Personally I would have difficulty accepting the shipping damage in glowforge’s position.
It would eat me up to be shipping good product just to have it chewed up in transit.
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I’d bet that UPS is just tossing it back at Glowforge with the 'ole “Well, you see how we handle them… You need to package them better.”
Glowforge may be running the numbers, and saying that the extra cost for better packaging plus the additional shipping due to the extra weight is more expensive than eating a small amount of damaged-in-transit units.
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Yes, I have no idea what the numbers are - just that it must hurt!
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@Dan Why ship to any if you are clearly not ready to ship to all?
Sure everyone who has their GF loves it…why are we not loving ours? How fair is it
to send it out to some and not to all.
How fair is it to make us just sit by and watch, when we should have our forges and comparing our builds.
People have feelings and after a time, it hurts to sit by and not be able to participate even though you paid for your PROVERBIAL ticket. I feel like since I am addressing a younger generation I need to be careful with my wording.
It hurt when I camped out by my computer for 2 days because I was sure I was going to get an E mail
Oh the crush
Then I was going to get one by the day before my Birthday
Oh this whole month sucked just anticipating another letdown from GF.
Now we are expecting another delay because the dates are not moving and man…we are humans who want our forges as much as those who already have theirs.
If not more so now because we see the fun they are having.
It get’s annoying after a while always seeing the cheerleaders with the saltshakers when people just want to be recognized and heard.
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Well…silly me at the time was following that spreadsheet, so that was not their fault, but they had to have known it would cause confusion. In any case, I removed my information because I did not want to participate any longer.
I actually thought it was somehow legit and I put a lot of hope in it, what a burn - but hey, I was expecting the original E mail sometime around the end of July, and that is when I started to become a regular fixture around here
It’s been two years since the pre-orders and I don’t quite recollect how many units were ordered by day 9. I think the biggest obstacle would be trying to assemble, test, and package what is probably on the order of 1500 to 2000 units to fill the first week of orders in the time allocated. Without knowing the production volume it would be hard to say one way or the other if the shipping dates will be met.
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I’m not going to lie, I’ve felt this way at times, but we also have to be realistic, do we want them sitting on all 10,000 (or however many) till they can all go out at once? What if a problem was found after the fact?
Something I’ve had to come to grips with (and have found interesting, even if a bit discouraging) is that we are part of the very beginning of a new product and company. No manufacturing starts out full speed delivering 100%, most of them are months and months, if not years into production before they finally hit what they consider full speed. I was talking to a friend of mine who used to work for one of the major oil filter companies about how many months (and months) it took them to get a new line with a new product operating at full speed. Frequently it took far more than a year. We are all sitting on the front end of that process. I can hear some shouting as I type, “But we ordered two years ago!!” Yes, and whether we all realized it or not we ordered an unfinished product that only recently managed to make it into production and even then are still sitting on the front end of their production ramp up and cycle. And more than that, there are still quite a few advertised features that are still in production as well.
And know this doesn’t make anyone feel any better, only getting the “Your Glowforge is on it’s way” email will do that. But in the midst of my frustration I try to remember I’m on the front end of something I still hope and pray and believe will be really cool and serve me very well in the long run.
Now, to @positiveforward’s main point -
very true, please don’t take anything I said as in any way demeaning your frustration, just sharing how I’ve tried to deal with mine 
Apparently my sermon wasn’t long enough this Sunday so I started preaching again. I’ll step down from my pulpit now 
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It’s terribly unfair that you don’t have your Glowforge so long after you were supposed to. I’m so very sorry - I recognize and hear you.
We did know (and do know) that it was causes tremendous confusion and is misleading people terribly. We decided it was better to let people communicate freely than to try and control the conversation because we thought we knew better.
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I just wish I never told anyone I was getting a glowforge because everyone at my woodworking group thinks it’s a big joke and I’ve been duped and I’m getting tired of defending GF
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Soon enough though it’ll be your turn to laugh as they all wanna “use it…just a little bit?”
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Haha, my family is big into Catan and they were really excited about the idea of a custom board. Now, it’s just a funny joke at every holiday gathering that passes. Fortunately, there is a lot of shared product management/marketing experience among us that has tapered the expectations quite a bit. Hang in there. I keep seeing all of these cool projects and I’m sure my own projects will be really cool “some day”. While I’m highly skeptical of the 10/31 timeline, I’m pretty certain that it will arrive eventually.
You have to be realistic based on what you’ve seen so far. In 7/16 they posted a schedule saying that every pre order would ship before 12/31/16. Then on 11/23/16 they said they had finally reached an agreement with a manufacturer to produce the consumer units. No mention of a delay in that announcement (haha). Then in the 12/16 announcement they pushed the shipping date back to 7/31/17 for pre orders. To me, that seemed somewhat possible, though I’ll be the first to admin that I have no clue about the actual time required to produce a GF. Point being, in the 7/16 update they promised a 6 month timeline for delivery. There is no way that they could have thought that that timeline was possible. Release dates slip. Designs get adjusted. Defects get corrected. But, that would mean that they thought that they were going to be able to do in 6 months what has taken them more than 15 months and still isn’t complete. Having spent most of my life working for companies that specialize in design, development, and release management, I find it a little hard to believe that anyone is that far off without knowing about it. Yet, I can understand why they keep doling out the bad news in little chunks. If they’d have come out in 7/16 and said, “we aren’t going to ship your unit until 10/17”, how many people would have bailed? It would have been a bit of a PR nightmare. So, they’ve done a pretty good job of maintaining a positive public image while stretching the patience of their pre order customers. We’ll see how much longer that lasts. It seems like the tension on this forum is boiling over. It has been interesting if nothing else.
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I was feeling the same as the @pdbarnett . I was losing confidence day by day as we are approaching two years and then I got my e-mail (WOOHOOO!!), and finally I have tracking, GF will be arriving tomorrow, it is a basic, I know you are waiting for a pro. I know that does not not make you feel any better but I can tell you I am very happy to be getting this as I have many plans for it. I was thinking I would cancel, so I was looking for alternative lasers while waiting to see if I could find anything that was a reasonable price with the features I want in the GF, and could not find anything in the price range. I personally hope you will stick it out and not cancel as I think you will only regret it later.
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Congrats!
When did you get your email?
A lot of my frustration is because they see all of these posts but ignore them, or say something like “I’m afraid we’re not releasing shipping information.” Or sometimes smug responses that make me not even want the thing anymore. I don’t know why they don’t just give us something small, like when they expect to move to day 2 pros? Instead, everything is fine (until it’s not fine, which is always at the last minute which further enrages people). As more people get them the rest of us want a glimmer of hope that ours is on the way too, but the lack of updates in the top bar and ignoring posts is what’s causing all of this. They can easily stop it but they choose not to. Monthly updates are just not enough now that they’re shipping. God forbid people are excited about your product and just want some answers. If we haven’t been through so many delays already and experienced how they were handled perhaps this thread wouldn’t exist.
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I agree this is painful. However, I do believe that with I have seen people create with theirs, it will be worth the wait. Frustrating, to be sure.
Look at the big picture. It will be a fine engraved one, soon.
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Looking forward to your initial experience (box opening, setup and first job).
Please post.
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Great! Looking forward to mad scientist creations 
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In Sept of 2015, we too were under the impression this unit would be shipping out Dec 2015
If we had known this was going to even be a year long wait, NO WAY I would have tied our money into this. My hubby understands these things and he has kept me chilled, but after 2 years having been under the impression it would have been shipped Dec 2015, it’s time for people to speak up.
After 2 years of sacrifices, we want our forge and hopefully we will get it soon.
What amazes me is that GF are still going to MF’s and touting promises to new customers of getting their forges by the end of November, when none of them probably know there are a bunch of people waiting from Sept of 2015 for this piece of technology, our proverbial carrot on a string that gets pulled a little farther away with each monthly announcement and the subtle changes in wording on the banner.
I wonder how many people will make the purchase, come to these forums and realize their wait may take longer than November. They too will be crestfallen to realize they will not be able to make those Christmas decorations or gifts. They might have to wait until next December for all we know.
Wait til they see how long the line they are in stretches!
The basics are continuing to be produced and shipped.
There is not even an update of information about the PRO’s which have been stuck on Day 1
And there are still Day 1 PRO customers who have not even been contacted.
NEVER, ever will we do anything like this again. At least it was for the GF that we learned our lesson.
We will be happy when we have our forge after this long wait.
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It has been about a month since I got the “e-mail” it was on 8/28
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