Redditors talk about Spring

The company Spring used to be called Teespring. I think it had been exclusively devoted to print-on-demand tee shirts in its early years, then it branched out to doing printed designs on posters, mugs, glasses, bags, towels, stickers, etc. Spring, never excellent, was all right for me and my limited needs at first; from the beginning, I had questions about the quality of the rubberized paint that the company used for its tee shirts, and several of the shirts I'd ordered had mistakes on them, e.g., I'd see a correct front design but the wrong back design, which created a waste of my time as I was forced to negotiate the exchange/refund process (which is never easy no matter what company you're talking about). 

But over the past year or two, something seemed to be going wrong inside the company: While ordering items was as smooth and easy as ever, receiving the items in a timely manner became a huge problem. Whenever I would write to the company about what was going on, I'd get vague answers about how the company had been taken over by a bigger company, how internal problems had been causing delays in fulfillment, etc. It was all fairly evasive, and very often, the company responses didn't feel as though they'd come from human beings.

Before I'd made my latest order of eight tee shirts and two mugs, I had canceled an order for a walk tee that I had planned to wear on one of my walks. This latest order—a set of gifts I had hoped to check over, then send to France—had been made in March. In April, after a month had passed, I asked Spring what was up. I got a mealy-mouthed, possibly AI response. I asked again in May. Same deal. No movement on the actual shipment. And I asked again just two days ago, after almost another month of waiting. No response except for an automated "We've received your query, and someone will help you within 24 hours." Then nothing for 48 hours. So in disgust, I contacted Chase, my credit-card company, and lodged a dispute. Chase immediately canceled and refunded my purchase, but it warned that actual dispute resolution could take up to 90 days. Just a few minutes ago, though, I got an email from an ostensible human being saying he(?) was sorry to know that I'd wanted to cancel my purchase and get a refund, and that the cancel-refund process was now under way. This email was no doubt the result of Chase's tapping Spring on the shoulder and declaring, "Cancel and refund."

Anyway, I look forward to seeing the refund appear on my credit card. I also hope to see my plane-ticket refund soon, too, but Korean Air had warned that that might take a few business days, which is fine. (Not much I can do about the situation anyway, short of paying through the nose for a US or Korean lawyer.)

Curious, I asked the Google AI god about what might be going on at Spring. The AI noted that many people have been complaining about Spring's poor customer service and molasses-slow product fulfillment. The AI ventured that Spring was showing all of the classic signs of a company in collapse even though the company has not yet filed for bankruptcy or done anything else to indicate its imminent demise. This led me to some Reddit links (which had been the sources of the AI's speculation), where I got an eyeful of complaints about Spring—how it's a scam, how it's all bullshit, now the new CEO is a liar—and that was enough to make me think that a parting of the ways would be a good idea.

For me, I'm going to have to see whether decent print-on-demand shops exist in Korea. I'd still like to offer walk tees to people who want them, but then again, I'm beginning to think that my distance-walking days might be over—at least, distance walking across the country. In theory, I'll still be able to take long walks on weekends no matter what job I end up doing.

A thought just occurred to me: Could I set up a GoFundMe page to fund future distance walks? The thought makes me a bit queasy, though, because I'd basically be asking the public to fund my rent and other living expenses, as well as my walks, since the idea would be to walk around the country most of the year instead of having a day job. Walking would become my job. And writing. The idea feels highly unrealistic, though, especially given my lack of fame and my precarious health. Just as a point of contrast: Colossal movie star Ewan MacGregor has done at least four documentaries over the years about motorcycling across different parts of the world, using different types of bikes and covering distances ranging from 13,000 to 20,000 miles; in his case, funding came from sources like AppleTV+, but other trips have been sponsored by different companies. I don't think MacGregor used GoFundMe at all, so what makes me think GoFundMe would work for me? I'd be better off with a rich benefactor.

I don't know... maybe using GoFundMe in a more limited way might work (limited way = working part of the year, walking part of the year), but walking when I normally walk—in the late fall—is going to conflict with whatever work schedule I end up with, and no Korean company will ever be as understanding as my American boss was for nearly a decade. Yeah... I think the era of my long walks has come to a close unless any of my readers has a good, solid, plausible solution.

But back to Spring. Whatever the future holds, Spring will not be a part of it. I need to remove all Spring links not only from this main blog but also from all of my walk blogs. The whole effort ought to take only a few minutes (I'm only removing a simple HTML widget from my blogs' architecture), but I'm still not looking forward to it. Wish me luck as I try to find a tee-shirt printer in Seoul. I'm sure there must be several.