One Year, 16 day round trip
If you run a pack and ship business, you know that you will get customers who report a package has never arrived. For me, that runs about 1 in 500 in the US (I'm US based) and about 1 in 100 internationally.
When I get contacted, if enough time has gone by I just reship the package.
But in all the lost shipments, I've only gotten one returned to me before today - and that was a case of someone moving from college and forgetting to give them his forwarding address.
But in yesterday's mail, I got a package back from South Africa.
I looked at the ship date so I could find the customer and contact him to see if I had the address right.
(The ship date on the mailing slip was October 28 so I was really surprised it came back so fast. I was thinking SA must have really efficient mail service.)
After 30 minutes searching my various order queues, I couldn't find any shipments to SA on that day.
I kept checking the ship date on the postal label to be sure I had it right and after checking about 4 times, it finally penetrated that the date was October 28, 2007 (more than a year ago.)
I had read the whole date every time but it didn't penetrate that the year really was 2007. I guess my mind didn't want to see that.
Anyways, I thought the situation was a bit amusing so I thought I'd share it here for all the other physical product folks on the forum.
Steven