[Nexus 4 General] cb474:
I really don't believe, as people are suggesting here, that linking the phone to the account requires opening the box. That would add a big labrorious extra step, when you consider the thousands and eventually perhaps millions of those phones that will be sold. I'm sure when they fulfill the order, as other people suggest, they know the IMEI or serial number of the phone shipped (which is usually on a label on the outside of the box and is probably scanned for inventory purposes before every phone is packaged for shipping, regardless over whether it is linked or not). Then the system links the phone to the account, if requested, and that's how the phone is recognized by Google's system when you first turn it on. I just don't think checking the link to my account box, during the purchase process, has anything to do with how quickly or not these phones are shipped.

This makes sense for UPS's logistics, but not for Google's. As people have noted, Google appears to be fulfilling these orders directly from a UPS warehouse in Louisville, KY. It makes perfect sense for Google to just process the purchases in the order they come in, then hand them over to UPS directly. UPS is the only party that has a logisitical problem with geography.

But UPS is then looking at all of their shipments to different places in the U.S., not just those from Google. And UPS will ship all packages to a certain geographic region together, regardless of who they came from. Now take into account that UPS's hub in Louisville is their main worldwide hub, which handles over 400,000 packages per hour. The amount of time to have enough packages to send a batch to any particular geographic region, especially some of the major metroplitan areas mentioned in this thread, has to be trivial. So there's just no way in actual pratice geographic region makes more than a tiny insignificant difference in the time of day one of these phones goes out.

On top of that, these packages are being shipped two day shipping. UPS is in the business of delivering things when they say they will, regardless of the location (or I believe they have to refund the shipping cost). So once UPS receives the package, it's going to go out within two business days to the delivery location, whether it is in New York or Katmandu.

So shipping logistics, I believe, has nothing to do with the delays and oddball order in which phones are going out. It has to do with Google's fulfillment process, the order in which they process the purchases, and then hand them over to UPS. And again, there is just zero reason for Google to care about geography for that, geography is UPS's problem.

The end result is simply, as many have said, that Google's fulfillment process is badly organized. The only other factor that I can think of that would cause irregularities in the order in which people's purchases are processed is if there is some hold up in getting authorization from one's bank for the purchase. Perhaps some banks are more efficient at clearing charges on credit cards than others. My purchase triggered the fraud alert system at my bank, so perhaps this is the sort of purchase that gives banks pause and causes them to take extra steps and slow things down. Although, this does not seem very likley since purchasing electronics online is extremely commonplace.