Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Miffed at McCalls!

Indulge me with a giant gripe!

Dear McCalls,
I have loyally purchased my Vogue/McCalls/Butterick patterns from your US site for years.  You have such good sales. I love Vogue patterns.  I buy heaps of them.  You have always been so good to me.... UNTIL NOW!   

You have new charges unless I am mistaken, and you are seriously slugging us poor international customers.  

I assume these are new charges as I made a purchase from you 3 weeks ago.  The postage for 7 patterns then was just under US$25 to Australia and all I paid was the cited cost of the pattern and the postage - no 'handling charge'.  But you say your new charges are:

Shipping and Handling Charges 
No.                                U.S. and Canada                                    International
1-3                                  $4.00                                                                    $20.00
4-7                                  $8.00                                                                    $40.00
8-15                                $12.00                                                                  $70.00
-20                                  $16.00                                                                  $100.00

I could be completely wrong but I just checked your postal company calculator and the actual postage charge doesn't seem to have increased.  Hey, I'm in Australia, I expect postage costs to be high.  But not this high!  So, is the increase a 'handling charge' for international customers?   

Please explain?

Yours sincerely
Disgruntled International Customer.  

It's not an easy job being a sewer these days is it?  So many of the fabric shops have disappeared, Burda is mucking around with us, and I have wondered from time to time whether the days of paper patterns are numbered.  What I didn't expect was pattern companies deciding to discourage international customers from buying their patterns! 

What a weird business decision.   Why don't they just increase the cost of the patterns or not reduce them so much on sale, rather than charge international customers a separate fee?  

Grrrrr McCalls.... Grr..... 

4 comments:

  1. Oh my goodness are you serious? That's disgusting, what will we do now...well I'm not going to start driving to Spotlight! Argh. My last lot was $25 postage too, I think I had 7 patterns as well and because they were on sale the price for each pattern still averaged out really cheap. I think we all need to write complaint letters, hopefully it's just a silly mistake :(

    ReplyDelete
  2. I just jumped back onto BMV...they have amended their shipping rates... :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I am a regular (international) customer of Voguepatterns/McCall's and I am disappointed with their new shipping and handling fees too. Even after they rethought the ridiculous shipping prices, the actual shipping costs are always about a half less than I have to pay. That's why I now turn more often to sewingpatterns.com, where the shipping costs are more accurate and customer-friendly. With their sales starting at 2.99 USD for a Butterick or McCall's pattern, you can't beat the price (at least for us, the international customers).

    ReplyDelete