http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/12/31 ... iday_card/

"Holiday card"??!?!? That's worse than nothing at all!

That was my thinking

Order earlier?

Yep. People are getting more and more reliant on other people taking responsibility for their lack of forethought. That said, if they were waiting for a new product release, sometimes there isn't an option to buying last minute - in which case, I would accept that it is unlikely to turn up for Christmas and arrange something else.

If that's true, it seems to me the problem is with Dell

Also, and I'm not saying Dell did do this but it's a possibility, loads of companies put 'GUARANTEED delivery for Xmas' etc in their emails and on the sites...

Either way, it looks and sounds bad, and how many of those customers won't go back to Dell now? Or tell other people not to go near them?

I wouldn't touch them again with a forty foot pole, and I know four other people that won't either

Amazon nearly did this to me this christmas. I ordered something which was someone's present. They claimed to have it in stock and I paid extra for next day delivery, just to be sure. I ordered it on December 14th. It arrived on December 23rd. Even more irksome, it arrived to the wrong address (my work address rather than my home address) so I had to drive in to work on very iffy snow covered roads to get it to ensure it got to where it needed to be for christmas.

I fail to see how anything less than clairvoyance on my part could have made any difference to events.

Jon