OK, it’s been a few months since my last post about the Garrison private order, when I explained the letterhead issue and how that needed to be resolved to keep the process going.  But what happened after that?  As you’ve seen from the recent posts the beer did in fact make it to Ontario and into the hands of our consumers.

The truth is, I didn’t want to jeopardize anything by highlighting too much while the order was taking place.  I kept my customers in mind – they were the ones who made this order possible and I didn’t want to have any extra delays with the order.  But it’s here now so let’s talk about what happened after we got the letterhead issue sorted out.

First, here’s a funny story about what happened after I submitted the paperwork, letterhead issue aside.  As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, the order documentation I needed to submit was 104 pages.  This was a massive PDF that was about 15 megabytes.  In order to process the order, I obviously needed to get the PDF to the LCBO.

Due to the sensitive nature of the document (it contained customers’ credit card information for a deposit), I wanted to be as secure as possible with the document itself.  I password-protected the PDF and e-mailed it to the LCBO’s order request e-mail address.  Shouldn’t be a problem, I thought, except the e-mail bounced – the address could not accept an attachment that large.

OK, on to another method.  I’m generally a tech-savvy person and didn’t want to resort to printing for mailing or faxing.  Not only would that be wasteful of all the paper but time-consuming as well.  So I put the document onto a web site address where the LCBO could directly download the file from a link.  And to be extra secure, I put another password to access the link.  Again, I was doing this for the security of my customers’ personal data.  One password to access the file and another one to open the document I believed was reasonable, or so I thought.

It wasn’t.  After I submitted the file to the LCBO, I received a curious e-mail from the private ordering department asking me to in the future, submit orders via mail, fax or e-mail.  I responded by saying that I did in fact submit it via e-mail.  I received another e-mail back telling me that the way in which I submitted the order (web download) was “encumbersome [sic] and very time consuming process” and that “for efficiencies” orders should be submitted via mail, fax or e-mail.

I was quite upset about this.  Here I was trying to protect the personal data of my customers and the LCBO gives me grief?  Now this is clearly a case of a regular process being the way that the LCBO is used to and even the slightest variance raises a red flag.  But what does this say about the mentality of the LCBO when having to take an extra step to ensure the protection of customer credit card information is seen as an inconvenience?

I responded back to the LCBO explaining that I did originally attempt to e-mail the document but the mail servers wouldn’t accept the attachment and they might want to look into that.  I continued to explain that the password layers were intended for customer protection and that should be something they could understand.  I didn’t hear back from them about the issue.

I did receive an e-mail later on from the LCBO telling all agents that they would no longer be requiring credit card information on the private order documentation.  I guess I won’t need as many passwords for the next order.

Beer Importing is an ongoing series documenting the process of importing beer through the LCBO.  This particular series documents a private order of Garrison beers from Halifax, Nova Scotia.