Kendall Swafford of Up Up & Away! in
No surprises here; virtually everyone agrees that receiving shipments one day earlier would be a good thing for retailers, ultimately (and immediately) benefiting customers with improved service on Wednesdays. Most of us are working WAY too hard Wednesday mornings trying to prepare hundreds of SKUs and thousands of pieces in an incredibly small window of time. It might seem ridiculous to an outsider how hard we try to get our product on the street in just a few short hours, but our collective livelihoods depend upon the devoted nature of our customer base, and our ability to "feed the beast."
We all know some in our marketplace that would break the street date without a second thought. Just this past weekend saw two violations in my market of Games Workshop's street date for its new Warhammer 40K release, so clearly the minority will ruin it for the rest. Eventually that problem sorts itself out, with retailers policing each other, and as A.G. Holliman of The Comic Strip suggested, Diamond can withhold future shipments by a day to punisher violators. Simple enough.
So let's discuss the elephant in the living room; Diamond has no motive and no desire to make this change. None. Some would say that Diamond benefits from healthy, successful retailers and that's true, in theory. But the already successful among us will continue to be so in spite of Diamond, and the lazy, unmotivated store owners are like Hydra; one dies and three more take its place. Diamond knows this.
The lack of any margin of error is killing us. I can go on for DAYS about the numerous and frequent shipping/packing/billing errors that we encounter. Last week, two $300 bookend sets didn't show, but someone else's Red Sonja statue did. Diamond overnights my statues to me, has me overnight the statue I received to
And this isn't the exception to the rule, mistakes ARE the rule, an error-free week is the exception. A Tuesday arrival allows us to deal with shipping errors, billing errors and packing errors in a professional and timely manner, lessening the impact on the customer.
Isn't everyone tired of making excuses for why something didn't arrive as promised?
This conversation of course leads us to holiday shipping schedules. Regular Tuesday delivery would mean holiday deliveries on Wednesday. In other words, holiday weeks wouldn't have a negative impact on cash flow. Then busting your hump Wednesday morning to make your opening time would be the exception, rather than the rule. Simple enough.
The solutions are simple enough, and the costs to Diamond are negligible, if not zero. The benefits to retailers are enormous, the savings significant. But don't hold your collective breaths waiting for Diamond to change. They won't. Where's the motive to do so?
The opinions expressed in this Talk Back article are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.
