Now I am not going to faff around with "Winterval" or "holiday celebrations" or any of that stuff.  It's CHRISTMAS, so Happy Christmas.  If you find Christian holidays unacceptable then please disregard ;-)

Curious to know.  Is it just my wholesalers/suppliers which are completely and utterly useless ??  Or is it the same for you sellers who sell other "stuff" ??  Most of the people in the DVD and video games wholesale and distribution industries don't seem to have any concept of how to actually run the business they are in !!  It's not rocket science, get the stuff in stock so we can buy it, duh !! 

The backlogged mail is estimated at around 8 million items and growing at 1 million a day. Consequently mail is taking a lot longer to get through to people and to get out of the country, and also via Heathrow, which is where 90% of international mail leaves this country. Particularly hard hit areas are Wolverhampton, London, Southampton, Milton Keynes, Uxbridge, Hull and Slough. Wolverhampton alone has a backlog of over 1 million items, which is understandable when you appreciate that Staffordshire is home to a very large quantity of mail order companies and fulfillment houses.

In theory the backlogged mail should be getting processed in an "oldest first" rota, but in reality we have been told this is not happening, and when mail is being sorted the private postings (from postboxes and Post Offices) are getting done first simply because there's "less of it" and being collected daily from the boxes etc it tends to be smaller sacks, eg the "easy option".

Some areas are particularly badly affected also as post is not being collected from some businesses AT ALL, this is for example affecting us on the Staffordshire Moorlands quite badly. However, the items leaving us from Sussex via Redhill in Surrey do not seem to be getting such serious delays. This is why some of our items will arrive a lot quicker than others, some are sent from Stoke On Trent, some from Horsham, stock is kept in 2 different places.

You will need to allow a reasonable amount of time for deliveries to arrive during this difficult time, and accept our apologies for Royal Mail's actions which are beyond our control.

Royal Mail's website on the action.

Steve and The Retrowarez.com team....

PS this affects ALL our eBay listings, not just DrSteveW, but the miscellaneous Retrowarez IDs also. Perfume/After Shave is unaffected AT PRESENT as this is despatched from Horsham.

PPS Anyone with any more info please add to this blog.

Ok ok you're probably thinking "Christmas ?? What the heck is he on about, it's July, the silly old doofus". Well you have to plan early ;-) We've started to get the "must have" games items in already, such as Wii's and DS Lites. There's some really top games coming up as well....

Then there is this year's Christmas release DVDs. Frankly we felt last year was at best "poor". We got the distinct feeling the manufacturers were trying to push the interactive DVDs such as "Deal Or No Deal" (which was incidentally the only one apart from the Red Dwarf Quiz which did any real good sales wise). So far it's looking better for this year and inside information has given us some great tipoffs for titles such as Mulberry and Colditz. This year's push will probably be TV titles. Let's hope for something decent !!

As ever, if you want something listed then don't hesitate to contact us, tell us what it is and if we can list it, then we will. Can't say fairer than that.

In the meantime enjoy the British summer (while it lasts), because it's nice and sunny on the Staffordshire Moorlands at least.

Steve