12/18/20:
So, after this summer I kind of expected everything to get back to normal, or at least to normalize, and I thought I wouldn't need to do any more Covid updates. However, it currently looks like shipping in the US, all modes, Trains, Planes and Automobiles, is a snarled mess. All of the Southeast rail freight lanes coming from the ports are at nearly a complete standstill. USPS is hanging on by a thread. I am praying our container made it out of Savannah before everything froze up, but if not, I'll be sending a note to all current pre-order customers about their options. I have currently closed pre-orders, because I am no longer comfortable taking them due to the continuous delivery pushbacks. They are saying up to a 2 week delay, which would put us after the 1st of the year until we're restocked (total delay now 7 weeks, as we were originally supposed to receive this shipment on 11/14/20). Supposedly we have another shipment coming in January, but after this nightmare I won't count on it. I am very sorry, this year has humbled me in terms of my administrative skills (or lack thereof)...every time I thought I had a handle at what the year would throw at us, I underestimated it. I will say based on this, I'd make sure all the cupboards and closets are stocked, as supply shocks like this have a tendency to ripple and can often get worse.
12/15/20:
Ugg, so sorry. The ports this year are an absolute disaster; shipping costs in and out have gone up almost 50%...I apologize, but our shipment has been pushed back to the 21st. All pre-orders/backorders will start going out then!
11/27/20:
We're caught up, yay! However, we're out of stock of most styles of 1 gallon and 7.5 mil bags. They are due back in stock 12/14/20; I'll open up pre-orders on December 1 for those items.
9/16/20 Update:
Doing better and catching up; we are about 3 days back now, I anticipate being completely caught up by the weekend.
8/30/20 Update:
So there's good news and bad news! The good news is we're only about 3 days back right now on orders. It's been a long time since we've been this caught up. The bad news is even though we basically quadruple ordered, we are out of stock on all of our 5 mil 1 gallon bags, all 4 styles. We still have plenty of 7.5 mil and 3.5 mil 1 gallon bags, and we are getting a big restock this week of regular 10"x14" 5 mil bags (they are open for pre-order), we won't have the other styles (Tamper Evident and Gusseted Ziplocks) until late September.
I guess I somehow thought as the Summer went on we'd see less orders coming through, but its gone the opposite direction and we're seeing even more orders now than we did back in March and April. Our website is doing almost exactly 1000% of what we did last year at this time. We are doing our absolute best to keep shipping, but please be patient. We have a bunch of solid folks working right now, but we've got some of them (and myself) already working 7 days a week. It's a pretty complicated task to teach folks to ship orders due to the number of configurations and bags we offer and the number of shipping options we use, so even though we could use another order taker right now, I hate bringing on folks I might have to let go later, so we're trying to get through with the folks we have. We're getting by, if just barely, right now. If the right person pops up we'll definitely consider adding them to the team.
As always, thank you all; its been many long nights and tons of hard work, but we are incredibly blessed by all of you!! Please take care out there!!
8/24/20 Update:
We're currently starting orders placed 08/19/20, so are running 5-6 days back. Thanks!
8/20/20 Update:
We're currently receiving more orders in a day than we are fulfilling, so we're gradually getting more behind. We are currently about 4-5 days back on shipping. We're using about half a day or more worth of labor every day responding to common questions, so I'm going to try to add some info here. If we don't need to respond to so many customer service calls, we'll be able to ship more orders (4 hours a day equates to up to an additional 40-50 orders per day we could fulfill).
1 - If you log into the website and see your order, we have received it, and it will be shipped and you will receive tracking when it does if you have left us a valid email address.
2 - If the item is on our website, we currently have it in stock.
3 - Yes, we have a pretty full warehouse and more on the way; we may run out of certain items, but you should be able to find something to meet your needs here indefinitely.
4 - The Oxygen Indicators on both FreshUs and Oxyfree absorbers have been atrocious. However, I have tested samples of all the absorbers (including the worst looking indicators), which are all brand new and going out as fast as we can ship them, and they are all working exactly as intended. So if you receive purple, or blue, or dark orange, the absorbers inside are all working correctly.
Stay safe y'all, we are blessed by you!
8/14/20 Update:
Another huge wave of orders, its feeling like April again...we're around 4 days back on shipping. The USPS difficulties also has us concerned and we're keeping an eye on it. Expect a few days delay on the USPS side also. Inventory is holding for the time being, we stacked up shipments almost every month; the bigger problem now is oxygen absorbers. Please note the indicators on both the Freshus and Oxyfree absorbers are wonky. I don't know whether they need time to bake or what, but they are very finicky in recent shipments with a huge variety of colors, bright and dark. However, we've tested absorbers from every batch and they're all perfect.
7/19/20 Update:
We're pretty caught up and are currently shipping orders placed on 7/17/20.
7/3/20 Update:
I have opened up pre-orders for 7.5 mil bags. Any order containing 7.5 mil bags will ship after they are received (somewhere around July 9). There will be incredibly high volumes of orders. These will be shipped first in first out; at this point my guesstimate is that orders placed starting July 10 may ship as late as July 20. Orders placed earlier will ship earlier. We'll be doubling up order order shipping team and will do our best to get your orders out as timely as we can! Thank you so much!
6/24/20 Update:
Our next run is due on July 9. It includes almost everything we carry. We'll have all of our core 7.5 mil bags and all of the 1 gallon 5 mil styles we're out of. We will open pre-orders for the 7.5 mil bags around July 1 for folks who would like to reserve theirs early. We have a 2nd run of core 5 mil items coming in around July 29. Thanks!
5/20 Update:
Our shipment is incoming a day early and will be here tomorrow, Thursday May 21! I've in-stocked those items which are on our shipment tomorrow (mainly our 5 gallon, 2 gallon and 1 gallon bags)! We'll start shipping orders as soon as we unload. (usually by noon)
5/19 Update:
So we're clearing up inventory and floor space, you may see some random bags come in and out of stock over the next few days. We are expecting our shipment in Friday or Monday (5/22 or 5/25), we'll start filling out of stocks the same afternoon we receive them. We've committed to hiring 2-3 extra employees to help us manage the continued higher volume, we'll keep you updated when we find some suitable candidates. We are currently about 1.5 days behind, but expect to be caught up tomorrow (5/19). In order to prevent future supply crunches, we've made a plan to convert a building on our home property to overflow space and fill it with an entire 40' container of product (56 pallets). We won't carry everything there, but we will have our top dozen SKU's.
4/29 Update: Still significant numbers of orders coming in. We get a little behind over the weekend then mostly caught up the rest of the week. The good news is we expect a shipment in around 5/24 which will restock all of our standard 5 mil bags. We have a 7.5 mil shipment coming in late June/early July. Oxyfree oxygen absorbers (the blue) are pretty close to out of stock on our most popular sizes (300cc 20's and 2000cc); we have plenty of FreshUs absorbers (the orange). We haven't slowed down as much as I thought we might after the initial waves of buying in Feb/March, so if you need something in particular, look to get it around the end of May. My guess is we will sell out fairly quickly of our 2 gallon bags (mainly for our business customers) as the order is a little light on them. Also, once we open the floodgates, I have no idea what its going to look like in terms of delays. With everything back in stock we might have a lot of pent up order demand to deal with. I'll post again Monday. My wife and family and I leave for my first longer-than-2-day vacation in 10 years (since we started the business). We figured its as good a time as any, as most of the warehouse is bare. Our compatriots will still be shipping orders and I don't expect any additional delays with us not being here. As always, thank you for being our customers! God Bless and stay safe!
4/15 Update: Holy cow! We've had some significant waves of orders come in, definitely unexpected due to the number of out of stocks we've had. That, combined with our order-puller being out with a migraine today, means we're about 3 days back (we're just finishing up 4/13 orders). We'll get through things as fast as we can, but please be aware it'll be 3-4 days before your order ships if you place an order today. Thanks!
3/25 Update: Whew! So we are finishing up the last few orders for 3/25! We are officially caught up! All orders going forward will go out either same or next day, as is our standard (unless something else extraordinary happens). Thank you to everyone for your patience as we worked through this. We'll spend the next few days cleaning up the warehouse and figuring out exactly what we have left. I plan on doing a master list of recommendations for preppers based on what we have left. I may even take a day off to quarantine with the family! God Bless y'all, its been a crazy time, but we've had so much fun laughing, talking and even praying with our co-workers.
3/23 Update 3: It looks like we've gone out of stock on enough bags that incoming orders are slowing down. We'll see how many we can wade through tomorrow. We are on March 22 orders, only a day back or so. Maybe by Friday we'll be caught up! Thanks y'all, this has been one heck of a ride. Now we'll see what we can do to keep everyone employed until our shipment gets here sometime in June! God Bless my peeps!
3/23 Update 2:
Our last random bag. 13"x14",probably around 1.25 gallons. Limited stock, but we have about 10 cases available.
3/23 Update: About 3 days back right now on shipping orders out. More out of stocks coming. We're putting up something folks want (10"x14" 7.5 mil) but please note these are printed with information about a website that never did get built to our satisfaction. These are at Pre-Corona pricing and will remain there until we are out of stock.
3/17 Update: So today went better than expected. We are actually on the 17th orders. I don't know what tomorrow will bring, but we are ahead of where we expected to be, with this morning's earliest orders getting in the mailstream tomorrow. I do expect call-outs tomorrow so what I expected to happen today will happen tomorrow. All I can offer at this point is a 'stay tuned'. We're doing our level best to keep up, and we will continue processing orders first come first served until we are out of stock.
One more recommended bag for today. Folks bought out our 6"x9.5"x3.5" silver bag super quick. I don't think folks realize we have the exact same bag (same material, thickness, etc) in green and black, in stock at pre-Corona pricing.
3/17 Info: Well, there's bad news, and then there's bad news. We've had some call-outs of our staff, leaving us incredibly undermanned. I would not place a new order if you need your shipment in any sort of reasonable time frame. We are currently working on orders from the 15th, and will likely clear those today. However, after that, I don't expect to get much further than that for the next couple of days. I wish I could perform some miracles for you folks, but the world is getting pretty crazy, and we're caught up in it now. I will update again when we are back at some decent labor capacity.
3/15 Info:
Gadzooks, sorry y'all, been a whole week since we updated, it feels like its just been a couple days...our days look pretty much the same for all of us here...doing orders 12 hours a day each. Yesterday we had caught up to current day orders (3/14), but no website orders are being run today, so we'll be back to about 2 days back on Monday 3/16 as we're seeing even higher volume today than we did 2 weeks ago. We're out of stock of several sizes of the 7.5 mil bags, and getting low on the rest. We've out of stocked the 5 mil 1 gallons except for the printed bags mentioned in our first update. We're burning through most of our inventory at a furious rate, and I'm guessing we have maybe another week before we'll be out of several more bags. Once the warehouse is mostly empty (about 2 weeks), we'll be able to take stock and sort out what we have left. I've got an odd sized bag or two I haven't listed yet if anyone is interested from some custom orders (13"x14" 5 mil, for example). Stay safe people!
3/7 Update: Some big waves of orders has pushed our timetable back a little bit, and my thought that we'd be completely caught up early next week is too optimistic. We're currently finishing up orders from 3/5, and tomorrow we'll start 3/6 orders. Orders from this weekend will likely start 3/10. Thanks for bearing with us everyone, we are working as diligently as we can to get everything out as fast as we can. One of our order fillers had some personal business to attend to for a few hours on Friday, as well as some general last-minute prepping for several of us (we're not going crazy, but I do have a daughter with asthma and an elderly MOL in our house, and we'll be avoiding crowds for the next several weeks as we assess.). Next week the goal is bump our immune systems and push through orders as quickly as we can! God Bless y'all, stay safe!
3/4 Update: Getting there! We've turned off eBay as a platform that we sell on temporarily. We are finishing up the last of our orders there today. This will allow us to focus on clearing the website backlog, as well as reserving some extra stocks for the awesome folks who support us here. I expect that doing this will allow us to be completely caught up on the website by early next week. A huge thanks to Sir Gregory of Poole, our website order filler, who has been an absolute trooper in getting your orders out. Please know that if anything is wrong (as always), we will take care of it, but it may take us a few extra days! Thank you and God bless!
3/2 Update: A pretty good day, we caught up a good bit on our website orders, we're only about a day behind at this point I suspect we'll lose some ground tomorrow as we have to work another one of our platforms. We added a 3rd full time order puller which was a big part of getting more orders out. We shipped out about 2.4 bazillion orders. We received a lot of the USPS supplies we needed, which helped also. We've hopefully got a continuous stream incoming (USPS limits supply orders) and it won't be a huge issue going forward. Inventory is dropping pretty quickly, I expect a couple of additional out of stocks by the weekend.
3/1 Update: We are about 2-3 days out for orders placed Sunday night. We're out of the USPS supplies we normally use to mail our packages. We have 3 orders into USPS, but the earliest we'll see one of the necessary boxes is Tuesday. We're working to ship creatively, but it'll take some extra time and expense.
Another bag to look at that we have lots of stock of is the 12"x16" black ziplock bag. It's roomy and available in good quantities and so won't have any price increases for a good while. Stay safe everyone...time to make sure your vehicles are gassed up and you ask your Dr. for an additional month or two of any medication you may need. Better to have it and not need than vice versa. God Bless y'all!
2/28/20 Update:
Coronavirus has severely hampered Mylar bags supply. First, manufacturing is not at full capacity across all of Asia. Second, Coronavirus panic buying has caused outages across many industries, but especially those survival/prepper related. Freeze Dried Foods, MRE's, even rice and beans at Walmart are having outages due to overwhelming demand.
This combination means that we will be experiencing shortages and out of stocks on many of our bags. For now, our oxygen absorber supplies are holding, and so you will be able to continue to get them. We expect to not be restocked on Mylar bags until June at the earliest.
As an FYI, one bag we do have is extremely plentiful, it is a variation of our nearly out of stock 5 mil 10"x14" and 10"x16" 1 gallon bags. It is a standard 10"x16" 5 mil 1 gallon Aluminum Foil and Mylar bag, like all of our bags, but it is printed with beautiful designs.
For whatever reason, most preppers didn't want beautiful printed bags!=) And so for this Mylarpocalypse, we are blessed to have a number of pallets of these available.