"When Did People Become so Impatiant?" Topic

I got an order last Friday. I mailed it this Monday. On Tuesday I get an email from the buyer concerned that he had not received his order yet.

Back when I got into historical miniatures (the 1960s), I was thrilled if I got an order in less than 3 months!

Blame Amazon. When they can get you your stuff by tomorrow or even same day, they set the new standard. I give folks a tracking number so they know I shipped and they can follow it themselves.

1st order of miniatures in 1976, took 6 months and he out of stocked 1/2 the order. I was still happy.

Scott, remember running to the bank to get a money order in English pounds Sterling (Oh, Betty handles those. She is off Tuesday…), mailing it to Hinchliffe or Essex, and then being deliriously happy when a large box arrived a few months later? With large denomination foreign stamps!

Ahhhh…. Kids today. 🙄

"please allow 28 days for delivery" it said on the Skytrex order form :)

When we no longer had to go to the post office to buy International Reply Coupons.

As noted, Amazon, and even they aren't what they were. Two improvements ago, I could take my kindle with me to dinner, open my book, decide I didn't care for it and buy and be reading a different book before the salad arrived. But overall, shipping in the digital age has improved so much, that there's a tendency to expect the fastest possible delivery all the time.

And as we get older and remember more disappointments, we grow more suspicious. One of your competitors has just asked me for the third time about the contents of my current order--odd, I'll grant you, but clearly specified the first time. The delay this has caused means the order will be caught up in the tariff fuss, which is precisely what I ordered when I did to prevent. If I'd been rude, I might actually have gotten my stuff.

And this afternoon a bus line has just announced that they've cancelled part of my vacation trip--not the whole thing, mind you: just one leg of the return trip so I'm still on the hook for the money but have no way to actually return home. Note that I'm travelling by bus because the airline I previously used delivered me a day late and to the wrong city without so much as an apology.

There's no such thing as customer service today, and as the saying goes, "it isn't paranoia if they really are out to get you." I'd recommend a constant stream of acknowledgements and updates

I once went on a German website looking to buy a cardsstock model of a Roman trireme. I found what I wanted and worked through the ordering webpages. When I reached the end it thanked me for the order, but I realized I hadn't been prompted to make any payment.

I figured something had gone sideways and they'd be in touch to get me to pay. Instead, about 10 days later, the model showed up. In the box was a little 3 page carbon paper form with ballpoint writing about the payment and shipping in DMs. After some digging I found out that that's how they did it back then. You sign the form and give it to your bank and they handle making the remittance.

My US bank said "no way." I had to open an account in a UK bank, PayPal them what I owed plus a hefty fee, and they handled the end payment.

Different strokes..l

I just think of who I want to buy from, I think of what I want to buy, I think of what method of payment I want to use and…it appears!
What?! No one else does it that way?

Well, given what is currently going on, it will be a looong
wait to get anything from Europe or Asia.

I've always had awesome service from you, Scott. Heck, I just expect good communication from a business since they have my money. But there's one manufacturer, I suspect they dispatched the package before I ordered and paid for it!

I blame pagers and text messages. And the fact that folks these days have the attention span of

When they started giving out participation trophies

Its getting worse and its not confined to young folk.

My mother has discovered the joys of tracked delivery.

here in the Uk you can track the location of parcels at every stage. So she now spends the day fuming something has not arrived immediately, AND tracking it and critiquing the distribution network: why has it got to go from Cardiff to B'ham to H'ford etc. Why can't it come direct ????

I am updated at every stage the parcel has changed location so its not even a case o f her being kept quite on the internet.

Having worked in the retail sector for over 4 decades prior to retirement, I can tell you this had been building long before Amazon or the arrival of the internet. A sense of entitlement devoid of logic or courtesy took the phrase, "the customer is always right" to mean "the customer can be a complete horse's behind and the seller is just dirt under their feet,"

You can blame Amazon, but it's only the largest recent step on this road. Businesses have been trying to get faster forever. They want to outperform competitors, and they want to take advantage of our impulses. Something that takes six weeks to get to you is not as exciting as something that will get to you tomorrow. If you can have it in two days it feels like you should decide right now. If it's going to take a month to get to you then it feels like you can take a couple days to decide on whether or not you want it.

I remember when you had to walk to the game store in the sleet and snow -- uphill both ways! -- just to look at miniatures that you couldn't possibly afford to buy on your measly work-study pay. But you tell that to kids today and they just look at their phones.

I've told my son how we used to search for out of print books back in The Day, but I don't think he believes me.

On balance and thinking it over--my people. The boomers. Even when we were young, everything had to be done right away. Better an immediate "solution" which didn't really solve the problem than one which would, but would take time. Actually being able to get away with it sometimes only seems to have made it worse. And subsequent generations have learned from us.

Not just retail, Fitzovich. I spent a lot of time on staff in the military watching bad work done to meet completely arbitrary deadlines. Instead of anyone asking "given our resources, how long would we need to do it right?" we'd do it wrong about every other year. Not talking real military crises, mind you--just dates like "end of the fiscal year" for projects having nothing to do with money.

Plenty of stories about impatience in the Old and New Testaments. It's part of our nature. Like we jokingly say in church, never pray for patience.;-)

Don't forget to add "And we liked it"!

I remember ordering the American Revolution soldiers from the back of a comic book, 4-6 weeks…well worth the wait. I loved those figures.

Delivery could be by Star Trek transporter and it still wouldn't be fast enough for some people… ;-)

I understand the Amazon effect on people but why would anybody hold your average Wargames company to the same standard of delivery? Barring a couple of cases most wargames companies are either a sideline for someone with a job or a very small with just a couple of staff comparing them to Amazon isn't even comparing apples to oranges it's like comparing an apple with a Boeing Jet.

It's odd, since things like Kickstarter offer goods with months or even over a year of wait time and they can be hugely popular. So waiting can be acceptable.