There's a lot of discussion on this forum about the lengthy order to ship time that some, perhaps many, of their customers experience. A couple days ago, on the 11 Bang Bang channel, I came across "the rifle shoppe tour and interview with Jesse Melot." After watching it I was amazed by several things. Jesse has such a depth of knowledge that the old saw "he's forgotten more than I will ever know" is true. The workshop is much larger than I imagined, and not exactly hospital OR organized, either.
Regarding shipping, here's what I heard from Ethan Woods' discussion with Mr. Melot. This might not be verbatim. "... and then to get everything together at one time, I literally have a lot, a lot, of inventory, but you know I have a lot of customers. So somebody buys one part out of a kit and I have to wait till the other part gets in to do it. Yeah, I get a lot of flak, not flak, but people gripe how long it takes. Well do you want it right or not?" This could explain how it is that someone sees online that a kit is in stock and they order it. Yes, the kit is there, but someone checks and sees that one or two parts have previously been sold. Now it becomes a long wait until the parts arrive from the casting company. This doesn't explain about the delay in shipping something like a handgonne barrel, or not communicating reasons for delay to the customer, but it does shed light on their operation. My personal take away is that Jesse loves the history and the actual doing of his work so much that running a business with Amazon like efficiency is the furthest thing from his mind. Changes would improve it, but I believe he might view that as a waste of his valuable time. He's a guy marching to the beat of a drum that 99% of us don't hear. I learned a lot from the video about the casting process and the Ferguson rifle too.
![Winking face :wink: 😉](https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png)