Severe weather causing major delays

Sunday, 19th December 2010

Throughout most of December, we have seen some of the coldest weather for years with plenty of snow settling throughout much of the UK.

Due to the nature of our business, a lot of orders have been effected by this cold and snowy spell. Not only have the temperatures been below freezing during the day and night, most of the UK have been disrupted by severe snow and ice.

We first had our major snow fall of 14-16" at the end of November going through into the first two weeks of December. Our small town of Chesterfield came to a standstill with had no buses running, it caused our post to be 15+ days late and no couriers delivering or collecting stock.

Although we managed to go through the majority of delayed orders early last week, we now face yet another set back. It seems that most of the UK, apart from our area, has weather warnings with snow and ice. This has caused a major delay with the postal system and couriers; Royal Mail are not guaranteeing any Special Deliveries and TNT can not access most delivery areas, therefore we are unable to deliver orders within our time scale at present.

We do appreciate that Christmas is around the corner, but we can not take any risks when it comes to the reptile or insects welfare and we'll hold onto orders until the weather improves. Same principle applies with frozen goods, if our postal/courier service can not guarantee a delivery, we cannot risk you, our customer receiving damaged stock.

Please bare with us while we are having such cold and snowy weather, hopefully after the New Year everything will be back to normal and the postal/couriers will have cleared their massive backlog of parcels.