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Erik Rutins -> Physical Shipment Status (7/30/2009 5:22:39 PM)
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Hi Everyone,
I have some news on the status of physical orders. Some good, some bad.
I have confirmation that the UK warehouse has everything in stock and should be shipping orders out today or tomorrow. That warehouse covers everywhere except the USA and Canada. The delay in the manuals arriving in the UK was due to an extra two day last minute "discussion" with UK customs to explain to them that yes, these really were full color game manuals and not "magazines" (which is what they were claiming and would have had to be taxed/imported differently). That's resolved and everything should be all set for orders to ship out.
On the US side, things got more complicated. When we released AE on Monday, we had excellent information that the manuals were going to be received at both the UK and US warehouses that same day or Tuesday at the latest. The US shipment had cleared customs in the port of Los Angeles the previous week and the shipment tracking indicated arrival in our Minnesota warehouse sometime on Monday. They did not arrive on Monday, or Tuesday or yesterday. Every day we've been checking with our warehouse and our shipper, multiple times per day, to find out where they were. Until yesterday evening, we were told they should be in the warehouse "any day now". Yesterday we finally got the real story.
US Customs decided to inspect the shipment again in Minnesota. The manuals have been a few miles from our warehouse for two days now, in the possession of US Customs. The shipper that shipped them out from China apparently failed to stick the label on the box that says "Printed in China". This appears to have been a pure oversight on their part as we all knew it needed to be done and had reminded them to do so. This was not caught in Los Angeles, but was caught on the second unexpected inspection in Minnesota. Unfortunately, this may now cause a significant problem for us.
We tried to get them to give us a waiver for this shipment last night, that now seems unlikely. The only alternative, they tell us, is for us to open all the boxes and put a label on each manual that says "Printed in China". Needless to say, doing that will add some additional delay and at this point we don't know if this will take a day, a few days or another week. Right now, we've got the labels printed, we're ready to go but we don't have confirmation from them yet on when we are allowed to go do that.
The upshot is that we waited to make sure that physical shipments would go out at the same time as downloads, but we were hit by Murphy again at the last possible moment. We're working overtime with our shipper and customs to resolve this unexpected and unfortunate complication in the shipping schedule.
I'll post more here as soon as I know more. Last night's news was very unpleasant news for us and all we can say is we're doing everything we can to expedite this now that we know what the problem is.
Regards,
- Erik
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