but there are still cases in which we cannot calculate the shipping automatically, so it will still be manual. In particular, where EMS is suspended and we can offer express shipping by Yamato (UPS in at least some countries), the cost depends on the dimensions of the final package, and we can only provide an extremely vague guess based on the weight.

Anyway, please look out for an announcement about the new domain perhaps in September!