@slippinjimmy wrote:
I like to recall the Shipinado days of December 2020, it reminds me that if you just chill things will work out fine.
As a refresher in the second week of December 2020, best week of the holiday period ALL my shipments arrived at Regional USPS facility which within a couple of hours shut down for nearly three weeks with my orders trapped inside.
Not a single INR, not a single bad feedback, not a single metric ding, no need to panic.
Same here, but I'm curious how you avoided INR's and negs. -Just get lucky and have all sweetheart buyers, or did you do any particular proactive thing? Incidentally, the 3 years' time since then must have narrowed your memory a bit, because really it was at least somewhat problematic the whole month of November, REALLY BAD through all of December, and even fairly bad a ways into January.
There were THREE confounding factors to make the perfect storm, well four if you count actual storms (e.g. snow/ice) and I do recall there were some but not specifically when or where.
1. Tons of postal workers at home because either they were sick with Covid, tested positive for Covid, or had family members sick with Covid.
2. In addition to the usual high postal traffic of Christmas stuff, there was higher than ever traffic of ordinary day-to-day household stuff, because people were afraid to get infected in crowded stores.
3. The election. Sigh. Yes that was in early November, and even with the extraordinary volume of mail-in ballots, it shouldn't have resulted in any major logjams for the main mid-Nov/Dec Christmas traffic. But because a certain Louis DeJoy had been appointed by His Royal Orangeness, and mail-in ballots were likely to skew 'challenging candidate' (because people who would avoid in-person voting ... because they took the virus more seriously than HRO ... were not likely to vote for him), AND because DeJoy had (and has to this day) conflict-of-interest investments in other package carriers ..... he went and shut down a ton of post offices, took away sorting equipment from a ton of other ones, and set major limits on postal worker overtime eligibility ..... and some of those blows were never remedied, but none were until well after Christmas.
I happened to be waiting for things I purchased (here and elsewhere) and what that did was give me perspective about how frustrating it is to wait an extraordinarily long time, even though I could see it wasn't the seller's/merchant's fault, by looking at tracking. But I thought, what about buyers who don't have a clue, or who are used to benefitting from "the customer is always right" entitlements? I was also seeing the horror stories here in the forums, starting in November. Sellers receiving tons of frantic emails, having refunds snatched for INR's of items that would definitely still be delivered, some deciding to put their stores on vacation until January, etc.
That's when I realized I couldn't afford to make assumptions about my buyers' awareness or good will. I needed to address their concerns even before they grew big enough to write to me. So I started keeping careful watch on all my tracking, and any package that appeared stuck for more than a couple days, I would write to that buyer and let them know I was watching with them, that I empathized, and that I would be the one to file a missing package case if it came to it. Not only did it 'work,' a ton of them expressed lavish praise in both feedback and PM's. A few referenced how I was the only seller/merchant who seemed to care after getting their money. That made me realize how alone so many people felt, and go figure, some hadn't even seen other humans in a long time, and wouldn't even for the holidays.
And that year my poor sweet grandma died 2 days after Christmas from Covid, because she dared to go to church just once, out of sheer need for fellowship. She was the last of my grandparents still alive. So, long reply short, long reply that came from my PTSD joke ... although I didn't suffer any business repercussions that season, in fact it made me a better seller thereafter, it took hyper-vigilance and lots of exposure to despair, even if mostly by-proxy. The opposite of "just chilling" I guess, but I will say, once it was over I did feel a sort of Zen I never had before as a seller. Like, if I survived that unscathed, it's going to take a lot more than a random incident with a bad buyer or unfair eBay decision to really stress me out.
