One of our suppliers, Safari, Ltd, invited Sue and me to visit their facility in Florida. In January, we spent a very pleasant day with them seeing their new products for 2008, etc. And we talked about our display needs. They had a beautiful lucite display rack that had been discontinued in favor of a new more modular style. They offered us the old one if we'd pay shipping. What a deal! We loved it. When we got home, they calculated shipping at about $280.00. Done! Again, what a deal - from Florida to Oregon. Nice. When it arrived, we were so excited. Our old display rack for plastic animals had been temporary, and we were looking forward to something that would work better for us and look cleaner. So, the day the delivery arrived, we were excited. "Wait," the guy said, "I have some big boxes on this truck." "Yeah, we know they're going to be big," we said. "But," he butted in, "I'd check out this shipping rate before I signed for them." What??? We'd authorized $280.00, and now they wanted over $2,000.00? Somebody misplaced a decimal point. Long story short, the racks went into the shipping company's storage facility in Astoria while Safari went to bat for us. As it turned out, the mistake had been in the estimate and the shippers were holding out for the $2000.00 plus. A week or so went by and finally Safari had made a little progress with them, but not much. In the end, Safari paid the lion's share and we paid our originally-agreed portion. We want to thank Safari in a big way for this. They were fantastic! And, our new racks moved in.
Here we're in the process of loading in carefully-chosen items that will relieve some of our storage issues in the back and make a nice display for the customers.
The cardboard boxes went into the recycling bin, but we got a bonus out of the deal - enough bubble wrap to last awhile (and I took the photo after much of it had been stored). We were happy. We recycle everything we can, and we won't be having to buy new bubble wrap for quite some time.
I thought I'd like to end with this. You can see this poster on the wall in Picture 2. And yes, that's a lowland tapir near the center on the left. The Safari poster rack can be seen on the right in Picture 2. We carry a number Safaris' beautiful posters, but they're not online yet.Click any photo for a bigger view.