PSA: Please pack PCBs well when you ship them! They aren't making them anymore.

[runawayabc123]

Ok, I recently got a game I have been wanting for a good long time.  Saw it, paid for it.  It was MINE. 

It was the happiest several days waiting for it in the mail. 

Then it came and I opened it up ready to rock'n roll. 

Pulled it out and quickly looked it over on the desk.  I was working with another board so it had to sit on the side for a day or so before I could hook it up. 

I went to pick it up and look over some of the dirt on it and I heard a dreaded sounding of a little something falling on to my desk.  Yep a part broke off.  But where?  After a bit of hunting, I found the spot along with a fair bit of other damage.  My best guess was the hard drive acted as a battering ram in shipping and caused the damage.  I was heart broken. 

Please everyone, they aren't making these old games any more.  Every one we destroy in shipping to save a couple bucks cheats 1 more person out of the fun of playing the game.  Some of these games are getting rare.  Please pack things well.  If you have several parts in one box, they might move, into each other!  This shipper did a good job with everything except the hard drive which was on a mount with edges. 

Oh well.   

[Malenko]

Killer Instinct?

[SavannahLion]

You'd be astonished at how many people ship things that have no business being shipped in a simple manila envelope or have such atrocious packaging that it wasn't really worth buying the item in the first place. What pisses me off more is people tend to charge outrageous shipping fees. $10 and the ---smurf--- spends 89 cents for postage and packaging?! ---smurfing--- morons.

My resistor orders come in better packaging. 

[nox771]

Somewhat tangentially, this is why I buy retail boxed instead of OEM drives from places like Newegg.  An extra $10 for retail packaging is worth not having the drive go all superball in the box during shipment.  If you look at their DOA rates on OEM shipped (thin plastic case + handful of packing peanuts in a box) versus retail boxed drives (form fitted foam + box in a box) there is a clear correlation.

[HaRuMaN]

Somewhat tangentially, this is why I buy retail boxed instead of OEM drives from places like Newegg.  An extra $10 for retail packaging is worth not having the drive go all superball in the box during shipment.  If you look at their DOA rates on OEM shipped (thin plastic case + handful of packing peanuts in a box) versus retail boxed drives (form fitted foam + box in a box) there is a clear correlation.

Wot? Are you talking hard drives?  Every single hard drive I buy from newegg has been OEM, and every single one has been wrapped in the jumbo bubble wrap, and not a single one has been DOA.  I've probably bought ~20 of them.

[FrizzleFried]

Somewhat tangentially, this is why I buy retail boxed instead of OEM drives from places like Newegg.  An extra $10 for retail packaging is worth not having the drive go all superball in the box during shipment.  If you look at their DOA rates on OEM shipped (thin plastic case + handful of packing peanuts in a box) versus retail boxed drives (form fitted foam + box in a box) there is a clear correlation.

Wot? Are you talking hard drives?  Every single hard drive I buy from newegg has been OEM, and every single one has been wrapped in the jumbo bubble wrap, and not a single one has been DOA.  I've probably bought ~20 of them.

Yeah,  I'm at about 25-30 OEM drives from Newegg and not one has been DOA... and every one of them comes wrapped in the inflatable "large" custom inflatable type wrap.

[DeLuSioNal29]

Newegg.com used to have issues.  But they listened to the public's outcry and they now package OEM hard drives extremely well.

D

[ChadTower]

Forget the games with hard drives.  What sucks is when you spend 4 months tracking down a Kee Games TTL board and it comes loose in a crushed box.

[Nephasth]

The only arcade PCB (a double stack) I've had shipped to me came loose (one layer of small bubble wrap) in a crushed flat rate box. Luckily, not a thing was wrong with it!

[bitbytebit]

I had a 19" WG 7200 arcade monitor shipped to me in a poorly nailed together 1/4" chipboard and 1x2 makeshift box around it, nothing else, no padding.  The top came off in shipping, was just hanging out, but the monitor was screwed onto one of the sides to the 1x2s and crazy enough it seems that nothing was harmed (I haven't gotten the actual table top setup for it yet).  Quite crazy, that back part and the board were basically just hanging out there at the open end almost, could see that as a hazard too if the monitor has charge and the postal people had reached in and messed with it.  Was a great deal, cheap shipping, good looking monitor, insane way to ship it to me.