The Holiday Season 2021 : When We Ship, Last Day for Shipping Orders, Pickup Policy
How do we ship? Why don't you see shipping updates after an order has been made?
We ship once a week from Jan-Nov; during Dec, we ship twice a week. During the year, we begin processing orders made by Wednesday at 5pm EST. After labels have been made for these orders, we spend Thursday packing items up and we ship on Friday. During December, we also ship on Wednesdays. To have an item shipped on Wednesday, your order must have been made by Monday at 5pm. You will only see shipping updates after we have printed a label, which happens on Wednesdays and also Mondays during December.
If you're looking for Christmas delivery, the last day you have to order is Thursday the 16th at 11pm (Eastern Standard Time). These items will most likely ship on the 17th because it takes time to pack up, arrange the pickup with our shippers, etc etc etc. Provided that you are living in the continental USA, we will ship items express (3 Day, 2 Day, Overnight, etc) if necessary to get them to you by the 24th -- it doesn't matter if you selected Ground, we'll still ship express after we pass certain Ship-by dates unless otherwise noted in some way.
Shipping on these schedules has historically been a good bet, it is also stated by UPS, and companies like ShipStation who deal with shipping on a daily basis. I say that to say this : we can only make these sorts of decisions based on what we are told by shippers.
Can you just come pickup?
In most cases, no. This time of year, I do make an exception though. Reach out to us on the week leading up to Christmas (20th-24th) with what you are interested in, and we'll see. Please note this isn't a guarantee, it's luck.
Why don't we usually allow pickup? The reason why is that a couple years ago I chose to make a big decision -- I chose to hire a 3PL, aka a 3rd Party Logistics Company, to take our product, store it, and ship it on our behalf. My reasoning went something like this : we are not great at shipping, we don't have the space for it, and we don't have the time to make our workspace our shipping space, so why are we doing it? We're certainly better at making cutting boards. Just 4 years ago, I kid you not, we sometimes had 4 week wait times just to ship something -- ludicrous. Always something stupid happened, like we confused X for Y, or we added a detail that wasn't supposed to be added or the very opposite. It was apparent that how we were doing things was just not going to work, so I changed it. And we don't break our rules now that the steps are simpler; we don't remove items from an outgoing shipment to our 3PL for customers. It is a slippery slope as they say, and that would become a big problem while trying to keep track of our inventories.
