Median arrival time by category
| Category |
Median |
Range we have seen |
Why |
| Paper and card |
9 days |
5 to 16 days |
Flat, letter rate, no restrictions. |
| Tea and coffee |
14 days |
7 to 31 days |
Usually batched and posted weekly. |
| Soap and dry cosmetics |
18 days |
10 to 40 days |
Often hand-packed by very small teams. |
| Seeds |
21 days |
9 to 60 days |
Seasonal queues in January and February. |
| Anything liquid |
39 days |
21 to 74 days |
Ground shipping only, and often a third-party fulfiller. |
What a long wait usually means
- The brand batches requests and posts once a fortnight. Most common by far.
- The sample is fulfilled by a warehouse that treats it as lowest priority.
- The offer ran out and nobody updated the form. This is the one that never
resolves, and it is why a listing that has gone quiet gets pulled rather than
left with an optimistic note.
Nothing on this page came from a brand’s stated timescale. Every figure
is from requests we made ourselves and dated on arrival, which is why the table
is short — there are only so many envelopes.
Envelope contents, as a rough count
| What arrived with it |
How often |
| Nothing but the sample |
About half |
| A single coupon |
About a third |
| A catalogue |
Roughly one in eight |
| A handwritten note |
Three times, all from single-person makers |
|