Silk Road forums
Market => Rumor mill => Topic started by: Pharmville on February 22, 2012, 11:00 am
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Hi Everyone,
I have taken down all our listings and put us on vacation. They will be down for approximately a week and as the week progresses I will keep everyone posted as to the time when they will be back up.
Ben and I had been discussing taking them down for a day or two to catch up on the pm's and some other things because we hadn't taken a day off since we started here last July. But then we got some very bad news. Someone in Ben's immediate family died. And Ben is the eldest male member of his family so the duties associated with arranging a funeral and all the things that go with it falls to him. Therefore he has left town and is taking care of the things you have to take care of when something like this happens. This person was very close to Ben and he is having a very hard time of it so I told him that he could take whatever time he needed to grieve and deal with it. He assured me that a week was enough time and that he'd be ready to go and go hard by the time he came back. One thing I can say about Ben: he is no pussy. So he's gone and all of the orders have shipped except for a few and I am going to get those shipped on Wednesday. But if I have to do some things to help him out and don't get them done, then I'll finish on Thursday.
I haven't had a chance to do the shipping confirmations for Tuesday yet, but I'm going to do them as soon as I get done writing this post, so if you get a confirmation by say 9am EST, then your order shipped on Tuesday. If you DON'T get a confirmation, then it didn't ship and if you'd like to cancel it, just send a pm saying "CANCEL MY ORDER" in the subject line and I will check the pm's every two hours all day and cancel any orders that people want canceled so your bitcoins get released and you can spend them elsewhere. If you don't cancel it, I will ship it today and if I don't finish them all then I'll ship the balance on Thursday. I'm not nearly as fast as Ben, so it takes me a lot longer to ship an order. But I can get it done, I've done it before.
Both Ben and myself like doing this business and we care very much about our customers. If you're one of our regular customers then you can count on the fact that we'll be back in a week and we'll be just as good or better than we were before. There are a lot of new item projects pending and this break will give me the time to get them finished and ready to ship. It will also give me a chance to get every one of the pm's answered and I promise I'll work on them as much as I can every day until they are all finished.
If you're a new customer, especially one of the people that's come on board in the last couple of weeks and already given us 3 or 4 or 5 orders, we really appreciate your business too, but we've been doing this 7 days a week, never less than 15-16 hours a day, for the last 7 months. So we should have taken a couple of breaks before, but now we have to, and I'm sorry that it's going to affect your ability to order from us. But when we come back in a week you'll get the same excellent service you got from us since your recent start with us and, hopefully, get to see some new items from us as well. And I'm sorry that this break had to happen just when you were getting started with us but in the future we'll always give notice before we have any days off so you'll always have a chance to stock up and won't get caught without product.
And to all the haters: wow, you guys are amazing! You spend a lot of time writing posts on threads trying to tear us limb from limb and I don't have a clue why or who any of you are. I know you're not our customers, because if you were then you'd put those complaints in your feedbacks and I don't see them there so who are you exactly? Are you people that who think it's fun to rip at people just because they are successful at something? If you do it to annoy us or make us angry, you're not getting very far because we're so busy that unless someone specifically points something out to me to come over and take a look at it, I don't have time to read the Forums and so you're really just talking to each other. Ben doesn't even read the forums so he never hears about your escapades unless I happen to tell him because one was funny or something like that.
All I know is that we started up here to try and do a good job selling product in the opiate and benzo categories. As it turned out, we did become the #1 vendor and we've just been keeping our heads down and trying hard to make our customers happy and make a profit while doing it. I don't know if in the future it's going to be possible for just two people to be the biggest and the best when there's a quarter of a million people to be served, but I do know that we'll definitely choose working to be the best over being the biggest and if that means we have to stop taking new customers, or start having a minimum order, or whatever, we'll cross that bridge when we get there. But we're here to do a good job and to fill people's needs at a fair price. We're not here for any other reason. And we will continue to do that for as many people as we possibly can and still have an outside life. But we're not going to keep working these hours and letting the rest of life get ignored and undone. We're going to find a way to strike a nice balance and then just keep it that way. We hope everyone can understand that. I told Ben when we started that we had to take some days off or this thing would become like a monster and eat up every hour of our lives and then I just totally forgot about that and let it do just that. Well, that's got to stop and there's got to be a better way and I'm really hoping to figure it out this week so I'll have it in place when Ben comes back to work. Maybe other people who vend here are well equipped to handle 180,000 buyers, but we never thought there'd be anything approaching that number when we started and we don't have the ability to serve them all...so we're going to have to figure out just how many we can serve and do a really good job and then that's going to be our limit.
And to the people who have current orders in house with us right now:
PLEASE DO NOT CANCEL YOUR ORDER RIGHT NOW IF IT IS "LATE"...I've had other things to deal with tonight with Ben and I am just now getting started sending out the shipping confirmations for today. EVERY ORDER THAT SAYS "LATE" WAS SHIPPED. So please don't cancel it and make me have to write to you for the money and keep track of that on top of everything else.
And please do not write to me asking about the $1 for 1mg xanax sale because I cannot do that until Ben is back and ready to work at the pace that that sale will demand. We have the product and it's going to happen, I just can't tell you when. As soon as I know, I will make sure everyone knows.
During this week I am also going to take a look at every product, policy, rule, regulation, whatever, that we have and decide which parts make sense and keep them and which parts don't make sense and get rid of them. The person who died was very close to Ben and he is pretty broken up but he also told me that he is committed to this business and he will be totally ready to work when he gets back. I was very happy to hear that and I was happy that he would even think to say something to me like that as I was dropping him off at the airport. I am pretty close to the members of Ben's family and it hurt me too to hear this person had died, but nothing like it hurt him and so if you think that Ben has been a good guy and worked his ass off to get your orders out really fast and used really good packaging, you could send him a note, I set him up an account on the forum tonight, it's user # 12437 and he's called "BadBen" but that's just a nickname, he's not really a bad guy. :)
I don't really know what else to say so now I'm going to get to sending out all the order confirmations and then I'll do some pm's and then get to the balance of those orders. I hope our unplanned "vacation" doesn't affect anyone too badly and I know we'll be ready to go when we put our listings back up.
take care everyone,
Alex
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I had the same thing happen to me in Jan that has happened to Ben soI know what he's going through, please send my condolences.
Be safe.
:)
nomad bloodbath
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Y'all Rock! Thanks for the updates...very professional. No wonder you are number 1. My condolences to Ben...sorry to hear that. Have a wonderful vacation...get some rest and see ya when u return.
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Sorry to hear. Good for Ben for taking some time to do whats really important. My condolences.
-drake
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YEah it's a shitty situation all around. Drake did your order ship out yet?
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Yes, I got notified this morning that it went out yesterday.
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Pharmville,
Please send Ben my condolences.
You guys are great and definitely deserve a week off.
(I sell a small amount through amazon (books, movies, video games, normal goods), and packaging and shipping is always a hassle. I couldn't imagine shipping hundreds of orders per day.)
I look forward to you coming back on board next week. You will definitely be seeing my name among the orders.
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Yes, I got notified this morning that it went out yesterday.
They just cancelled all my orders with no explanation or anything. I got really excited too bc I had new messages which i thought was from them, but NOPE just a cancelled order. Pretty steamed right now
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7 months straight non stop? I can relate to that and longer. It's BRUTAL, I know.
I would like to send out my condolences to Ben. The one thing that WILL bring a burgeoning business to a halt, is death.
The spirit and the energy and the vibration that is necessary for Ben, and you too Alex, to work through this is there. You just have to reach for it.
Ready to business ASA you guys get back online. It is going to be an exciting Spring and Summer.
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All bullshit aside, I am very sorry for loss...
~shields
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7 months straight? Shit now I know why I haven't seen adderall listed by you guys ;D
Seriously, I always have a momement of personal silence when I hear of someone passing on, especially when it is a friend (Even an online anonymous friend/vendor). I'll be hoping for a smooth transition for Ben.
Will see you on the flip side. Take a vacation for hell's sake!
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Wow I just hopped on here to put in an order with you guys and was shocked to see such a consistently reliable, immaculate vendor with no listings. Then come on the forums and find this...So sorry for your loss guys (especially Ben). I really hope everything comes out OK and you and Ben have your time to deal with things as needed. Take your time off, you deserve it, not just because of unforeseen, unfortunate circumstances, but just time off in general.
Wishing you both the best,
Deadfuture
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Hi everyone,
I will be posting within the hour about our listings going back up and a bunch of other things.
To gmennyc-we had some issues trying to get your address or something, I don't recall the details right now and since last Weds was the last day I was shipping orders, I wanted you to have use of your BTC, not have them in limbo for who knew how long at the time. It was nothing personal and not meant to screw you. I thought I made that clear in my messages to you, but I guess not.
To shields-on another thread you told me that you sent that wild rant when drunk on your ass so now I understand. I sure didn't when I read it and it was very illegible to be honest so I just did the best I could.
As far as I'm concerned, it's no harm, no foul if you want to take another try at it this weekend when we open again. I assure you that you won't have the problems you were having because now we know your address and such and I think you'll send us more legible pm's that we can follow and get you taken care of.
To everyone else...just thank you...thank you... Alex
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Hi everyone,
I will be posting within the hour about our listings going back up and a bunch of other things.
To gmennyc-we had some issues trying to get your address or something, I don't recall the details right now and since last Weds was the last day I was shipping orders, I wanted you to have use of your BTC, not have them in limbo for who knew how long at the time. It was nothing personal and not meant to screw you. I thought I made that clear in my messages to you, but I guess not.
Nah I posted that before you sent me the message. We're all good now