Waiting for a Horizon Hobby order to arrive

Last week I put in a little stock order at Horizon Hobby.  I order a lot of stuff from them, and after many orders I have a real good idea of how long the shipping interval is from their California Warehouse, and also the Champaign IL location. 

For the last few years it’s been my experience that orders filled from the CA warehouse get to the Bay Area in 2-3 days, tops.  If you want something for the weekend, you order by Tuesday, and you should be set for Friday.  It is important to note that this is when you use the $4.99 shipping option.

Last week, I placed an order on 3/2.  I was really surprised when I did not receive the gear by Friday, and even more surprised when the stuff from IL showed up!

I tracked the package, and noticed that the tracking had been handed over to ‘Mail Innovations’, which is a UPS spin-off.  According to the tracking, the package has been sitting in Petaluma since 3/4.  It arrived in the North Bay 2 days after I ordered it, but’s it’s been sitting since.

I phoned Horizon customer service, and I was really surprised at what I was told, verbatim by the customer service rep:

- The tracking on Mail Innovations items is ‘goofy’, and is not really useful or accurate.  This is known and understood by Horizon.

- The rep recommended that if tracking is important to you, that you should use another method like UPS.

- These Mail Innovations packages can take up to three weeks to deliver.  I asked her to repeat this three times.
When I asked her what I should do if my order did not turn up, she said I should wait another week until Monday, 3/15.

None of this is very good for the Horizon Hobby customer in California.  

We used to be able to spend $5 on shipping and get a small order out to the Bay Area in 2-3 days.

Now, we are told we should wait 2-3 weeks for the same service, and if we don’t like that we should start spending more on shipping.

I’m sure there are extenuating circumstances that caused this, but I would expect some kind of warning from Horizon either as part of the order process, or a bulletin on their website. 

Put plainly, this change, and this poor performance is not what I would have expected from a company like Horizon, especially without notification.  And, when their customer service people tell me that the solution is just to start spending 40% more on shipping, I’m tempted to start shopping around.

**Update 5/2010**

A couple months have gone by since I wrote this, and shipping times have returned to what we always considered normal.  Couple-few days from the CA warehouse, maybe 1 or so more around Xmas.

So, in retrospect I think that the problem I experienced was a fluke.  The subsequent communication problem I had with the service rep at Horizon complicated matters, but who knows, maybe I was a little cranky that day.

Horizon has always been a solid resource for the hobby, and it’s awful nice to have reliable, inexpensive pretty-quick shipping.  Special thanks to Beth at Horizon for getting in touch and making sure that all of my questions or concerns were answered honestly by the right people!

- Eli

I tripped on Electrotek RC purely by accident.  I was up in Chico visiting family and was looking for a hobby store.  It turns out that these folks are based in Chico, and specialize in electronics for RC airplanes.  They have a few core products that are designed for gasser ships that need to monitor their reciever packs/etc/etc, and they also have a complete line of lighting kits.

If you are able to do so, I highly recommend you talk to these folks on the phone the first time you order.  Bob was more than happy to talk to me about what I was working on and build me a custom lighting kit with extensions that were just the right length. 

I ordered 2 kits, one for a park flyer (the kit you see on this T-28) that is based on their ‘micro sunbrite’ line, and another kit that I have not used yet, which has much larger LED’s and was designed for a 2M sailplane.

Since I bought all this stuff last Spring, Electrotek has started a seperate line of products designed for foam parkflyers.  I think the new product is cool, but I will note that the stock location on a T-28 for the ramping beacon is at the front of the rudder where I put it, and not at the top of the rudder.

I took a video of my T-28 after installation, apologies for poor quality:

T-28 Navigation lights by Electrotek RC from Eli Caul on Vimeo.

I’m planning to add a set of landing lights in the wings someday, on a reciever controlled switch I got from Turnigy. 

Geeky, scale details like lighting just makes the sport more fun for me

- Eli