Christmas in May

Mark Steyn's America Alone is in the pipeline

Checking Amazon's "Where's my stuff?" feature this morning, our eyes popped at the delivery date of our recent Christmas order for a dozen or so gift books:

Shipping estimate: May 3, 2005
Delivery estimate: May 5, 2005 - May 9, 2005

We fired off a disbelieving email to their "Help" address.  As we sat stewing in our own juices, reviewing the list of books we had ordered, one of the items, Mark Steyn's forthcoming America Alone:  Our Country's Future as a Lone Warrior, caught our eye.  It has not yet been released. Had we unwittingly agreed to wait for all items to be available and shipped in one package or something?

Hoping to save a few bucks, we had, indeed, checked off the "Super Saver Shipping" option, but rereading the fine print just now, we see nothing to indicate the entire order would be held up for one late comer:

Select Super Saver Shipping as your shipping speed. Please note that your order will take an additional 3 to 5 days to ship.

Select "Group my items into as few shipments as possible" as your shipping preference.

Harrumph. First time Amazon has let us down. There's gotta be a mistake in there somewhere, big time. Technical difficulties? Terrorism to disrupt the economy? Simple incompetence? Whatever. Fortunately, key items ordered from Hammacher Schlemmer, Cooking.com, L.L. Bean, Victoria's Secret and Cafe Press are either in our hands or scheduled for delivery today.

Update: Cafe Press, that online place that produces mugs, mousepads and such with your designs, doesn't deliver.  The mousepads we ordered of Tiny staring at a mouse were completely missing from the initial shipment.  We called their Customer Service, and a few days later the mousepads arrived but with the design ruined by unwanted white margins along the top and bottom.  We tried to trim off the white with an x-acto, but the edges disintegrated, and we threw them out in disgust. Quality control is not their strong suit.