Originally Posted By: ultramag
That's a pretty good trick waiting till after the order is paid to flash a notice that it wont be processed for 10 days...............maybe you should hire some temp help.......and answer your phones.
Was that aimed at us?
If so...
Our "Contact Us" Page:
JoeBob Contact Us Page
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lease allow 5-10 days for orders to be processed and shipped due to a huge surge in volume.
DUE TO VERY HIGH CALL VOLUME
PLEASE EMAIL INQUIRIES
(BOLDED AND UNDERLINED)
And our shopping cart page (which you obviously have to go through to checkout):
JoeBob: View Cart Page
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lease allow 5-10 days for orders to be processed and shipped due to a huge surge in volume.
If the cart allows you to checkout then the inventory is held for your order, and it is IN STOCK.
(BOLDED AND UNDERLINED)
If you think you can hire temp help for an unprecedented, unpredictable, sudden surge in business you are sadly mistaken.
First: Would the temp help even be worth a dang? It can take weeks if not MONTHS to properly train an employee. A guy off the street can't answer questions about YHM handguards, or 2 stage vs 1 stage triggers, or even know availability on items off the top of their head. So we COULD theoretically hire a ton of temp help, and try to train them (which takes away trained employees from doing their own work). Then, HOPEFULLY this surge of business continues (which it won't most likely) otherwise we'll be out tens of thousands of dollars in labor that we won't recoup.
Secondly: We literally have THOUSANDS of calls coming in a day. We'll have handfuls of lines at a time ringing in. We're not going to try to staff ALL the phone lines possible to answer questions such as:
"When are you getting more 30rd magazines in...I'll prepay. I REALLY want magazines!"
"I want an AR15 lower really really bad. When are you getting more in. Please give me the secret handshake because I'll love you forever"
If you know a cheap source for turn-key employees that KNOW guns inside and out, local to us, will show up to work on time every-day, work long hours, won't pocket expensive inventory, and are highly intelligent then I'd be all ears.
New guys screw up orders, period. They'll mess up boxing and shipping orders at the beginning of their employment. That in the end causes us to have even more customer service issues and additional costs to operate on top of their labor.
Everyone right now is panic buying which means they're not being sensible, and they're all throwing up random hail marries trying to connect with getting inventory.
We're backed up 1000 orders alone, without answering our phones. If we pull staffing off of processing orders, shipping orders, to answer the above questions we'd never get anything done. We ship out 400 orders a day. That's about our maximum capacity at our current staffing levels and influx of orders, customer service needed, FFL transfers being arranged, local business, etc. Our local sales have greatly increased as well through all this, which means more staffing needs to go upfront to work as well.
So at this point we have two choices:
1:Not answer all the calls and try to best serve our current customers and orders that are in processing.
2: Answer all phones and never get caught up and not serve our current customers that already have orders placed.
Option 1 seems to be the best in the long run.
Our availability is marked on the website, however, there are delays in processing on EVERY gun dealers website on the internet. Just check out DSG Arms, Rainier Arms, Brownells, Aim Surplus, etc, etc. EVERYONE has notes to expect delays and many indicate phone lines are slammed. That's life right now. NO business operates on a surplus of trained labor to accommodate a 2-3 times surge in normal volume.
Many of our distributors are backed up 3-7 days on shipping and they're not even dealing with customers. Only dealer orders.
I'm assuming you aren't a small business owner yourself? Staffing is the hardest thing to plan for, period. In our line of work, you can't hire random workers. The liability and risk that goes along with it all is unlike any other small business.
Did you get a Christmas break from your employer? How many days off are federal holidays at this time of year for employees? How many days this time of year do USPS & Fedex not operate? These all affect our timelines in shipping. Just so YOU know, we've had a total of (8) personal days taken for our entire dozen employees outside of Christmas Day in the entire month of December. That includes sick days, or days they needed off for family commitments. Yes, we have families too. Many businesses take a week off at this time of year, which we have not done.
Most of our part timers are working fulltime hours, and all of our fulltimers are working additional hours. Many are working on weekends ontop of working all week.
If you want to complain to someone, you're preaching to the choir. We're busting our tail to try to get caught up, and have made it obvious enough on the website to let people know what we're dealing with currently on wait times which is currently an industry standard.
We can cancel your order if you'd like. Just email us your order # and reference this thread and we'll take care of it.
Just my $.02.