Blog posts in 2021

August — Delays, delays, confusion, progress

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!

December — Move to new location - at last!

Our new Imaginatorium Shop site at the .com domain is now operating: try this link: New Shop. We are still in the final testing stages, and there may be teething problems, but the main bit of progress is the new checkout: this is operating, so in most cases you can choose the shipping and pay online, without having to ask me for a quote. The shipping options have changed: the SAL economy air rates are all suspended indefinitely, but we have added surface as the new economy option for larger orders. Where EMS is suspended (USA, Australia, in particular), the only fast option is Yamato / UPS, and for this we can never calculate the shipping automatically, so you will still have to ask for a quote.

Eventually all pages on the old site will automatically redirect to the corresponding new page, so you do not have to worry about bookmarks.

Email addresses

Currently our email address is shop@imaginatorium.org, but this will move progressively to shop@imaginatorium.com. Please make sure you can receive our emails; you may need to fiddle with settings in your mail software to whitelist us.

Ongoing shipping problems

The big problem at present is simply unpredictability; everything varies country to country and case by case. If you are lucky, delivery times may be more or less normal; but sometimes not. The big problem regions are North America and Australia, where only extremely restricted services are operating.

And occasionally things go wrong on a horrendous scale. Mid-July, a customer in Denmark ordered some puzzles by surface. Accepting the need for patience (which sort of comes naturally to most puzzle fans!) this is very economical once you get to 3 or 4 kgs (three or four 1000-piece puzzles). But at the end of November, four and a half months later, there was still no sign of the puzzles, so we requested a Post Office investigation. The tracking system does not show progress while in international transit, so after Kawasaki port, the next event is arrival at the port in the destination country. But the Post Office internally obviously has ways of knowing where each container of packages is.

The head of our local Post Office is very helpful, and phoned me back with the following story.

It appears the package (pallet, container, whatever) was loaded on a ship in Kawasaki in July, and this ship set sail for Vladivostok. But on the way, it had to call somewhere in South Korea, and this is where everything went wrong (and the story gets a bit vague); it couldn't be unloaded, loaded, or docked or undocked, or something. The latest is that it is expected to arrive finally in Vladivostok mid-December. Then trans-Siberian to Moscow and on to Denmark. Normally the train takes about a week to Moscow, but who knows how long it might take now...

Update! 27 January 2022: the package has finally arrived with the customer in Denmark. I think this is the slowest delivery we have ever had, in nearly 20 years...