Phil,
When you accept orders without deposit, and offer worry free cancellations, there are about 10% of folks within a year's time that change their mind, move, die, divorce, leave the hobby, have an accident, surgery, cancer, to either themselves or their spouses or families, and then we are left with their order to sell to someone else. We send everyone with reservations 3 to 4 notices, first by email, then we mail those that don't respond, then lastly we call. Most of the time, the call isn't necessary as the phone number is out of order, or the customer is no longer with us. ;(
If we don't hear from a customer and they have other models on reserve we mark them as inactive, and their reservations are no longer counted for the next project production. If they contact us and assure as they are on board for the next project we reinstate.
I don't want to take deposits for these projects. It drives too many customers away. If we do, and we are late, then people get cranky. What? You said it would be here before my birthday, or Christmas, or whatever the important date is to them. Today especially people expect instant gratification. Amazon's success is a testament to that. But people also expect this of the mom and pop shops. It's a big shoe to fill. We do our best, and over time, our customers understand our limitations and relax a bit.
Without these pre-orders, we wouldn't have the financial forecasting to plunk down 100s of thousands of dollars in tooling and production to make these models.
So again, I will say THANK YOU to all of you that participate in this madness, and deal with the little disappointments with finesse. You are truly the life's blood of this hobby.
The E89 project container docks on May 26th. We should be shipping these by June 5 to June 10th. Very excited about it.
Cheers,
Scott
