Get it on time

My livelihood is in the hands of the post office. My blog and other online presence aside, most of the revenue that pays my salary comes to my firm through its print periodicals. Numismatic News is one of them.

Readers still love it. They can’t wait to get each issue. Occasionally, they call me to report a delivery problem, or do so by e-mail.

Delivery problems crop up now and again and have done so sporadically during my nearly three decades in the Iola office of Numismatic News. Our circulation department does its best to track down the source of each problem and work it out.

The perennial question posed to me is whether an issue was mailed on time. Numismatic News is mailed on time almost without exception. When the very rare exception occurs, which is accompanied by unusual events, we report it in our paper. Presses can break down. Vehicles can crash. Strikes can happen, but these kinds of things almost never occur.

That leaves routine causes. I picked up my copy of Thursday’s Wall Street Journal in the mailroom of my office yesterday after I had posted my daily blog entry. With it was the Tuesday Wall Street Journal. Getting two issues at once doesn’t happen with that paper very often, but it does happen. Usually it involves consecutive daily papers. I obviously went without a paper at all on Tuesday.

I subscribe to three news weeklies at home. Their delivery wanders around the week. One of the weeklies, the Economist, can reach me sometimes on Saturdays. When I am home, I love reading it in spare moments on the weekend. Mostly, though, it comes on Monday or Tuesday.

I get other periodicals. Their delivery is sometimes not according to routine, either. I understand the frustration of readers when an issue does not come. I’ve been there. I've experienced it.

All of these publishing firms earn their livelihoods as I do. They take any delivery problem seriously.

I don’t expect delivery problems ever to disappear. Human organizations will always have their flaws. Know that we take problems seriously here and work hard to correct them.

However, unlike when I was a kid waiting for the Saturday delivery of Numismatic News, I have an option if I do not receive it. I can go online at www.numismaticnews.net. As a subscriber to the other periodicals, I can go to their Web sites.

Life definitely has gotten better.