champs

Don’t want to drag this out, but from experience, getting Footlocker shipments to Hawaii can be hit or miss. Okay, it’s not specifically Footlocker, but all “footsites” aka Champs, Eastbay, Footaction, and Footlocker. Footaction has been a total dud getting online orders of hype shoes to the aina. They always cancel. Champs is almost as bad as Footaction. Eastbay has been good and Footlocker had been good but even they cancel more than they should.

Like I explained before, these cancelled orders have to do with warehouses and stores and who’s allowed to ship to Hawaii. So if your online order is being fulfilled by the massive footsite warehouse then everything should be good. However, if your order gets routed to a brick-and-mortar store for fulfillment, you can count that as a loss.

Until COVID-19.

I place three orders during the past few weeks. Two from Footlocker and one from Champs. Both Footlocker orders got the telltale sign of cancellation – an email titled “We’re still working on your order” and the body starts with:

It’s taking a bit longer to complete your order. We’re trying to track down your item.

Historically, that’s a sign of game over. Checking the order status would show the name of the shoe replaced with some generic description like this:

But this time, after two days, I received emails stating the incredulous:

YOUR ORDER HAS SHIPPED

I had heard from Unbreakable Kicks that physical stores were still in business, just not opened to the public. Instead the workers were packing and shipping out orders from their local inventory – something that Hawaii was not privvy to until now (again, this is for hype sneakers, not general releases).

The Champs order is still processing, but I already got the email saying, “We’re still working on your order.” So this will test if other sites can ship to the 808 during Rona Times.

Now having seen this, will these successful online orders continue after stores reopen? Or will footsites revert to cancelled orders?