Not my style, but I guess I have no choice but to join in on this one... Problem is that I already know it's a lose/lose situation. Your upset and you have every right to be, we're just as upset as well... Problem here is I understand the human condition. Regardless of the answer and how it's stated, I'm the supplier, your the customer, your right, I'm a liar, etc. I know how it works... Problem is that I am now getting phone calls here from people concerned on what's going on. The problem is that nobody reading any of these posts have the benefit of speaking to us directly or hearing any of the phone calls between you and us or us and our supplier.... Here's what I can say up to this point...
* Yes, I understand your upset and believe me when I agree you have every reason to be. Your upset that you do not have your two spindles for your car, I'm as equally upset that I don't have the 200 spindles here in stock to ship.. Honestly, were both upset, although for slightly different angles. This backorder represents two spindles you need to get your car closer to being on the road. It also represents the dozens I need to finialize the thousands of dollars in sales we can't complete..
* As far as you already paying for these, this is a rare occassion for us as we do not charge for backordered items until they ship to the customer. You had a specific need with using one charge card for the parts and another for the freight. In an effort to not mess up your charge card split payments, you asked us to charge the one card for the parts immediately so we only had to worry about the freight.... In all honesty, would you be any more patient for the parts regardless if you paid for them yet or not? Prepayment is a fact of the situation, but the lack of getting the parts is the real issue. Although your spindles are paid in full, many, many others are currently sold are not.. This represents a revenue that we obviously need to PAY my suppliers for the spindles once I get them.. It's all cash flow, from one hand to another to another... You pay us so we can pay them so they can pay whomever is next in the line. Regardless of the type of business, it's all pretty much identical.....
* I have no idea where the "general manager" thing came from or the Aruba deal.... The owner of the company, went on a Friday-Sunday cruise (3 whole days)... He's the owner, not "general manager".... We have a VP of operations who is in our CT location every day, usually 6 days a week. I have no idea why a 68 year old man going on a 3 day cruise for the first time in his life has ANY bearing on the speed of spindles being completed by a supplier who is NOT Total Performance but a supplier FOR Total Performance.. I don't see any connection to any of that, but it was obviously posted enough times to draw some attention....
Here's the deal in short form folks..... The spindles are made at a foundry that does the work for us. They then have to go to the machine shop that does the VERY extensive amount of machine work for us. While all this is going on, all we can do is make phone calls every couple of days like we do every week. The answer that we get is the answer that we provide. If the information given to us proves to have been incorrect, I have no way of knowing this until THAT time frame promised goes by... I called them again today around noon and was told that the owner was at lunch at that he would call me back... It's 1:44 right now as I'm typing this and I figured I would call again in order to put the most up to date information on this posting, well, he's still at lunch... Yes, an hour and a half lunch... I got nothing to say about this however... I can't get an answer right now, the guys on a REALLY long lunch.. I can't control this fact...
Please don't think I'm upset about this, just trying to convey OUR frustration to this fact as well... It's another business and another person jamming me up. I'm surely not happy about any of this, plus I have the added frustration of knowing my hands are pretty much tied... It comes down to after everything else, "it is what it is"... I just hate doing this on e-mails or bulletin board postings because I can pretty much promise that at least one person is going to take this as I could care less about the situation and am just passing you on... Like I said, no matter what I do or say, I'm going to be wrong... This is why I will take a phone conversation or, even better, a face to face conversation over the Internet any day of the week...
Brian - TP