I emailed them about this yesterday:
Good afternoon Brian and the rest of the G.I. Joe Collectors club,
In efforts to help the G.I. Joe collectors club I'm trying to keep you aware of the delays your Canadian members are suffering from. Yesterday (January 23rd, 2008) I received my December news letter (2007) from Switzerland. That is about 1 week of being two months behind schedule. The news letters even have a date stamp on them saying something along the lines of "Deliver by December 12th".
Part of the appeal of being part of the G.I. Joe collectors club is we are suppose to get our new G.I.Joe related news first, before the other news groups. For example, the new Wild Bill figure that Lanny has mentioned in a thread. He was upset because pictures of this new figure were posted on other news line groups. Well photos of Wild Bill are now showing on the web (http://gijoeclub.com/2008wave3-02.cfm for example) free for anyone to see. Canada has not yet received our January news letter so news breaking things like this no longer have any impact. The news letter is no longer the place to get news first for us living outside the U.S.A.
Plus the news letter includes information on preorder items. Getting the letter almost two months late greatly impacts preorder items. By the time I read about new preorder items in the news letter I have already placed an order and received my item from another on line store.
I want the G.I.Joe collectors club to thrive and survive but in order to do this then something needs to be done to address this situation. This has been going on for the past four months. What has changed recently and how can you as a club rectify the situation and get back to the service we were receiving before? Granted that was a bit slower, but being 3 weeks late is better than seven weeks late. In all honesty, since we as Canadians pay more for our membership I would hope the inflated price we pay would go to ensuring our news letters get shipped at a higher priority service so that we may get our news at the same time as any person living inside the United States of America.
Please don't leave this in the hands of FedEx and wait for them to solve the problem. This is your product that we all pay for in advance every year with our membership. It should not take this long to resolve this issue.
Thank you for hearing my concerns,
David
The reply I got from Brian:
David, We are working on new technology for the newsletter online. The preorder search in the store now shows you everything that is available soyou don't need the newsletter for that. As to the mail, we are goingback to DHL this month to see if their system is any better. They arethe ones we used before FEDEX so we will see what happens, this may makea difference in the price. We are working on all items, they just take time. Brian
So the good news is we should soon see our news letters showing up in the same month like how it was before October 2007. The bad news is last comment about price. I'm not sure how that is going to play out for us. Of course I wouldn't care half as much about the delay in the news letter if the DPF was still a download option.
I think the biggest problem is they changed two things at the same time, leaving no reasonable backup system. They ended the on line PDF AND changed the delivery service at the same time. Had they experiments with a new courier first then yes we would still be getting our information late but still would have had the option to read the letter online. Or it could have gone the other way with no online service but we would still be getting our news in the same month it came out.
Right now they are working on a solution to the news letter and working on switching back to the old courier. Again, no backup system in place.
At least they are aware of the problems and working on a solution. I want to go on record that I'm not bashing the club and trying to work with them to provide them with as much information as I can so they can report back to their people and get things smoothed out.
