My fellow Fair Trade Tobacco forum members. The past 18 months have been nothing short of a nightmare. C19 and all of its implications have consumed enormous amounts of time, money, and energy...I miss the daily banter with you guys. USPS has probably been the biggest headache. In the last tally, in the past year and a half, we've had close to 1000 orders missing, delayed, returned, confiscated, etc. etc. A full-time employee has been hired just to file claims and follow up on these orders. The worst part about these missing orders is the customers almost always blame us...and in a way, I can't blame them, but of course, the situation is completely out of our hands. I'm not sure if anyone here has received one, but we started putting GPS trackers in select packages (usually those with higher value) and we can now locate and call that post office to request they get the package moving again. I can go on and on about USPS, but I won't bore you and I think you get the gist.
C19 also forced us to comply with conditions by our overly protective governor which became a circus and then a joke, but in order to stay open, we had to comply, so we did. On April 18 at 3:00 in the morning, I received an email from our credit card processor that our account had been suspended and that all of our money would be held for 6 months to cover all potential "disputes" from customers. Any reasonable person would know that 100% of our previous 6 months of orders would not be disputed, but nonetheless, they held our money. They were nice enough to allow us to keep accepting orders, but we couldn't access any of the money from new orders either.
Luckily, due to the loss of customers because of our history with lost, missing, delayed packages, we were able to reduce the number of warehouse employees. Unfortunately, the remaining employees soon realized the government would pay them more to stay home than by having a good-paying full-time job. We had two choices...increase the hourly wage or go out of business. Even after raising the wages, we still kept losing employees...life is just a lot easier if you don't have to work. I ran help wanted ads, put the word out with everyone I knew that I needed help. One ad generated 12 replies, not a single person came in to fill out an application. This happened several times. Not one single person was hired from placing help wanted ads...not one. Our workforce is now largely made up of non-English speaking immigrants. We've had to reduce the number of grades of certain tobaccos to eliminate confusion. We have had to resort to using symbols to identify products because of the language barrier.
Many functions of the website and forum have been removed due to the cost of hiring a tech who is able to fix the issues. We've tried to find someone, but everyone wants a $10,000 a year contract just to do general maintenance. We have recently found someone locally who says he can fix the problems, but that is yet to be seen. A huge "thank you" to the mods who have been able to hold the forum together in my absence.
This is just the tip of the iceberg, but I think you've already suffered through enough.
I'm tired,
Don Carey (FmGrowit)
C19 also forced us to comply with conditions by our overly protective governor which became a circus and then a joke, but in order to stay open, we had to comply, so we did. On April 18 at 3:00 in the morning, I received an email from our credit card processor that our account had been suspended and that all of our money would be held for 6 months to cover all potential "disputes" from customers. Any reasonable person would know that 100% of our previous 6 months of orders would not be disputed, but nonetheless, they held our money. They were nice enough to allow us to keep accepting orders, but we couldn't access any of the money from new orders either.
Luckily, due to the loss of customers because of our history with lost, missing, delayed packages, we were able to reduce the number of warehouse employees. Unfortunately, the remaining employees soon realized the government would pay them more to stay home than by having a good-paying full-time job. We had two choices...increase the hourly wage or go out of business. Even after raising the wages, we still kept losing employees...life is just a lot easier if you don't have to work. I ran help wanted ads, put the word out with everyone I knew that I needed help. One ad generated 12 replies, not a single person came in to fill out an application. This happened several times. Not one single person was hired from placing help wanted ads...not one. Our workforce is now largely made up of non-English speaking immigrants. We've had to reduce the number of grades of certain tobaccos to eliminate confusion. We have had to resort to using symbols to identify products because of the language barrier.
Many functions of the website and forum have been removed due to the cost of hiring a tech who is able to fix the issues. We've tried to find someone, but everyone wants a $10,000 a year contract just to do general maintenance. We have recently found someone locally who says he can fix the problems, but that is yet to be seen. A huge "thank you" to the mods who have been able to hold the forum together in my absence.
This is just the tip of the iceberg, but I think you've already suffered through enough.
I'm tired,
Don Carey (FmGrowit)
