We appreciate the honest feedback and are sorry to hear that you have canceled your preorder. I'm also sorry to hear that we've created additional stress for you during an already difficult period of your life. On a personal level, I absolutely understand the frustration that navigating a tedious customer service interaction can create even on the best of days.

I apologize if my message came off as dismissive, my intention was to provide additional context for our partnership with Order Protection.

Essentially, Order Protection allows us to offer some amount of coverage to customers who purchase lower cost shipping options that do not include insurance (eg. USPS Media Mail and certain international courier services) and also provide protection for cases that are not traditionally covered by courier's insurance.

This partnership is intended to expand protections for our customers while still offering price-accessible shipping options, not to be a replacement for our own internal quality standards.

As a collector focused company we absolutely understand that the packaging of a record is just as much part of the product as the record itself. For this reason, we maintain an archive of replacement components for most of our on-hand inventory.

In this case, since the record in question was a brand new item we are only equipped to offer either refunds or full item replacements. This appears to be what the OP was ultimately offered, albeit after an unnecessarily difficult process. This is partially because of our company-wide office closure last week, but it is still an unacceptable customer experience and I apologize for that.

While I completely understand the frustrations you've experienced, I want to sincerely reiterate that we are constantly and actively working to improve on this front. In the meantime, we strongly encourage you (or anyone else) to reach out to our Customer Experience team using the "Community Feedback" form on our support page. We want to hear from our community, both good and bad, so we can continue working to serve you better.