Yeah, this is a very long time. I've already got my rigs all built and running. I'll likely just flip mine domestically when they arrive as I don't feel like rebuilding my rigs. Anyone want to reserve a 4 or 6 GPU vitalia with all the add-ons? LOL!
I can picture those tribal ladies that balance water pots on their head transporting the mail all over South Africa. ROFL
LOL!
The problem is really only around late November to the end of January. There are two things that impact it and lead to a very drastic slow-down in deliveries:
- Customs gets completely tied up, because there are so many migrant workers from Zimbabwe and Malawi and other parts of Africa that are both sending parcels to their families and receiving parcels from their families. As is expected, they send parcels with things like cans of underarm deodorant (I kid you not), which have to be removed and destroyed because of the danger of the cans exploding. They also don't fill in documentation correctly, and postal staff just process the parcel and send it out, making it custom's issue to deal with.
- If that's not bad enough, because of the high cost associated with courier deliveries in South Africa, the postal service becomes *the* method for delivering parcels (international and domestic). Since they don't have the staff capacity, they hire temporary staff to make up for it. The temps don't have training, don't have time for training, and are paid a pittance, so they aren't really motivated to work well. This means that parcels like ours, that are pre-cleared by customs, end up sitting at the post office in a pile in the corner waiting to be processed until they can get to it.
To give you an indication of the magnitude of the problem, this time last year I was at Capemail customs in Cape Town paying customs and collecting parcels from eBay, and they told me that they had just over 100 000 uncollected parcels sitting on the warehouse shelves from November/December! Typically stuff sits on the shelves for such a short period of time that they barely have a few thousand parcels at any given point in time, so it really goes crazy.
From the beginning of February the backlog is cleared, both at customs and at the post office hubs and branches, and the temporary staff have gone, so things return to normal. Doing a soft launch at the beginning of November was great, but our mistake was wanting to take advantage of Bitcoin Black Friday at the end of November - we didn't think that so many people would choose the cheapest shipping option, and we'd just end up contributing to the year-end backlog:)