Archive | 2020

It has been an interesting few months for, well, everything, including USPS mailings.  Here is some of the oddities I’ve seen in the last month:

• Packages having random delivery time delays
• Packages that are marked as undeliverable and sent back to us despite having the correct address
• Letters that take a month or more to arrive just within California
• An international package that sat for over two months in the Port of LA waiting for international transport
• Deliveries to the correct address on the wrong street or the wrong address on the correct street

Just a reminder to be patient as shipments from us may not arrive in a timely fashion due to these issues, or may not arrive at all.  Check the tracking which you’ll get with our shipping confirmation email to see what is going on.  If it says delivered, check with your neighbors to see if they received it by accident.

Just understand that we aren’t the USPS and probably have less of a chance of finding a mis-delivered package than you do by talking to your neighbors, mail carrier, or local Post Office.  Please exhaust your local options before expecting us to re-ship your order.

If your order is ultimately not delivered, don’t worry, we’ll do everything we can to make it right.

For years, we’ve seen a sales cycle that peaks around the holidays, and troughs in mid-summer.  Everything associated with our business follows this same cycle, so we are pretty sure it represents the level of interest people have in finding replacement parts for their cookware, and not something else.

And then there is this year, the blue line above.  May was our best month we’ve ever had in 11 years, by a significant margin.

My best guess has been that the holidays bore an increase of sentimentality, which caused people to want to refurbish their Revere Ware, or perhaps do it as a gift for a loved one.  I’d also assumed that the increase in sales we are seeing in the last few months is because people have more time on their hands, and are doing things they have long put off.

In casual conversation with my mother yesterday, a very astute woman and practicing certified public accountant, I mentioned the cyclicality of our sales to her.  She immediately came up with the idea that the current sales increase is driven by the fact that people are cooking more now.

That sure make a lot of sense.  People do cook some pretty prominent meals during the holiday months, and people are preparing their own food more now, as we well know.

I tried to find studies about cooking at home (or restaurant sales) versus time of the year, but was unable to find any data to back up the new theory. Still, I like it better than my last theory. 🙂

After a customer request, we have added Puerto Rico as a shipping and billing option.  We’ve hesitated to add countries other than the US and Canada to our shipping destinations because configuration and rate selection must be done separately for each country. Puerto Rico however gets the same US domestic shipping rates so we were able to add it to our US domestic shipping zone, which made things a lot easier.

However, because Puerto Rico falls in a grey area where it isn’t really a separate country than the US, and it isn’t a state, there is one quirk; when you select Puerto Rico as the “country”, it doesn’t show any selection for the state, and you have to manually add Puerto Rico as the state, in addition to it being the country.