[ukbloke]

The arrival date is overly conservative. It will probably arrive around a week earlier than that. I continue to be surprised that they ship each of these orders to store as an individual FedEx Ground item. This doesn't seem like a good way to run a business to me, especially in cases where they could just fulfil the order with stuff already at the store. Nonetheless I use the free-ship-to-store option frequently, usually when stocking up on consumables when all the discounts/coupons line up and delivery timeliness is not a concern. Originally they didn't have the $50 minimum which made it easy to abuse. One time they had $10 off any purchase with free shipping - and the obvious thing to do was to buy something that cost $10!

 

[ukbloke]

I wonder if PB has a regular inventory shipping schedule to the stores, like every few weeks, and they just throw my order on the truck with the rest of it.

I don't think so. I've had orders split up, put in different boxes, and arrive in consecutive days. I'm sure that everything goes standard FedEx ground or equivalent, and is completely separate to their general distribution. This contrasts with REI ship-to-store where it is clearly integrated into their normal distribution chain and schedule.

In that case, I'm the idiot for not checking the store first.

In my experience, my local Performance store is pretty good about scanning the incoming items soon after arrival which triggers a pick-up email within the hour. Usually there's a follow-up collection notice when they scan it out after collection.

 

[ukbloke]

Cool, thanks for the inside scoop!