Albertporter only needs 50

I got a lot of confirming emails today with agreements to send payment to make this purchase.

Those who have not yet responded by email, please do. My response is the same to everyone and you get my address and a copy of the ship rates.

Orders need to be based on prepayment. That way additions (or deletions) will match only what people need and have paid for.

The next issue is when to set as a cut off date.

Set too far in the future, early respondents will wait longer for product. Set too short, mailed payments may not have arrived in time, stranding some Audiogoners who expect to be included.

We need an open vote and agree openly and to all, as to a fair date that payment must be received by me.

Then the project will proceed on a schedule known to everyone !

Albert,

In response to your last post I would feel very comfortable with you setting the cut off date. You will best be able to judge when interest in slowing and it's time to place the order. I know for me, if you said one week or one month, it's OK. You're doing a great service for all of us and I would be surprised if anyone would question your judgement.

So Audiogoner's, do I hear any seconds on letting Albert set the time frame for this project?

Since you called for a vote, I would vote for November 15. That gives everyone a little over a month to get their payment to you and to work out logistics.

One vote for Oct. 31st.

Thanks Albert.

I would think that two weeks would be good. This would allow people another paycheck to come up with the cash and a week for transit in the mail.

I would only suggest to Albert that he come up with some type of a plan on how to ship to the end user. Since i have gone through something similar before, my suggestion is to use USPS Priority Mail. Not only will they provide you with all of the boxes that you need for free, the cost of shipping is reasonable and they will deliver to P.O. Boxes whereas UPS, Fed Ex, etc... won't. Transit time using Priority Mail is typically three days depending on how far it has to go. Obviously, there are exceptions to any example, but this has been my experience for most instances.

Besides all of this, Albert needs to think about covering shipping costs to the individuals that have ordered them. His price above covers purchase of the outlets and shipping to and from the Cryo facility. This means that there is an additional fee to send them out to the individual. Since each individual lives in a different place and may have different weigths ( more or fewer outlets ), it will be hard for him to come up with a way to estimate cost on an individual basis. As such, i would recommend a flat rate for each individual outlet.

Since Priority Mail is a flat rate up to 2 lbs, i would think that this would cover at least a couple of outlets. If one were to tack insurance on top of this, it would be more AND this would give Albert a way to verify that the package was delivered. After all, insured packages must be signed for so nobody could try to pull a fast one and say that they never got theirs and get a few "freebies" on top of the ones that they paid for. While i'm hoping that nobody here would do such a thing, i know that Albert is honourable enough to try and make things "right" even if they were already "right" to begin with.

On top of this, i would recommend sending Albert a "love offering". While it is very "nice" of him to go out of his way to do this, this type of project eats up WAY more time that one thinks it does. You have to sort out the individual orders, pack them up individually , address each box individually, fill out the insurance forms individually, etc... Then you have to tote everything up to the post office, etc... As i said, it eats up a LOT of time since you have dozens of individual orders to take care of. Sean
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