This is what my family room has looked like four out of the last five days.
The first of those days was assembling sets, the rest were more or less like this picture, putting orders into boxes. We won’t ship again until Tuesday. Part of me feels bad about the delay, except shipping on the weekend gets problematic because of reduced postal service and the fact that all the postage has dates on it. The shipping project won’t be stalled completely. We’re waiting on some necessary supplies. Also there are some orders which are going to require special boxing because of the quantities of coins involved. I can’t fit 42 monkey coins in to a small priority mail box and expect the box to stay intact. So I’m going to have to pile up all the coins and then ponder how best to box and ship them. I also have to manage customer emails. With the complexity of this project and the fatigue in my brain, errors are inevitable. Fortunately Schlock fans are very nice about letting me know about them and I get to fix them.
The process for shipping these coins has settled into familiarity. I think we’ve finally figured out how to work with relative efficiency. Though many times it still feels like a mess with loose coins, packing lists, and postage spilling all over the table. One person pulls a packing list and grabs all the coins for the order. The next person pins all the loose coins down so they don’t get lost as the order is processed. The third person re-checks all of the coins against the invoice. Every order is checked by two different people. We fix errors and send the order down the line to the packing station. Everything is packed into an envelope or into an envelope and a box. The postage label is matched to the packing list, the package is sealed, postaged, and put out for the mailman. It is a multi-step, complicated process, but it is the best way we can think of to reduce errors and to contain these coins until they arrive safely in the hands of their owners.
Monday we’ll print postage. Tuesday we’ll package the last orders. After that I’ll be able to look around and try to find some sort of normality for this summer at the Tayler house. I’m looking forward to that part. There will be post shipping clean up. I’ll be helping with customer support issues for the next couple of months I’m sure. I’ll need to count the remaining inventory so that it can be entered into our accounting programs. At some point the extra inventory will be made available in the store and there will be more orders to handle, but I have to wait on that until I’ve finished everything currently waiting for me to manage it. The backlog of things I haven’t done because I shipped coins instead is depressing. So I’ll not think about it tonight. Instead I will sleep.
You have done a great job. Thanks to my son and daughter-in-law who have their packages sent to our house, we have received two boxes and one envelope from you. We opened the envelope yesterday and the glue dots hadn’t all held, but it didn’t seem to matter. My husband was thrilled with his coins.