IMPORTANT SHIPPING UPDATE
Greetings!
These last two months have been extremely difficult with the Canada Post strike and also with one of the comic distributor's completely changing how they ship out comics.
The troublesome distributor is Diamond Comics who distributes a wide range of titles including those from Boom Studios, Dynamite Entertainment, and Titan Comics amongst others. They had to shut down one of their two main warehouses and made the awful decision to close all Canadian drop points as well. The end result is delays and utter chaos. For example, tomorrow is December 18th and the comics that were supposed to be released December 1tth have still not arrived. Then the December 18th comics look to be arriving next week but there is also Christmas so maybe not. What that means is we are over halfway through the month and only a single week of comics have arrived from them. They say they will improve in 2025 but be advised that there will be significant delays for the immediate future and possibly next few months. We are also looking at discontinuing getting our bags and boards from Diamond and transitioning to a new more dependable supplier as well.
Speaking of delays, that leads us to Canada Post. The workers have officially been forced back to work and are now faced with the huge backlog from before the strike occurred plus all the parcels waiting to come into the country before countries stopped sending them. Most of all these existing parcels will not be delivered before Christmas but thankfully we had no one that falls under this category. As for new parcels, they are not accepting them until Thursday at the earliest and say they can limit the number of parcels being received if the number is too large. Suffice to say they are currently overwhelmed going into the period between Christmas and New Year's. Normally this period is chaotic and has seen (in our own personal experience) parcels get dropped off and arrive AFTER parcels dropped off once New Year's has concluded. We stopped sending parcels during this period last year due to numerous issues in the past and now adding the colossal backlog to this makes a perfect storm.
What does this mean? In order to ensure nothing is misplaced in the chaos, there will be no parcels heading out until everything settles down and this holiday period has passed. The plan is to start sending parcels out the week after New Year's (January 6th to January 10th). If everything has been entirely paid for including shipping then it should head out January 6th/7th. If an invoice needs to be generated then we would start sending them out and they would head out on the next available shipping day once payment is received. This shipment will consist of all the comics that physically arrived by the end of 2024. If you are on a monthly schedule there will be a second shipment at the end of January as per usual.
The plan is for the entire team at Timestream Comics to be shut down for business starting December 23rd with a slow return starting January 3rd/4th. I will periodically check emails but will only respond to those of an absolute emergency situation. The next two Mondays have a very limited number of titles on Final Order Cutoff as well but rest assured if you order/request them by FOC we will put it in for you. The good news is that Marvel and DC both have nothing on FOC during this period.
With that said we want to wish everyone a very happy upcoming holiday season! May it be a time filled with joy and relaxation. Thank you for the continued support and we look forward to business finally resuming in 2025!
If you have any specific questions you can always reach us by sending an email to info@timestreamcomics.ca.
- Timestream Comics