Kudos to PSA
 

I would like to make note of the excellent service I just received from PSA. I submitted a group of cards at the Long Beach, CA show on February 1 for what was supposed to be 23 day service. Much to my surprise, the grades were out by this past Thursday and I received the cards back today. That’s way ahead of schedule. The grades were almost exactly what I would have expected, which shows the consistency of their process. So many times people complain about how slow the grading process can be. I thought it was proper to congratulate PSA on a job well done, ahead of schedule.

For every order they deliver on time, there are 50 that are behind schedule.

I am part of a group submission that is nearing 100 days. Another group sub just popped after 40 days. There is no rhyme or reason to their service. The fact that they don’t prioritize submissions as they come in makes no sense. Explain to me how a submission sent in December pops before a submission sent in September.

LOL, I won't ask how you came up with that 50/1 ratio. I have had three submissions in the last year and they have all been on time or early. Maybe the economy service has bigger backlogs. I always go with the $20/card service. It's a little more expensive, but I am impatient.

Dan-I find their customer service people very helpful. That would be a great question to ask them. If you do, please post the answer,

As someone who works in a software company (which shall remain nameless) where we fix bugs found by customers in the software, I will venture a guess on how this might happen. I'm sure it's mostly wrong, but it'll show you some of the logic on how a submission sent in December might pop before one sent in September.

Our team is made of very experienced engineers (or graders) who are able to fix (or grade) any type of issue (or card) and those who are new, and are only able to fix easy issues (or common/standard cards). When a new issue (or submission) comes in, we will see how difficult / complex the issue is (or whether the card is from Topps or some unknown card company), and assign it to the engineer (or grader) that can best take on that issue (or submission). However, we also want to balance each engineers workload, so they will all have roughly the same number of issues to work on. And at the same time, we will give a few of the more difficult issues to newer engineers so that they can slowly learn those new areas. The engineers then pick which issues they want to work on, but keep in mind the severity (or service level) of the issue, and that we don't want the ageing for the issues to be too high.

So given that, I can definitely see cases where a particular grader might see a particular submission as really cool (or easy), and one that he wants to grade earlier. Or one where a newer grader might think is hard where certain issues need more research, and leave it on the back burner. Or some graders might be able to grade much faster, and run through their queue quicker while others might just be really slow graders, so if your submission is stuck with them, you might need to wait awhile.

Again, this theory is most likely wrong, and it could well be that all graders draw from a single queue of submissions, but I can just think of plenty of reasons why certain submissions might pop earlier than others even if they are received later.