MauiShirts Blog

Aloha blog readers and fellow Aloha Wear aficionados!

My name is Dustin Caldwell. I am the unofficial part time Customer Service Representative and the official Amazon.com and Shop.com guy here at MauiShirts.

This is my first blog entry. I’ve refrained from posting before since the best thing I’ve had to write about has pretty much been the same stuff that grinds Mickey’s gears: the rare customer who is rude, hateful, or possesses the uncanny ability to both manipulate a size 2X dress in such a way so that it will fit into a matchbox and ship it back as a return for refund, and then complain about paying for us to steam out the wrinkles. But now, I’ve stumbled onto something unique, and blog worthy, I call it the “Shop.com or Overnight Shipping Enigma”.

Here’s the crux of it:
As most of you folks out there wearing your brightly colored Aloha Shirts and Dresses know, we ship from the island of Maui, Hawaii. Maui happens to be located in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Due to our location, true overnight shipping is not available to people who live in the Midwest and Eastern portions of the US. If you live in the Midwest or East, the fastest service possible, aside from Mickey getting on a jet and personally delivering your Aloha Shirt, (send him an email to price this delivery option), is FedEx 2nd Day. In a nut shell, if you live in one of the aforementioned parts of the country, FedEx 2nd Day will save you money, AND, get your stuff to you just as fast as Next Day.  People in Hawaii and some areas of the Western US can get their Aloha Wear overnight, indeed, some of these people NEED their Aloha Wear over night! (I can hear Mickey in the back ground, “the words ‘Aloha Wear’ and ‘Rush’ DO NOT belong in the same sentence”).

So I’ve scratched my head and had several high level meetings with the President of MauiShirts, (by “high level meetings”, I mean that Mickey and I had a chat on MSN Messenger), and we decided to add the following message to our shipping information which appears when a customer is prompted to select a shipping method:

IMPORTANT NOTICE:THERE IS NO OVERNIGHT, NEXT DAY, SERVICE TO THE MID-WEST AND EASTERN MAINLAND STATES POSSIBLE FROM HAWAII. IF YOU LIVE IN ONE OF THESE AREAS, TRANSIT TIME WILL BE 2 DAYS; SAVE YOUR MONEY AND SELECT FED EX 2ND DAY!!!

OK, That message appears right at the top of the screen when the customer selects Overnight Service. That should certainly take care of it, right? Well….you would be wrong in that assumption. For some reason, once every two weeks or so, somebody who lives in New York, Ohio, North Carolina or some other obvious problem shipping destination selects Next Day as their mode of shipment. But that isn’t the strangest part of this enigma, the really weird thing is that this only happens on Shop.com and the Yahoo main web site. Amazon outsells Shop.com 8 to 1, yet this has never happened on Amazon. You are thinking, “that message must be easier to find on Amazon then Shop.com or the main web site”. A reasonable assumption, nonetheless, incorrect. I’ve loaded a cart on both sites and gone through checkout, if anything, the message on Shop.com and the main web site on Yahoo is MORE apparent then Amazon. Its right there next to the box you click for Next Day, screaming at you in CAPITALIZED BOLD PRINT, but for some reason customers on Shop.com do not read it. Therein lies the Shop.com Shipping Enigma. And like the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle and the whereabouts of Jimmy Hoffa, we may never know the true nature of this baffling phenomenon.