It's taking LONGER and LONGER and LONGER to get my STUFF!!!

@dis_member That was a good excuse when they were a new company but they are approaching a year in a couple months so the "they are new" excuse doesn't really apply anymore.

@cengland0 Mediocre Labs is experiencing exponential growth. Even if the company as a whole is much more ancient, most of the 50 or so employees were hired in the last 6 months. While everyone makes mistakes, it is much more common for the new employees.

@cengland0 Having witnessed a company grow from zero to multi-million in the past few years, it's the middle growth phase which carries the most issues; the customer base expands faster than the company could keep up, causing logistic and customer service issues.

Midway through the growth amid growing shipping and communication delays, the owner made this statement:
"I know a large number of you have been experiencing long wait times, especially when it comes to receiving responses to your emails, and I wanted to apologize to you if you have had a bad experience with us up to this point.
...
Nobody should have to wait to hear back from us, especially when there is an outstanding issue that has not yet been addressed. ..."

FWIW, staffing expanded, distribution expanded, and production expanded ... which if the same path is followed, is where I see meh in the future too.

@hamjudo You mentioned exponential growth so I checked your claims. I took the quantities of items sold since day one until today and charted it. It is clearly not exponential. Here's what Meh sales are:


This is what it should look like if it was exponential growth:

@cengland0 meh is just one part of mediocre.

@hamjudo I might be missing out on some deals then. What are the other parts of mediocre?

@cengland0 They do checkout and fulfillment for other websites. You'd have to visit those storefronts to see the deals from those people. They aren't Meh's deals.

@cengland0 Only place I've really seen checkout.org deals is the slickdeals forums. I'm sure other sites have them as well.

@cengland0 The only problem with your numbers is that they don't include sell out times. Meh can only buy so much of any one thing (in most cases) so the growth is best represented by speed of sales, not units. Of course, you would also need to remove outliers, such as speaker docks and knives. (things that will always sell, and things that don't ever sell.)

@givemeyoursoul Sell out times do not matter when you only sell one product per day. That makes no difference in their growth. Here's an example:
Product 1 sells 1,000 units and sells out in 5 minutes. Product 2 sells 1,000 units and takes 23 hours to sell out. Which one takes longer to reach the consumer?

@cengland0 Your chart does show substantial volume growth look at how many sales there are with over 2000 product sold I count about 12 sales between 7/8 and 11/8 and 21 sales 11/8 through the end of your graph they have nearly doubled the amount of over 2000 items sold. they had no 6000 item sales in the first half and 4 of those in the second half. The volume is clearly increasing.

@Ruger9mm I'm not disagreeing about having sales growth. In fact, I know there has been growth but I still dispute that it's exponential.

So here's a new version of the chart averaged by month to remove peaks and valleys.



Clearly you see growth. It's been more then double the sales since the beginning; however to be exponential, it should be about doubled each month (technically e^n so closer to 2.7)

If the first month average was 620 units per day, the next month should have averaged out to 1,685 units. If that trend continued, they would be selling approximately 1.8 million units daily (on average) this month like this comparison chart shows:


Notice you can barely see the actual line because it's so low to the bottom and very straight compared to exponential.

This is based on exponential growth for their current period since day 0 and I am aware that other periods can be exponential instead such as annual sales. Since they have been in existence for less than a year, the best we can do to determine exponential growth is daily or monthly at this time. Neither of those can be exponential growth from the actual data available.

@cengland0 Those charts and numbers are only able to take into account meh.com's sales. It doesn't factor in mediocre's other ventures, B2B operations, etc. While we are aware of the public face of mediocre, here at meh.com, we are far from the only face of mediocre as a whole. The growing pains they are experiencing are not a result of new members here, but a result of growing operations company wide.
While I understand those issues, that doesn't mean that a customer should be expected to be understanding of them. If you paid for a product, you should receive it, in working condition, in a reasonable amount of time. If any of those fail, you should be able to contact someone and have your issue resolved within 48 hours, imo.

@Thumperchick True that we don't know what the other parts of mediocre is doing but that doesn't mean we have reason to believe the growth is exponential. That's the whole point I was trying to make in this thread. Someone said that's the reason for the problems and I see no evidence of that kind of growth. It may be true but it probably isn't. Exponential growth is a dream every company hopes for but is rarely achieved.

@goldenthorn What flavor of ice cream?

@katblue Hmm... I bet meh's a Ben and Jerry's Half Baked type. That or Hazed and Confused.

@goldenthorn Wit and sarcasm only work about...oh, say one time then it, like all businesses, has to satisfy the customer. But I'll have the PEACH ICE CREME please...

@Foxborn wait, my meh orders dont come from china? I half expect my stuff to come one day in one of those beat up-been in a boat way too long-with chinese import paperwork in to arrive in my mailbox.

I like to think of it as triple presents. once the coolness of ordering it. And once the coolness of receiving it. And then i let it sit unopened for a few days and then the coolness of actually opening it and playing with whatever i got.

@lisaviolet I'm really not seeing enough @BillLeHecka blame this month. I blame @BillLeHecka and his daily goat journal.

@Teripie Watch it. When you get your earphones likely they will also send you a box of klenex.

@Teripie Your tongue must hurt your cheek as well. I'm so sorry for your woes.

@Kidsandliz I'm curious which state and county you live where they charge per bag for trash. I want to make sure I never live there.

@cengland0 I have been hit with it twice - once in a very small town in MI (where I met the dean at a college dumpster as she and I were both ditching our trash - explicitly against the rules LOL) I and now in an unincorporated area between two towns immediately south of a big one.

@cengland0 http://www.worcesterma.gov/dpw/trash-recycling/ my hometown. used to be like 50 cents a bag (you had to buy the yellow city ones) but free recycling ... Don't know how much it is now.

Charging per bag is the most rational system, encourages thoughtful consumption, allows you to control your own costs, and limits the amount by which you have to subsidize the biggest wasters. Just trying to imagine why you'd prefer any other scheme is bothering me more than it should.

@matthew because ain't nobody want to pay for throwing away garbage, subsidize meeeeeeee!

@matthew And encourages you to get to know your neighbors as you drop a few bags over by their place.

@IBMgrunt to respond to your concerns, @hamjudo isn't too far off up farther in the thread. We're growing very quickly and while we're in the process of making a whole bunch of changes that should prevent the shipping errors we've had in the past and speed up the shipping process in general, it's going to take time. I know I've asked for a lot of patience from everyone here and for the most part you've given it to me, which I am very grateful for. These growing pains will get worked out, just know that we hear you and if you're unhappy with something it's likely that we are too.

@IBMgrunt oh, another thing to mention is that you can check our estimated delivery date by looking at the specs. There may be certain circumstances where something is expected to ship out later than usual (such as the 808 headphones).