Restocks/Represses

zdkaiser said:
@Plaid Room / Colemine

Hey Plaidroom, are you all charging shipping for albums that cost $49.99? I am trying to check out and it's charging me $5.50 for media mail. I wanna say that on previous orders I've made, anything near the $50 mark had free shipping. Forget what your threshold was, but I wanna say it was if the total was above $49.
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Can’t say for sure but I think I remember a post about Plaidroom having to change the free-shipping threshold due to rising shipping-related costs.
 
Russ I said:
Good to know. Someone posted about having to raise the minimum for free shipping (or was it an email.....).
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We're probably going to have to bump to $60 or $70 by the time the year is over. The free shipping is great but we also need to incentivize folks to use UPS where possible. Our local USPS is just too unreliable. They lost around 150 packages of ours in mid-March, some having over $500 worth of records inside. I'd love to ship everything UPS but we just can't quite do it right now.
 
Plaid Room / Colemine said:
The free shipping is great but we also need to incentivize folks to use UPS where possible.
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I can't speak to domestic service within the US, but in my experience as an international customer from the US as well as my experiences domestically within Canada, UPS does everything they possibly can to DE-incentivize folks to use UPS.
 
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Really? I'd be interested to hear your experience with them. Honestly, 95% of our business is domestic, as there's export restrictions on most major label stuff. But, we do a handful of international and we've moved to UPS with most of it for the same things that are happening domestically. I can get packages to the UK in less than a week very consistently with UPS. But, USPS, we're seeing transit times anywhere between 3 weeks and 8 weeks.
 
Plaid Room / Colemine said:
Really? I'd be interested to hear your experience with them. Honestly, 95% of our business is domestic, as there's export restrictions on most major label stuff. But, we do a handful of international and we've moved to UPS with most of it for the same things that are happening domestically. I can get packages to the UK in less than a week very consistently with UPS. But, USPS, we're seeing transit times anywhere between 3 weeks and 8 weeks.
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I've had UPS outright lose partial shipments on my twice now - once coming from the US and once within Canada. I've also received deliveries from them that have been damaged within shipping but our driver just leaves it inside the lobby of our building and runs away like a coward rather than own up to it. On more than a few occasions, UPS has charged absolutely exorbitant "brokerage fees" on cross-border shipments that would not otherwise incur duties. In my experience, these fees have ranged from 50%-100% of the cost of the item ordered and they hold your shit hostage until you pay it. So when I ordered somebody a $60 art book direct from the artist as a birthday gift some years ago and had to pay $60 to liberate it from UPS (let alone make my way out to an extremely inconvenient location to do it suddenly went from a birthday gift I could just barely afford to get them to one it took a while to recover from. To add insult to insult, one of the drivers in our area has been incredibly rude to my wife on two occasions now. And, of course, calling in to register a complaint or try and locate the fifth box from a partial delivery is just an absolutely convoluted mess of robots, recordings and unhelpful people and options.

Truly the absolute worst of it for me though has been the bullshit "brokerage fees" which is obviously a strictly cross-border thing. FedEx and DHL also pull the same bullshit (I've also had DHL charge me an $11 fee to collect 50 cents worth of tax that had gone unpaid by a shipper before). This particular issue obviously wouldn't be a factor in your domestic shipments - and, ultimately, I understand that you as a business have to do what's best for you to make sure your asses are covered and it sounds like USPS has fucked you over far worse than UPS has fucked me over so wanting to move away from that makes perfect sense.

To be fair, I don't recall being able to order to Canada through your website anyhow - the export restrictions you mention make that make a bit more sense, so really my disdain is kinda moot on this point. I just get triggered by UPS and have an exceptional hate-on for them given my experiences. I will avoid purchasing from places where UPS is the only shipping option - especially if it's crossing a border.

All that said, if moving your shipping strictly to them is going to be better for Plaid Room that's the most important factor. And those shipments being all, or mostly, domestic eliminate the most grievous bit of bullshit from UPS's arsenal in their dealings with you - so more power to you. Despite being unable to directly support y'all due to geographic factors, I really love and appreciate the shit out of what you do and how well you do it. As such I wish you nothing but success and a process that suck less!
 
Plaid Room / Colemine said:
Really? I'd be interested to hear your experience with them. Honestly, 95% of our business is domestic, as there's export restrictions on most major label stuff. But, we do a handful of international and we've moved to UPS with most of it for the same things that are happening domestically. I can get packages to the UK in less than a week very consistently with UPS. But, USPS, we're seeing transit times anywhere between 3 weeks and 8 weeks.
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I didn't realise you shipped to the UK. I'll have a look.
 
avecigrec said:
I've had UPS outright lose partial shipments on my twice now - once coming from the US and once within Canada. I've also received deliveries from them that have been damaged within shipping but our driver just leaves it inside the lobby of our building and runs away like a coward rather than own up to it. On more than a few occasions, UPS has charged absolutely exorbitant "brokerage fees" on cross-border shipments that would not otherwise incur duties. In my experience, these fees have ranged from 50%-100% of the cost of the item ordered and they hold your shit hostage until you pay it. So when I ordered somebody a $60 art book direct from the artist as a birthday gift some years ago and had to pay $60 to liberate it from UPS (let alone make my way out to an extremely inconvenient location to do it suddenly went from a birthday gift I could just barely afford to get them to one it took a while to recover from. To add insult to insult, one of the drivers in our area has been incredibly rude to my wife on two occasions now. And, of course, calling in to register a complaint or try and locate the fifth box from a partial delivery is just an absolutely convoluted mess of robots, recordings and unhelpful people and options.

Truly the absolute worst of it for me though has been the bullshit "brokerage fees" which is obviously a strictly cross-border thing. FedEx and DHL also pull the same bullshit (I've also had DHL charge me an $11 fee to collect 50 cents worth of tax that had gone unpaid by a shipper before). This particular issue obviously wouldn't be a factor in your domestic shipments - and, ultimately, I understand that you as a business have to do what's best for you to make sure your asses are covered and it sounds like USPS has fucked you over far worse than UPS has fucked me over so wanting to move away from that makes perfect sense.

To be fair, I don't recall being able to order to Canada through your website anyhow - the export restrictions you mention make that make a bit more sense, so really my disdain is kinda moot on this point. I just get triggered by UPS and have an exceptional hate-on for them given my experiences. I will avoid purchasing from places where UPS is the only shipping option - especially if it's crossing a border.

All that said, if moving your shipping strictly to them is going to be better for Plaid Room that's the most important factor. And those shipments being all, or mostly, domestic eliminate the most grievous bit of bullshit from UPS's arsenal in their dealings with you - so more power to you. Despite being unable to directly support y'all due to geographic factors, I really love and appreciate the shit out of what you do and how well you do it. As such I wish you nothing but success and a process that suck less!
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Definitely appreciate the perspective on this, and I can certainly relate to a lot of these issues.

I guess at the end of the day for us, UPS has fucked up about 8 packages this year, and USPS has fucked up over 250. The other difference is that UPS comes with insurance up to $100 automatically. When UPS has destroyed packages, they'll actually issue us a check for the entire amount of the package up to $100, which is actually pretty nice.

But yes, the brokerage fees, and and all of that BS, I totally feel you. It's a mess one way or the other. Feels a bit like voting to me, just choosing the lesser of 2 evils.
 
Andy said:
I didn't realise you shipped to the UK. I'll have a look.
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"Plaid Room" actually doesn't ship to the UK, unless it's some of the used 45s on the website. "Colemine" ships internationally. The difference is, with Colemine we control almost all of the products so we can export as we choose. But with Plaid Room, we're stocking boatloads of major label stuff, and none of that is technically allowed to be exported. There's definitely some stuff on the Plaid Room site we can export, but it's so hard to tease apart what's allowed to be exported and what isn't, we have it set up so that nothing "new" can be exported by default. It's not worth the risk of losing our major label accounts.
 
Plaid Room / Colemine said:
Really? I'd be interested to hear your experience with them. Honestly, 95% of our business is domestic, as there's export restrictions on most major label stuff. But, we do a handful of international and we've moved to UPS with most of it for the same things that are happening domestically. I can get packages to the UK in less than a week very consistently with UPS. But, USPS, we're seeing transit times anywhere between 3 weeks and 8 weeks.
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That's interesting, because my orders from y'all to Virginia usually arrive via USPS less than a week from shipping.
 
wmeugene said:
That's interesting, because my orders from y'all to Virginia usually arrive via USPS less than a week from shipping.
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That's great to hear! You're one of the lucky ones. When things go smooth with USPS, it's great. The transit times I mentioned right before that were for international shipments.

Most domestic shipments with USPS still make it with a pretty reasonable transit time. It's just - when they mess up - they mess it up in a big way (see my note about about losing 150 packages mid-March :().

We appreciate your orders!
 
I haven't gotten any mail for two weeks now, so I'm on team pissed off at USPS right now. They're delivering my packages (for the most part, two are "missing") but no regular mail. Everyday I get an informed delivery with bills and checks and other crap and everyday my mailbox has been empty. And they're really unhelpful lately in fixing problems, including having several dead links on the website now. Dejoy really screwed that place up and the fact Biden has kept him is mindnumbingly stupid.
 
avecigrec said:
I've had UPS outright lose partial shipments on my twice now - once coming from the US and once within Canada. I've also received deliveries from them that have been damaged within shipping but our driver just leaves it inside the lobby of our building and runs away like a coward rather than own up to it. On more than a few occasions, UPS has charged absolutely exorbitant "brokerage fees" on cross-border shipments that would not otherwise incur duties. In my experience, these fees have ranged from 50%-100% of the cost of the item ordered and they hold your shit hostage until you pay it. So when I ordered somebody a $60 art book direct from the artist as a birthday gift some years ago and had to pay $60 to liberate it from UPS (let alone make my way out to an extremely inconvenient location to do it suddenly went from a birthday gift I could just barely afford to get them to one it took a while to recover from. To add insult to insult, one of the drivers in our area has been incredibly rude to my wife on two occasions now. And, of course, calling in to register a complaint or try and locate the fifth box from a partial delivery is just an absolutely convoluted mess of robots, recordings and unhelpful people and options.

Truly the absolute worst of it for me though has been the bullshit "brokerage fees" which is obviously a strictly cross-border thing. FedEx and DHL also pull the same bullshit (I've also had DHL charge me an $11 fee to collect 50 cents worth of tax that had gone unpaid by a shipper before). This particular issue obviously wouldn't be a factor in your domestic shipments - and, ultimately, I understand that you as a business have to do what's best for you to make sure your asses are covered and it sounds like USPS has fucked you over far worse than UPS has fucked me over so wanting to move away from that makes perfect sense.

To be fair, I don't recall being able to order to Canada through your website anyhow - the export restrictions you mention make that make a bit more sense, so really my disdain is kinda moot on this point. I just get triggered by UPS and have an exceptional hate-on for them given my experiences. I will avoid purchasing from places where UPS is the only shipping option - especially if it's crossing a border.

All that said, if moving your shipping strictly to them is going to be better for Plaid Room that's the most important factor. And those shipments being all, or mostly, domestic eliminate the most grievous bit of bullshit from UPS's arsenal in their dealings with you - so more power to you. Despite being unable to directly support y'all due to geographic factors, I really love and appreciate the shit out of what you do and how well you do it. As such I wish you nothing but success and a process that suck less!
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Not sure what it is about UPS here in Canada, but to say they are a bunch of rodeo clowns is an insult to rodeo clowns. Too many issues to count with them in the past 2 years and pretty much 50% of the time there is a screw up on their part with every order.

If I had a choice between UPS and a random person hitchhiking across Canada to deliver my parcel, I would go with the stranger since I would probably have better luck that it would arrive at my house in a timely fashion and not be damaged.
 
Hemotep said:
I haven't gotten any mail for two weeks now, so I'm on team pissed off at USPS right now. They're delivering my packages (for the most part, two are "missing") but no regular mail. Everyday I get an informed delivery with bills and checks and other crap and everyday my mailbox has been empty. And they're really unhelpful lately in fixing problems, including having several dead links on the website now. Dejoy really screwed that place up and the fact Biden has kept him is mindnumbingly stupid.
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I was told that the reason my mail wasn't being delivered some days, even after they show up in informed delivery and are "out for delivety," is because they don't have anyone to deliver it. I live in Seattle in the city limits, not on some random cliff in the middle of nowhere. They're understaffed here.

That said, I'm not a fan of UPS either.
 
jamieanderson1968 said:
If I had a choice between UPS and a random person hitchhiking across Canada to deliver my parcel, I would go with the stranger since I would probably have better luck that it would arrive at my house in a timely fashion and not be damaged.
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Hobo Post! I have legit done this, sending and receiving, and it's worked out very well.
(I knew a lot more train hopping, hitchhiking anarchists and crusty punks back in the day)
 
Dead C said:
I was told that the reason my mail wasn't being delivered some days, even after they show up in informed delivery and are "out for delivety," is because they don't have anyone to deliver it. I live in Seattle in the city limits, not on some random cliff in the middle of nowhere. They're understaffed here.

That said, I'm not a fan of UPS either.
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Sometimes I wish I lived on some random cliff in the middle of nowhere.
 
Our Smashing Pumpkins restock may have fallen through, fyi! Even though I pre-paid 😐😐😐😐😐😐😐😐😐😐😐. We'll have a small amount of Mellon Collie, still waiting to hear how many. Sorry to let some folks down. I'll be sure to limit the stock we do have to 1 per customer to try to spread around.

I had so many folks ask for a pre-pay or reservations on this one. It's unfortunate that this is the exact reason I don't do that. In today's world, even when you pre-pay and write a big ol' check, it doesn't guarantee you stock. I'll do my best though to keep it on my backorder list and hopefully they'll get some more stock soon!

Cheers,
Bob
 
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