Sub-posting without naming the company is dumb. Name and shame.

Agreed. I've got my pitchfork waiting by the front door, just need to know where I'm bringing it.

I get your PR point, but I could easily see supply disruptions happening, but having your design staff perfectly able to design stuff from home, etc. If the factory in China or whatever got shut down for 3 months or converted to making masks, might as well design new stuff.

Keeping my pitchfork in the closet for now.

They didn't make it sound like a "foreign" disruption. Maybe so, but I would assume that the disruption would have affected both things I bought. Meaning, since the one with the disruption is the same exact type product as the fancy newer stuff..........it raised flags to me.

Plus, it said 4-6 weeks. Not 8 weeks or more. Once it is in that territory, just shut down the week estimate and say "back ordered indefinitely".

Let's say your shop makes chocolate chip cookies. I order some and it says it will be 4-6 weeks. Week 7 and 8 pass and you say, "well, we have disruptions". But, the entire time you've been pushing photos online of piles of new fancy "super duper giant chocolate chip cookies!!!". That's more what this is like.

There's about 4 companies making what I bought in two different quality and price points. If I chose at least two of the others at a slightly higher price point, I'm pretty damn sure I'd have my shit by now.

I'm about to eat it and blow my load of cash on the other company knowing they have the parts and just resell these at a loss on Slowtwitch later.

Having supply-chain or distribution issues while still developing right now does not mean that a company has "shifted resources to instead focus on something new." Quite the opposite, really: most products being presented or introduced right now were in development long before COVID struck, and it's far beyond nontrivial to just "shift" design resources to making and shipping things. This is doubly true in the context of COVID, since the bottlenecks that COVID is causing are generally not from a lack of available laborers (if the bottleneck is within the control of your company at all).

Well the FB post showed piles of things apparently ready for sale.

I wish I had seen the FB post before buying. I would have thought that "we have a current X week lead on this specific product" meant "we shut down capacity for that product for a while to make this instead".

Just seems odd to me the delay was for one specific product while the same exact kind of product is being now produced. That sounds like an intentional tooling change that took longer than expected.

That's hypothetical on my part.

At the end of the day, if your can't meet...........don't post a lead time. There is no lead time to give if you don't know. Post X weeks if you know for sure you're getting a shipment in X weeks on the boat. Other sites nailed that concept. Let the consumer decide, don't entice with a lead time then blow it.

If you don't know the details of their supply chain, you're making a lot of assumptions.

Sometimes similar-type things aren't made at the same facility. Sometimes there's a lot of pipelining and you can't "just" swap the priorities of two different orders (i.e. to push a batch of a late current-production part ahead of a batch of a new part). Etc.

Lead times are never 100% certain, and COVID has made an absolute mess of things. "Nailed that concept" can mean "got lucky with manufacturing locations and/or the alignment of the relevant restock cycle(s)."

I mean who knows, maybe they made an easily-avoidable mistake. But from the description you're giving, it's really not obvious to what degree or how badly the brand screwed up.

Did you order from Love the Pain?

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Brian Stover USAT LII
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