So here’s a good question for ya.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away. I ordered some custom poker chips from a vendor online. This company had a good reputation with all the other chip-geeks on chiptalk, which is a site I frequent.

Here’s the story. PCOL is a company that offers custom chips to the public. These are compression molded clay chips, just like the casinos use. Real clay, not that 11.5 gram injection molded plastic crap that people on ebay try to sell as clay.

PCOL offers a bunch of different colors for the body of the chips, and they offer one type of edge spot pattern. The pattern is 312, meaning 3 spots, half inch wide each. You get the body color, then the spot color choice, and that’s all.

They decided to do a special sale. They were going to offer a bunch of different edge spot combinations and colors that they never offered the public before. So I decided to place an order to get in, so I could have these edges in the future. I placed my order in April, and approved the artwork on May 2nd. I was quoted 10-12 weeks delivery time from that date.

Well here we are, 21 weeks later, and I still don’t have any chips. Here is the timeline:

May 2nd, artwork approval and 10-12 week delivery time
July 15th, emailed for progress and was told last week in July for shipping. Was also told to be patient.
August 1st, my credit card was charged and the bill was paid in full. Contacted them on August third for status and was told that my order was just put into production and it would be 4-6 weeks from then. I was told that other order were completed ahead of mine due to material shortages on the colors I chose, but that I should get it by the end of September.
Sept 25 again I had to contact them for an update. I was told that some of my chips had to be redone so they didn’t make their truck on Friday. They were redoing them now, and that she didn’t think they would get shipped that week, but probably next week.

That brings us to now. At first, I was thinking that I’m at the point of no return with these chips. I’ve waited so long, that it wouldn’t make sense to cancel now. The more I think about what has gone down, the more pissed I get at the shitty service and missed delivery times. Everytime I got an update from them, I had to initiate the contact. They were never proactive in giving me any information as to what was going on with my order.

There is a reason for all of this. Well, it could be an excuse. The company got a lot of orders from this special offer. It appears that they got a lot more then they thought they would get. So much so, that it backed them up. They also had a large casino order come in, while all this was going on. Casino orders take precedence over home orders, so our orders were pushed back even more. So this is the standard response to shitty delivery times. The problem is, people on chiptalk have posted how they got their orders rushed through, while others got fucked over. (like me) These stories just piss me off even more about the whole thing.

So, it’s October 2nd. I still don’t have any chips yet. No idea if they are shipping this week or not. I paid for these, in full, on August 1st, over tow months ago. I have no clue if they are even made, since I can barely trust what I’ve been told to this point.

I kind of came up with this thought: If my chips don’t ship by Friday, I’m cancelling the order and disputing the charge on my credit card as fraudulent since I never recieved the items I paid for. I’ve just had it with this whole thing.

What would you do?