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Ilkuul
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of Thame (UK)
Mar 2000
time: 05:15
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After reading the earlier thread on this subject yesterday, I wrote to Chips & Bits about my preorder, anxious because I live in the UK and it made me wonder whether I'd be better off just buying it when it comes out here.
I got quite a lengthy response! For others like me, living outside North America and ordering from C&B, this might be of interest (my bolding):
"There is always uncertainty on exactly which day we would be shipping any title. Assuming they remain on schedule for October 30th which is never certain until it happens and even then we've seen too many titles get pulled back at the last moment or even recalled after shipping. In such cases the product had another serious enough bug to warrant remastering and then it will be another two or three weeks. Once a title is released we are more concerned with keeping our price to the customer down then receiving it here the first day, so titles rarely arrive here the same day as they first start arriving in some of the retail stores. There is no way a customer could get a title mail order anywhere faster than from those places afterall unless he received it directly from the manufacturer. To keep the price down we then sacrifice being among the first to receive it and it arrives several days later.
EB has a different philosophy as they are primarily a retail store in local malls, but they also do mail order as well. They of course charge the full retail price on most items. They consider us competition and would like to buy us out if they could, but we are the biggest mail order company of games, while they are one of the biggest of the retail stores who does some mail order business also. They don't usually have a lot of the older titles that we continue to carry. If you must be the first in your neighborhood to get all the top products you should haunt your local EB often checking on the updated projected dates and be there on the release dates and take your chances that you'll get it go there. If you'd rather buy your game after the reviews and opinions on how good the game is are in and many of the bugs have been fixed and for the most part pay less as well, you don't care if you are the first as long as you get it and you often are looking for the older titles that are difficult to find new then we are a good choice. This sort of customer makes up a very large and loyal group that comes back to us again and again to get all there games. With these people patience pays. The first sort of customer may try us once or twice with the mistaken idea that when you preorder mail order you will receive a title before the stores, which is just not possible, but in general they only use us for the odd title that they happened to miss when it came out.
In the case of Civilization 3 to be on schedule they must begin shipping on Monday the 29th. The company Infogrames is a European company, so how quickly this gets to stores depends on whether they are shipping from within the U.S. or from some other country. If they ship from say California then it will begin appearing in some stores on the 30th depending on how fast shipping is these days. There is major slowdown in some areas such as Florida, New York, Washington DC and New Jersey as packages are being searched and the postal service and shipping companies are being very careful these days which is causing delays. In this case I would expect them to begin arriving here the next week on or around November 5th. If it shipped from outside the U.S. all bets will be off for everyone as packages these days are being held up in customs. As we get on into the various holidays shipping volumes go up and shipping times normally slow down. You would need to be Miss Cleo to predict all this stuff exactly or with much certainty.
All we guarantee is that you will get your order, not that it will arrive on or before the release date, which is impossible anyway. Sorry if there has been some confusion."
Whew. Not exactly very reassuring, is it? Maybe I'll go out and buy the UK version in the meantime...! 
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27-10-2001 01:43
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