Went to my LHS Saturday and the new issue of NSR was on the shelf, I'm a subscriber but I'm still waiting for mine. Also noticed that N Scale supply had them advertised on October 15th, I'm a subscriber, I'm still waiting for mine. I think I'm not going to renew my subscription, my LHS gets them before I do as a subscriber so where's the benefit? JMHO 2slim
They may have something boogered up with whoever does their bulk-mailing. I know this has happened once or twice with some of my subscriptions. I am not currently and NSR subscriber. I use that magazine as part of my excuse for regular visits to my hobby shop - "oh, I gotta go get my NSR..."
Whenever this has happened to me, I make certain a reasonable period of time has passed. Then send in a gently worded inquiry. Over the many years, almost every magazine and historical society I have subscribed to, has at one time or another had a slow arriving, or lost issue. BTW- It may not be their fault, as USPS can easily be the culprit here. Which is completely outside of any magazine's control. They've already lost one thing inbound to me this month, and been incredibly slow on another. Boxcab E50
Still waiting for mine. A friend bought a copy from the local shop last Friday. Thought I would have had mine by now but don't panic yet.
Mule-train? Stop trying to confuse me with this modern high tech terminology! Actually they do. But only if it has three legged mules, to keep the speed down. You ought to see how long it usually takes from northern California to here. I have often seen 14-17 days for 1st Class. Boxcab E50
Took 5 days for a letter to go back to origin for me. I accidentally put the rent check in the mail (with proper postage) and it delivers to hte main office. It went to the post office (3 blocks away) and either sat there for 5 days or made a trip around the country in the meantime. Either way, needless to say I cancelled the check and delivered one in person because of that little problem.
In this day and age, subscriber benefits are simple - lower cost and saving the gas for an otherwise unnecessary trip to the LHS. Its not unusual for magazines to get out the cash sales mags first for cash flow reasons. The subsribers have already paid their cash, regardless of when its delivered. It is the main reason I stopped subscribing to many mags. Also, I travel a lot and it always seemed they would come just after i left town for a trip.
Apparently Kalmbach hasn't heard of this trick, as I get my issues of Trains and Model Railroader around the first of the month, a good 10 days before our local Hastings or Books-a-Million get them. GUess I have an excuse to run down to Denton to Silver Spike, so's I can get my copy of NSR. Which is OK, since I'm needing some scenery items for my layout.
Bob, Well, I always enjoy my trips to SS. I just hate to spend $8 in gas for a $5 magazine and some scenery! MR and Trains used to come later than DMT got them. About 5-8 years ago, they changed that policy and I started subscribing again. I think I recall similar complaints back then and they listened. Also, ya gotta believe MR is the most solvent of the whole MR publishing biz and can afford to send out the subscribers copies first. As always, my memory could be wrong. The south won the civil war, right?
Jeff,I on the other still like to visit hobby shops and perhaps do some railfanning in the process.This is one of the many ways I keep up with the state of the hobby in the surrounding areas.Last week I visited a hobby shop,did some railfanning and later visited Central Ohio Model Railroad Club located near Powell(Oh). See how I combine trips? I had a very relaxing afternoon and evening.
Feel better knowing I'm not the only one.... I agree it does give me an excuse to visit my LHS. But then they are pretty clever over there they know when I'm broke and that's when they put out everything I want, then when I have $$ and go back, nothing. That's how my credit card got so thin!! 8^) 2slim still waiting for Nov/Dec NSR
NSR switched the mailing classification for this issue in hopes of making the process more efficient and timely, but it seem the USPS didn't perform as expected. I suspect that the "late arrival" occurrences will be rectified with the Jan/Feb issue. bb
There's actually another rail connection for all of this. My grandfather, as some of you know, worked for Union Pacfic for a whole bunch of years between Portland and Hinkle and LaGrande and other points on the line. He was a conductor for a bunch of years and has a personality that fits that job pretty well - very detail oriented and by the book yet flexible if the situation calls for it. He is also very interested in the postal service, and is always trying to mine postal employees for more information about how the mail is sorted and delivered (yes, that's kind of strange, but some people would think that we're very strange in our hobby, too). Well, he decries what he calls the over-centralization of post office functions. A letter, for example, from LaGrande to The Dalles in the 1950's (two eastern Oregon towns almost a couple hundred miles from one another) would have been collected in LaGrande and put in the RPO car, where it would have been sorted en route as the train headed westward, and by the time the train would have reached The Dalles it would have already been "in the bag" and would have been dropped off there and delivered. NOW, that same letter would go to a post office in LaGrande, get put on a truck, and get driven all the way to Portland, 100 miles farther away than The Dalles. There it would be sorted into a truck heading back east on I-84, and delivered to the post office in The Dalles, where it would be sent out for delivery. So, yes, that letter that may have taken 1-2 days or so in the 1950's can now take nearly a week. With all that extra storage and travel and fiddling around no WONDER postage keeps inching upward. End of diversion. I gotta institute some "rant control." Here's the other possibility - it could be that whoever is doing their mail pre-sorting is just shoving them into the back after bigger clients more on the scale of MR. I don't think that they are trying to sell it in the LHS's first to make money. For one, magazines themselves don't make a whole lot of money off that whole thing. The outlet gets a cut, the distributor gets a cut, and then they get whatever is left. For another thing, I know from when we carried magazines at our bookshop for a short while that we had Net 14 terms with our distributor, which means that we'd have 14 days to pay from the date of invoice, and that was to the distributor, and who knows how long they had to pay their magazine publishers. When someone would buy a magazine we didn't just stick the money in a chute and have it shoot off to someone else. Anyway, I hope this illuminates things a little. Without knowing exactly how NSR is handling their labeling and pre-sorting I can't go much further. I have had usually pretty good responses from magazines in the past when I have felt an issue was late. The answers are usually pretty understandable. Also, this is the Nov/Dec issue out now. It's not like it's really late, yet.
