PSA yet again demonstrating pure incompetence. From top to bottom we have 3 orders as follows. All sent in the same box. 5 day turnaround marked on the box since it was the fastest turnaround time contained:
45 day turnaround, 54 card submission ($8 per card bulk)
5 day turnaround, 1 card submission ($45 per card “express”) <== used this since value was >$500 I had no choice, but it is nice to get expensive cards back quick, right?
10 day turnaround, 3 card submission ($18 per card regular) <== used this since card value was ~$350 each
What order would you think these should be graded in? There really is no excuse to not go 2, 3, 1, right?
Well the geniuses over at PSA had their own method.
They literally have done it backwards, and while it is awesome to get a 45 day turnaround done in 4 business days it just makes no damn sense when you let a 5 business day order go over the allotted time. Clearly it isn’t a volume issue. It is just gross incompetence. They can’t use the excuse of the Boston show, as again two lower priority submission leap frogged it. I mean if the 5 day was like 500 cards and the other two were a single card I could see where you can get the quick ones out of the way, but that is the opposite of the case here.
On top of it, these took 3 business days to receive as well which is quite a large amount of time considering it contained a 5 day turnaround.
Rant isn’t over yet, as I am going to call PSA later today to ask how in the hell they come up with this crap. I am sure that will go well.
There is almost no way this is going to attract any defenders, it will be mostly ignored, and I might be called a whiner. There really just isn’t any defense. If it does though, I would be extremely interested to hear how anyone could try and build a defense for this.
Just was wanting to vent really.
It doesn’t make any sense that I hear the specials are weak due to high volumes of modern stuff, but then my bulk comes back so quick, and my express and ocghp regular gets delayed.
I called and ran through these 3 orders with him over the phone. He could “see my frustration” with the one order not being complete but couldn’t do anything or offer anything as the turnaround times are only estimates. I asked if he could flag it in any way to get it done today/tomorrow, but he mentioned he could only send an e-mail to “operations”. This would remind them of it being late, but it wouldn’t guarantee that it would be done today, tomorrow, nor even this week.
I asked how this could have possibly happened, mentioning the fact that it seems like shorter turnaround times should have higher priority. He used the word “busy” initially and I jumped on that with the fact that a 45 day turnaround time was completed in 4 days, yet a 5 day is now on day 6, so it is not remotely an effect of being busy. Then he mentioned something about how different graders are assigned different orders and they just work through them. I mean yeah… I get that. But who is this incompetent person coming up with the assignments that result in something so stupid occurring in the first place? Asked it in a nicer way, but was given a runaround type answer.
Ugh. Waiting on a grade has never been so nerve wracking especially with some of the issues I have seen in the past regarding cards coming back with issues. Most valuable card I have sent so far and I had no issue paying the $45 + shipping to grade it. Almost went with the $95 for 2 day… but now I really wonder where that would have gotten me. Wanting to get into some of the higher tier stuff, it is just hard seeing stuff like this when time really counts that much extra on the higher dollar stuff.
As someone who has worked in the bowels of Customer Relations at a Casino and Customer related areas of businesses before, the run around the representative was giving you was a combination of 2 things:
The representative has a ‘script’ to read off when reading these types of complaints and has certain words and phrases that are drilled into them as ways to brush off/explain these things, the problem is that in almost all cases this just makes the customer angry and usually give up. The representative just doesn’t have any real answers and is paid not to actually think and go and investigate issues but to pass them onto someone else, who has to pass it on to someone else, and the cycle continues.
This is a really common and just speaks of awful mid-level management policies and communication between areas of the business. It’s not an issue with the grading, like you say, it’s extremely poor management of how orders get given to the graders.
I think it’d be costing them more money from inefficiency than any money they will lose from people turning away from them.
Due to the increased value I can see why they would want it on site for a minimum amount of time (limiting insurance liability in case of break in or total-loss fire type situation) hence the high dollar cards necessitating fast turnaround times. Also the increased risk on their part in handling it for part of the increased cost.
I can totally see why they charge more for more valuable cards and stick the theoretically faster turnaround times with them. I have no issue with that at all. I just have issue paying that and then dealing with their half assed system of determining which orders get graded at which times.
You would think that, except for the fact the its basically an oligopoly. Essentially you have one other option (BGS) and since its not technically a substitute, you have nowhere to go. They know this, and although they attempt to strive for good customer service, they understand they have a safety net to fall back on. The amount of money they probably lose from people turning away is negligible at best and you won’t see any type of shift in practice until they see at least 8%.
Actually our boy got the correct answer but it was cluttered up with csspeak.
It’s an intentionally different queue.
Shouldn’t state exactly why because the next time there’s an anamoly ill get called out by our brothers and sisters here and it’ll be treated as a failed overall policy
