Mr. Palermo, sorry to hear about your medical problems and I hope you're recovering from them as well as can be expected. I know the bypass operation alone can really knock a guy down. I understand how and why your business has come to the point where customers aren't satisfied, and it's not necessarily for any reasons that would reflect poorly on you as a person. By all accounts before this recent backlog Penn bullets was a great company to buy from.
I have a couple of suggestions that would have made my experience better. First, communication is key. The Penn Bulletin was updated about this time in 2007. With the difficulties you've had getting orders out, I think a lot of problems would have been avoided if you gave an update every three months while leaving old bulletins on the site for people that check less frequently. In the time you took responding to this thread you could have written an update for all your customers that are wondering where their bullets are. Second, if you can't fill orders in a timely manner don't take them. Gunsmiths do this all the time, and it only helps their reputation. For your less frequently cast items instead of taking orders, put together a "waiting list" that allows people to be notified by email when their bullet comes up for production so they can plan their bullet purchases more easily. Knowing how many of these bullets to cast could at least be roughly estimated by this list, and surely if anything is left unaccounted for it could be sold without taking up too much warehouse space. I don't know how often you less popular bullets are cast, but if you're going to offer them at all it seems like you should at least cast them on an annual basis. A business that only offers a bullet every couple of years can hardly be counted on as a source of that bullet, and customers will go elsewhere. You may be thinking that you don't have time to implement changes, but in reality you don't have time not to adapt.
In your response you highlighted a lot of the strengths of your company and gave a lot of the reasons that you're behind. I can see the differences between a reason and an excuse, and I urge you to be careful which your bulletins come across as. If all you say is "having difficulty getting material X, swamped in the office, casting mostly .45 and .38 because demand is so high, will soon be casting bullets X over the next whatever time period, and I haven't forgotten about you guys that ordered those whatever is cast less often" that would be fine.
Also, keep the site somewhat updated to the price of bullets (like 2-3 times a year when prices are so volatile, as needed during times of stability).
For those of us that ordered before lead and fuel prices got so high, will we be charged the prices at the time the order was placed or when the bullets are cast? If it's the later, I really don't like the idea of placing an order that arrives sometime in the distant future that'll cost however much things cost then. It gives me no control over my bullets or my money- not really something I'm fond of and not something other casters expect of their customers.
I hope this helps, and I hope you can make the changes needed to get things running smoothly.
