Sellers who use shipping timeslots against their customers...

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Readers of BoGD presumably know of my interwebbing panache at gleaming the cube of eBay and Amazon for interesting tapes and discs. Usually things go well and I receive my plunder in appropriately due time. Sellers often ignore the expected shipping timeslots assigned by e-tailers for the buyers to know when to expect the package. I say "ignore" in a good sense because you usually already receive the purchase days before the starting date of the timeslot. Then there are the assholes. The ones that promptly send you shipping confirmations a day or two after the initial purchase and then leave you hanging for weeks until the package finally lands in your mailbox. Sure, the goods might have arrived within the timeslot, but it's still an absolute dick move on the part of the seller. Especially when your fists clinch the box in annoyance when the post office's stamp rides a shipping date or just three or four days prior.

Case in point, a seller based in Ohio I purchased six tapes from in two separate orders from two separate places. A five tape lot from eBay on March 17th and one tape from Amazon on the 21st. Both were marked for media mail and I received shipping confirmation a day later respectively. I've had many of the same type of orders from Ohio across a multitude of sellers throughout the years and unless something catastrophic occurred--it just seems mighty fishy two packages would be entangled even in media mail for this long at this time of the year. Usually media mail for Ohio takes about four or five days to reach me. Everything else I ordered from around that time has long since arrived...even Survival of the Dead from Amazon.uk across the friggin' Atlantic.

The moral of this rant? Sellers who use shipping timeslots against their customers are lazy assholes. They truly give the hobby of collecting through valuable online sources a bad name. Most buyers don't care about anything after the transaction's completion except for receiving the item in a timely fashion. Period. I'm still going to hold out on contacting either the seller or the merchants in question, but I'm real tempted to give negative feedback regardless of if/when I get the packages. At this point, I wouldn't care if they arrived with a handwritten apology and an Andes mint inside. I'm getting real tired of such sellers taking advantage of their customers this dirty way. Imagine if you went to Best Buy, bought a DVD, and then had to wait weeks to receive it? By the time it's in your hands, you've either nearly forgotten or much cared anymore.

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