When the Supply Chain Goes Bad

If you’ve been following along, you’ll know that I order postage stamps and they arrive by Canada Post.

That they arrive is a bit of a miracle. The short story is that I enquired of the supplier as to why the stamps arrived anywhere from 4 to 28 days after being ordered. Turns out Picture Postage is at the mercy of Canada Post, who stipulate “that we must allow 5-15 business for delivery once the order is shipped”.

Now 5 business days (BUSINESS days) to mail a letter from a major Canadian city to another major Canadian city seems a bit much to me.

15 days is downright lacking in responsibility.

My enquiry has resulted in the supplier advising Canada Post that the shipment has been “what they consider to be lost in the mail”, so now I’ll wait while another order is prepared and, perhaps, lost-in-the-mail or else takes 3 weeks (15 BUSINESS days!).

The clincher is this:

I have the option of using an overnight courier other than CPC, that is not looked at fondly around here as all parties would like to keep everything closely tied together from an overall business prospective.

The Overall Business Perspective seems to be that the supplier and CPC have to work together on this, but the supplier ships within 48 hours of receiving the order, so CPC is letting down the side.

And where, in the name of all that’s profitable, is the client (me) in all of this?

I don’t hear anything about “Gee we’d better make sure this gets tightened up”.

All the more incredible because I am, after all, ordering postage stamps that should be delivered by the very organization (CPC) that profits by my making use of postal services!

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Canadians Need to Be Patient

“Canadians need to be patient, because orders can only come from within the United States.”

Says the article in The Toronto Star .

I know that one can possibly, order through eBay, Amazon, and others of that ilk.

But it seems to me that there is a niche here for a Canadian entrepreneur to serve Canadians with a secure set of US addresses which would allow bleeding-edge technology Canadians to order by proxy.

Trust is involved, to be sure, but that’s true of any online business.

Imagine that you want to take advantage of the free CD, the latest camera, or what have you, but you are stymied by the “US-only” constraint.

You’d place your order, wait two weeks, (several months in the Star’s example) and take delivery of what you really want.

Beats driving across the border and prowling the malls in Buffalo, if you ask me.

And yes, this niche is a world-wide niche. People in Kenya, Australia, and India want these toys, too, and they want them NOW!

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Canada's New Anti-Spam Law

In “Canadian businesses face tough challenges with strict anti-spam law” Grant Buckler reports on the new measures to be implemented in Canada to cope with spam.

In theory.

In practice I believe that Bill-C28 will be applied seldom, and then only at great expense against mega-millionaire spam kings.

You and I don’t need to worry about Bill-C28. The lawyers are interested only in people with lots of money, millions of dollars.

So Sleep easy.

But do pay attention to what is required, because if nothing else, it makes for courteous business sense.

Opt in

“Bill C-28 ... requires recipients explicitly to opt in to receiving e-mails and other electronic communications rather than simply requiring that they be given an opportunity to opt out ...”.

Most commercial mailing list providers stress this every time you breathe in.

Done Business

“If the sender of the message has done business with the recipient in the past two years, consent to receive commercial e-mail is implied. But since that implied consent now expires after two years, businesses that rely on it will now need a way of tracking their business dealings with people on their mailing lists and either removing their names from the list or obtaining their explicit consent to keep sending them messages before the two years are up.”

This is the more interesting paragraph.

My accountant says “Business is the exchange of two pieces of paper, one of which must be a cheque”, so in theory many of the people to whom I send an occasional email could have me chased by The Feds.

Even if I have supplied them with goods and services “that implied consent now expires after two years” so I ought to be confirming, every two years, that it’s still OK to communicate by email.

How to do that? Well, having lunch every two years as a minimum ought to be a good time to ask if it’s OK to send occasional emails.

“businesses ...will now need a way of tracking their business dealings with people on their mailing lists “. Well, for sure. But shouldn’t we be doing that anyway? Keeping track of each contact, with a time-stamp of each communication, whether we phoned, left a voice-mail, mailed a letter, met for coffee, and so on. How else would you know which contacts are getting attention?

“... removing their names from the list or obtaining their explicit consent to keep sending them messages.” Again to my mind this is a no-brainer.

The strict letter of the law may find a nit-picking loop-hole, but long before it gets to court, the CEO is going to have the executive assistant ask you to stop mailing postcards; they don’t have time to take you to court.

And any judge would laugh at the suit.

P.S. Here’s a simplified view of the bill.

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