Lee Valley Tools says the distribution of its annual Christmas catalog has been caught in the crossfire of postal disruptions for the second year in a row. “This is the second national service postal interruption to Lee Valley Tools and our customers within 11 months,” Lee Valley President and COO Jason Tasse tells CTV News Ottawa. “And it just happens to be right over top of the busiest season of the year.” Tasse says the shutdown of the postal service earlier this fall came at a crucial time when catalogs were supposed to be mailed out. “We printed all the catalogs, invested in the paper, put six months of work into it, and the day before they were to be inducted into the postal service, the shutdown happened. And then it carried on for weeks and weeks.” About one million Christmas catalogs were printed, according to Lee Valley Tools, which is also available online. “It’s a pretty critical one for us. It’s our single largest mailing of the year,” says Tasse. The company then turned to plan B for distribution of the catalogs, working with package delivery services and stuffing them into newspapers. “That’s not ideal because instead of an address that mailed to you as our customer, we can get it close to your neighborhood, so it’s suboptimal,” says Tasse. Lee Valley is offering customers who visit a store and ask for the Christmas catalog $1 in cash until Nov. 15. “The dollar’s intended to offset the postage that we were going to spend,” says Tasse. Customers are encouraged to donate the dollar to their local food bank. “And, if they choose, we will match that dollar for a food bank donation, which we set up right at the counter,” he says. “That’s just fine with me,” says Peter Waddell, a customer at the Ottawa store who donated his dollar after receiving the catalog. “The Christmas catalog gives you a lot of ideas. Even the family likes to look at it to get ideas for different people because they have so many things from gardening to just any kind of gadget that you might want.”
