A very small rant, because this isn't exactly a massive deal in the grand scheme of things.
I ordered some straps from the US on the 26th of April (about £35 worth). On the 28th of April I got a shipping notification, which I thought was pretty good because I was fully expecting things to be slow given current circumstances. I was fairly relaxed, because I expected shipping to take a while given the state of the world, but I kept an eye on the tracking info.
On the 18th of May I sent the company an e-mail on their customer services mail, because no sign of the straps, and also nothing had happened on the tracking since the 4th of May. A relaxed mail just querying if they had any info beyond what was available in the tracking, because it had been 3 weeks by that point.
Today (1st of June), I started composing a more snotty e-mail, because 2 weeks after my previous mail I hadn't had a reply. The company is still open and accepting orders, and I've had half a dozen marketing e-mails from them in the period, so I don't think failing to answer an e-mail about an order for 2 weeks is particularly good. I decided to check the tracking info one last time while writing (it hadn't changed up until the end of last week when I last looked), and lo and behold it had actually been updated! I saw this:
On the 5th of May, my straps finally left the 'partner distribution centre' and went to Chicago, where they arrived on... the 31st of May? 27 days later!!
Wow. Realising that both of these places are in the great state of Illinois, I looked at Google Maps out of curiosity to see how far that is. Readers, it is a distance by road of less than 10 miles.
10 miles.
27 days.
Like I said at the start, I expected everything to take longer because of the pandemic, but that is something else.
Anyway, not a big problem in the grand scheme of things, but it did make me (sort of) laugh. At a guess I'll finally see my straps this week or next. I abandoned the snotty e-mail I was writing to the company today, I'll send one when the straps finally arrive and point out that not replying to customer service e-mails for weeks at a time is quite rubbish, but otherwise I think I'll just chalk the whole thing up to, "Oh well, pandemic."
(And yes, I am kind of waiting for Royal Mail to contact me with a demand for VAT plus a stupid amount of 'handling' charge, but I've always thought that might happen, so no change there.)