Contents may have settled…

So, my cohort Jono is over on his blog talking about screaming goats and grabby seniors. How am I supposed to compete with that? I would love to just secede this little corner of the internet to him and let him do his thing on this blog but his skills are far too valuable and his time far to short, so you’ll have to live with me for the time being.

When things break, it sucks but we’re here to negate that pain as much as possible. Usually products ship directly to the manufacturer or our distributor for replacement. Occasionally, if the product is outside our distributor’s thirty day warranty or it’s part of a complete system we’ll have it returned directly to us and charge a restocking fee. This brings me to the topic of today’s discussion:

PACKING PRODUCTS FOR SHIPMENT

(I’d like to preface this by saying that the overwhelming majority of our customers do a wonderful job when returning products to us and I realize that the customers who might benefit from these instructions will probably never read this post so I’m putting this out there as a fun story to share with my 3 or 4 adoring fans purely for entertainment’s sake).

There is one goal to packing up a product to send to us: Try to get the product to us in as close to new condition as possible.

While striving to reach this goal you must understand that there will be many pitfalls that your poor little package will face on the way to our doorstep. I know from experience that UPS routes the majority of their packages through a cage full of drunk skunk apes (those labeled fragile go through an elephant pin). FedEX too has some sort of “animal helper” program but I’m not quite as familiar with it.

To deal with this you can either pretend your packing up your little brother in a barrel for a ride over Niagra Falls or just look to our packaging and how we cared for your product as a great example to follow.  Original packaging is always preferable since it’s designed to take the abuse.  Double-boxing prevents labels, marks, and stains from finding their way on the the Original packaging making it hard to resell.  If original packaging is not available, start with a box at least three inches larger in all dimensions than the product itself.  Place the product in a bag and seal if possible (packing peanuts and paper tend to disentigrate and will hightail it for any vent or opening in a printer or monitor they can find making it nearly impossible to clean). Place some packing material in the bottom of the box (paper, packing peanuts, or newsprint preferably, see below), place your product in the box, fill it the rest of the way, and tape it shut.  That’s all there is to it.

Now for the fun part, THINGS NOT TO DO (taken from real experiences):

Do not use a box that you have to squeeze the product into. This leaves no space for packing material to cushion the product. I can normally poke a hole in a box with one finger, imagine what a skunk ape can do with a claw hammer. A little space is your best bet.

Don’t try to get too creative with packing materials. Paper works great, expired bags of potato chips do not, they just burst open, break into little crumbs, and march their way into your receipt printer allowing it to bounce around the box like a superball. We have learned to identify these boxes by the tell tale gease stains soaking through the boxes and will just send them back to the customer unopened in most cases.

DON’T try to get too creative with packing materials. I understand you might not have any paper or other suitable material around but that does not make it okay to resort to adult diapers. Clean or not, they’re made for a specific purpose and that’s not protecting your barcode scanner. Anyone thinking it would be funny to send a bunch of diapers in the mail may also think it’d be funny to send a soiled diaper along too. Gross.

DON’T try to get too creative with packing materials! I know you may own a salon and figure that since the packing material is just going to be thrown out anyways, trash is a good option. That does not mean you should try cushioning your computer with bags full of hair. It makes me all skeevy just thinking about it. It’s bad enough itching four hours after a haircut, it’s infinitely worse when it’s not Your hair doing the itching.

Good rules to follow no matter what your shipping, and I’d like to welcome anyone who found their way here after Googleing “skunk ape”

A bit of non-fiction

So, we had a customer call in a couple weeks ago who had purchased a complete cash register system. The system this customer purchased included a small computer (a little smaller than most cash drawers) and a basic 15 inch LCD monitor. The customer got the register up and running rather quickly with a couple of general questions and seemed very satisfied. Unfortunately,  the customer called their salesperson about a week later to complain that the computer was sucking their brain energies. The sales person of course contacted me and I had to inform him that we didn’t install that option on this customer’s computer and it must be some sort of mistake. We ended up speaking with the customer for a few days (it’s very hard to track down which component might actually be feeding off brain energy) and eventually decided that even though this PC had been used for over a month and most likely had nothing physically wrong with it, we would take it back and allow the customer to exchange it for an all-in-one PC like the customer’s friend had (which had never attempted to suck out a brain).  In the end the customer was happy, which makes me happy. We received the brain sucking PC back and I allowed one of my techs to attempt an exorcism. The PC should be fine but the tech may need a few days off to recover or at least carry a bucket with him wherever he goes.

One option to avoid issues like this is on-site installation! You can sit back and let our techs put their brain energies on the line while connecting and testing your brand new point-of-sale station anywhere in the US. Our systems are pretty straight forward with everything preinstalled, a nice printout showing exactly where to plug everything into and a nice little note from our support department letting you know we’re here to help so don’t feel like on-site install is absolutely necessary. If your lacking in time, fearing for your brain energies, or just lazy in general, on-site may be just the thing for you. It might even be entertaining to stare at the tech for an hour or two asking all kinds of odd questions.  Additionally I’ll give you my promise that our technician’s will not smell.

I’m working on an on-site install as I type this which is probably why I’ve chosen to share this with the interwebs today. And it’s kinda cool.