With the continuing squeeze on reloading components in the market, we continue to grow and supply customers with bullets... at the same price as before the world went crazy. We have continued to make investments to expand our production capacity in order to be able to deliver our amazing value and quality to more and more customers. It is an exciting and stressful time navigating this, but we are committed to making great product and welcoming our new customers!
With so many new customers finding us as everyone struggles to keep supplied, we wanted to share a little bit about our expansion, shipping policies and how we handle In-Store Pickup of our products.
Capacity Improvements Coming in December
Even though 2020 has been pretty rough overall, we had a stroke of luck at the beginning of this month. A local person called up out-of-the blue wanting to know if we would be interested in some Magma Engineering Bullet Master casters and Lube Master sizers... to which we quickly responded YES!
(BTW, if you are such a person, wanting to sell equipment taking up your storage space, give us a call!)
The two new Bullet Master casting machines with their legs removed. These are older version (Mark V and IV), which will need a few thousand dollars of rebuilding to bring them into service. The good news is that we are pretty practiced at taking these things apart and doing repairs, so as long as we get all of the parts in, we should have them into production in the month of December.
Here you can see the two new Lube Master sizing machines. These will need a good cleaning and all of the parts tested and tuned, but are mostly serviceable as is. Just a little bit of electrical work is needed to replace the older setup and eliminate the wax lube complexity, which has failed in the past for our existing machines. We also expect these to be online in December.
The last few months has severely stressed our ability to keep up with orders, and while we now have inventory on many profiles, we are still catching up on orders. To do this, we are working flat out seven days a week for up to 16 hours a day. Together these four machines will bring us much needed capacity, increasing us to six casting, five sizing machines, and much needed ability to make more product!
In-Store "Pickup" not "Purchase"
We are so thankful to all of the new customers that have found us in the last few months as they search the internet for available reloading components! And some of these new have the completely reasonable expectation that we are setup as a retail storefront and able to handle walk-in business. Unfortunately, this is just not the case.
As you can see we are scrapping it out in our industrial shop building, which is hidden on the south end of College Station. Even in these meager accommodations, we are happy to offer In-Store Pickup for local customers wanting to save on the shipping.
What are not able to do is support walk in purchases. Our staffing and inventory management is just not able to support in-store customer sales. For this we truly apologize, and do one day hope to expand enough to support this capability.
To take advantage of the pickup option we do have available, you need simply to place your order online, choose the In-Store Pickup option for shipping, and we will notify you via email as soon as your order has been picked and packaged for you to swing by and pick it up.
Lost Shipments and Replacement Orders
Sometimes USPS does lose (or damage) shipments, and they do not make it to our customers. Many times USPS is slow in delivering the packages, and while it takes a while, almost all of the packages are delivered. This is the trade-off that we all deal with in order to get 2-5x less expansive shipping costs. In our experience, actual lost (or damaged) packages happen to about 1 in 500 packages that we ship out, and when it does we always simply replace the lost shipment.
As part of our commitment to make sure that every customer gets the bullets they order, and balance with the reality of USPS deliver system, we have a straight-forward policy:
If a package is not delivered within 15 days after we ship it, we will enter an replacement order and ship it out.
Honestly, we wish that we could do more than this, but after shipping literally 10,000+ packages we have learned that it is almost always "slow" and not lost.
In fact, many (many) ((many)) times if an order is tracking and delayed for several extra days than normal, we find that it is almost always to be found at the local post office. Sometimes holiday package rushes happen, sometimes it is just "misplaced", sometimes a USPS employee just didn't want to lift it, and sometimes the carrier has a substitute that was not inspired to deliver. The absolute best course of action is to ask your carrier or call your local post office and inquire about why the package tracking seems to be "stuck". This almost always will get it moving again and delivered soon afterward.
Thank you all for taking the time to read our update. If you have any question, please contact us via message in the store, or email to [email protected].