While JonnyB has shouldered much of the effort to correct this situation, I've worked with him on this as well.
My own copy arrived "dirty"; the envelope looked like it was somehow caught in a machine thought the magazine itself was not damaged. I guess you could say there was ink and dirt all over the backside of the envelope. Moreover it took 30 days to get from its Florida mail drop to my home. There is no class of postal service with that long a delivery time--so while in the system, it was somehow delayed. That's the story of ONE that arrived.
As for the 300 that did not, it is correct to assume they never entered the postal system in the first place. How and where they got waylaid is just a guess. But, if they were indeed dropped off and entered as they should have been, there is no way that this many could go missing. Say what you will about the US Postal Service, but they are NOT that bad--not even close. Remember, we sent out many hundreds of PW books via the postal service and they all arrived.
My experience with recent international shipping indicates that other postal systems around the world are fully capable of less than perfect service. In more than one instance recently, perfectly addressed items were returned indicating the address is wrong. In other instances, and yes that's plural, with more than one international location, the local postal services do not hold the mail for the recipient long enough for them to come and get it, nor do they provide any means for what we call a "vacation hold". Thus, the items get returned. A few book deliveries made two and three round trips before finally getting properly delivered...
We (the Pagoda SL Group) does a lot of mailing. It helps if we have ONE and ONLY ONE correct, standardized address for you on file. If you move, updated it. If you change your address, update it. When we have an issue like these missing magazines, we are striving in the most expedient means possible to rectify the situation, and even after a reasonable amount of time, we're still getting requests for magazine, long after the print order was submitted...a timely response is important. We are running out of PW #30s and there are very few we can handle from this point on.
