buying domestic 🇫🇮 (thanks to the deterioration of the postal service)

[cimorene]

Since parcel delivery has been unreliable since the outsourcing of delivery to our local K-Citymarket supermarket, I've been trying to use parcel-pick-up shipping methods instead. There are 2 corner groceries within a 10-minute walk of home, each next to its own bus stop, and between them they get at least 4 of these (including the infamous Smartpost automats, whose mishap from the previous link has now been rendered impossible because the websites now display the private automats in the dropdown list when you order from them, hallelujah). A lot of websites from within Finland offer more than one of these, because not every corner grocery has all of them.

So that means that I try harder to find online shops inside Finland to order from now, where in the past I often ordered from the UK or Germany by default because they're so big & hence have a wider range of well-designed large English-language webstores (the difference in shipping cost is usually not extreme, although UK ones are less likely to offer international shipping at all)*.

But today was the first time I started to order something from a domestic shop and then changed my mind because they didn't have any pickup-point options. This is... unheard of. It's bizarre. It's not like it's a tiny little shop, either. It's quite large! I feel like I've time traveled to 2005 with their webshop! I'll have to find more Spøt from one of my other 8 Finnish yarn shop bookmarks...



*Which may slightly reduce the shock if they slide out of the EU soon... though not for me, because I'm deeply attached to three different UK-based fountain pen & ink shops and I've only found one likely EU replacement and their website's not as good. Unsurprisingly the situation is quite different when it comes to yarns, although afaik only Great British Yarns has all the Jamieson's of Shetland and Studio Donegal yarns which I want acres of... Finland is a big knitting and yarn-consuming country, so there's a pretty solid stock of good speckled hand-dyed colors from indie dyers like Hedgehog Fibres (Irish), The Uncommon Thread (UK), Qing Fibre (UK), La Bien Aimee (French), & Finnish Aurinkokehrä, Handu, Kettu Yarns, Louhittaren Luola, Lanitium ex machina, and Silmusolmu. Much more surprisingly, there's a Helsinki salon that carries several great indie nail polish brands of which I am a long-time dedicated fan, even though she's much smaller than the UK shops that do that (so small that she hand-signs every packing slip "Thanks! - Satu").

Comments

[yvannairie]

I casually read through your postal service tag as I was making tea and now I have the overwhelming urge to apologise on behalf of everyone at the postal service >.<)

[cimorene]

You'll notice most of the error is Citymarket though. I never had any problems until they closed our postal branch and switched to them!

[yvannairie]

But there's also stuff like logistics losing packages and retrieval tickets being mishandled and it hurts my professional pride. Like, yeah, sometimes POK fucks up, the majority of the time it's not on delivery staff but the level of consequtive fuck-ups that have needed to happen for some of your stories boggles the mind.

[cimorene]

I was assuming that the logistics fuckups were happening at Citymarket with the same employees as the other ones to be honest! Is it not possible that they get the full blame, or is it just that it needed a bunch of DIFFERENT employees at Citymarket to do the wrong thing?

I don't really blame the employees there, though. They don't have the kind of training, let alone the job security and pay and benefits, that postal employees have, and with the job that they DO have, I think expecting about the same level of job dedication and so on that people generally apply to being cashiers and service desk workers is normal. My assumption is that the level of work and organization in being a perfectly good service counter cashier is simply not adequate for postal delivery and package storage and retrieval.

I do assume the package slips going out at the wrong times or getting lost completely is on delivery staff, I suppose, but even if they are still postal workers and not from Citymarket there's still the interface with the store to consider which could probably account for the some.

[yvannairie]

... honestly, yeah, in theory it could be that, too, because the way in-shop service desks are set up depends entirely on how the shop decides to do it. I just kind of... snarl, mentally, because this is one of those situations where I know what the right way to do it is, and I get antsy just from the knowledge that someone didn't bother to do it the right way, omg.

[cimorene]

Everyone from somewhere else I've talked to has had pretty good experiences, so maybe we've got like the literal worst grocery store post office in the country. 😅

[yvannairie]

That is also entirely plausible, tbh. When my Least Favourite (now, thankfully ex-)coworker still worked at our location, I distinctly recall coming across a reprimand forwarded from a customer with similar complaints -- addressed at the shift I shared with her. And I know it wasn't me fucking up with those retrieval tickets.

Geez, would you look at that, I managed to turn this convo into complaining about lackluster (ex-)coworkers after all :'D

[cimorene]

I mean why would you EVER not write the shelf location on the ticket. Writing the wrong one just requires you to accidentally swap places of two, but NOT writing it and then actually DELIVERING it like that. Like, for FUCK'S SAKE.

[yvannairie]

Right??? Fuck. I'm also constantly yelling at people that they need to write the return dates on the packages because I don't want us getting blamed if they're misreturned due to a time mishap.

[owl]

Is the EU pen shop fontoplumo.nl/shop ? If not I would recommend them. There's also https://www.fountainfeder.eu/shop where I ordered the German exclusive inks from Diamine.

[cimorene]

It wasn't, but I have since added it. And I can't actually find the one that was, amusingly...

Maybe I just need to get a list of European languages' "fountain pen" and then search them all one after the other. I haven't tried French... or Danish... or Spanish...

[owl]

I've been very happy with fontoplumo's customer service. I'll miss them if Brexit goes as badly as it looks.

I haven't tried French... or Danish... or Spanish...
Italian? http://www.stiloestile.it/

[cimorene]

Well, I was a little leery of Italian because the Italian brands of fountain pens that I see all seem to be extremely expensive and/or gaudy, which really isn't my style; but I've ordered from Italian online stores before with no issues so I could check them out too!