This is a re-post from last summer but deserves mentioning here on the site.
If you don’t read the whole post, know this: S&J CD has high quality CD duplication/replication, and is very attentive to customer service. They went out of their way to correct a mistake that UPS made. We are very lucky to work with S&J!
The long version:
The folks over at S&J CD bailed us out in a huge way at DEFCON. S&J pressed our Lost Reality albums back in March. We placed another order with them at the end of July for a new shipment of CDs. S&J has a very fast turn time, and so they were shipping the albums to us at DEFCON via UPS ground. We needed the albums on Friday, August 8th; and UPS quoted a 4-day ship time via ground. So to keep costs low all around, S&J shipped the albums via ground at the beginning of the week.
After having fulfilled their duties of pressing our albums and handing them off to UPS, S&J checked the shipping status. The tracking on the UPS website showed that the albums would take 5 days for ground rather than the originally quoted time of 4 days. UPS mis-quoted the shipping time. Already, S&J had exceeded my expectations just by checking the shipping status. But then S&J went above and beyond. They notified me right away to advise they were trying to have the shipment diverted and marked for express overnight delivery.
A quick note here: one extra business day (so 5 instead of the original 4) would have had the albums arrive in Vegas on the Monday following DEFCON. That is completely unsatisfactory when the point of the order was to sell the albums at DEFCON.
S&J attempted to leverage their status as a UPS Preferred shipping customer and have the packages redirected. Unfortunately, UPS messed up again and didn’t grab the packages out of the shipping hub. On Wednesday, August 6th, the bad news was delivered to me that UPS had failed to follow the directive of diverting our albums. At this point, UPS had fumbled twice and our albums were going to miss the mark.
Here is the true point of quality. S&J, realizing the situation from our perspective as Dual Core, ran an emergency half-order, and shipped them out overnight — all at no cost to us. The emergency shipment arrived just in time as we ran out of our initial stock of Lost Reality rather quickly. All of this is truly phenomenal to me. Every day I read about airlines who shaft their passengers, and companies who could care less about the experience of customers; but S&J moved swiftly in the right direction.
To emphasize how amazing this is, I want to iterate that S&J had originally completed its work as agreed. Our late album delivery was in no part the fault of S&J. They saw that UPS had twice botched the situation, and S&J stepped in to make everything right.
This was, by far, the best customer experience I have had in years. The people at S&J were in touch with me any time an update happened. They exercised their options to first get UPS to correct its problem. Then when it became apparent that this would not happen, the people at S&J took matters into their own hands to provide an outstanding solution. If you are looking to press any media (demo, EP, LP, DVD, etc); the competent and hard-working employees of S&J CD come highly recommended.
