Answers to Frequently Asked Questions

Q1: Can you make a custom bumper sticker for me?
A1: If you want to pay for at least a hundred copies of it, sure. The printing process that we use is wildly impractical for production of just one copy of a sticker. There are ways to make single-copy stickers, but we're not impressed with the state of the art in that area. We might get into it someday, but if you're reading this comment, then it hasn't happened yet. For custom sticker job pricing, toss an email to info (@) instantattitudes.com with a description of what you had in mind. (Obviously, you'll need to remove the anti-spammer spaces and parentheses from that email address before it will work.)

Q2: Can you do custom T-shirts?
A2: Yes, with certain limitations. If you want a bunch of shirts printed, save yourself a lot of trouble and shop around in your neighborhood; the cost of shipping will almost certainly make us more expensive than your local screen printing shop. If you just want one shirt, we can do it, but be advised that the technology we use is only slightly better than what you might be able to do yourself. For single-copy custom shirts, we use a heat transfer generated from an inkjet printer and applied to a blank (usually restricted to a blank white) shirt. The difference between what you can do at home and what we can do in our shop is that we've got a real transfer press that usually does a better job of getting the transfer on to the shirt than you can do with an iron. Pricing information is available on request; this isn't a service that we're anxious to promote, though, as it doesn't really produce the kind of quality of finished product that we like.

Q3: This website doesn't have much in the way of fancy formatting or graphics on it, and I do really kewl website development; I could make this site look totally awesome, wouldn't you like to hire me?
A3: No. The reason we don't have a graphics-infested site with frames and lots of other fragile bells and whistles is very simple; by not putting all that crap into the site, it loads a whole lot faster, and it's not going to cause a visitor's web browser to barf and lock up. Even if they're running Netscape 6.0. (Okay, so merely loading the browser can crash Netscape 6... but that's not our site's fault.) And please, don't even mention FrontPage around us.

Q4: Do you accept suggestions for new stickers or shirts?
A4: Yes, but at least 95% of the suggestions we get are things that either don't get past the review process, or are ideas that we've already seen. In bumper stickers, for the (perhaps) 5% of suggestions that do make it into print, the deal we offer is this; for an accepted bumper sticker suggestion, we reward the person that first suggested the item with a dozen stickers of their choice from our catalog. Suggestions for shirts are much dicier; unless you've got finished, printable art work that you think we might be interested in licensing from you, we probably would rather not discuss the subject. While a number of our shirt designs are in fact essentially just slogans with little or no art, we'd prefer to have more with art than without... and a suggestion that doesn't come with marketable art requires a substantial amount of work (and expense) to get it to the point where it's a product.

Q5: Haven't I seen you somewhere? Your stuff looks familiar.
A5: Well, maybe. We occasionally will get space at science fiction fan conventions and other special events to sell our wares, and have been as far afield as Los Angeles, Orlando, Chicago and Boston in the past, but our enthusiasm for traveling has waned over the years. There are also a number of other dealers and retail outlets selling our stickers; if you have a retail business and you'd like to be one of them, send us an e-mail and we can discuss wholesale.

Q7: You know, you've got lots of really great merchandise here, but your website is kind of bland; for a fairly small investment, I could work up a much more exciting look and feel that would be much more impressive...
A7: We get this question a lot. No, we don't want any bells and whistles. Unlike retailers such as Neiman-Marcus, we feel that substance (the product) should be the thing that gets the customer to buy from us; form is secondary. Our site could be much fancier, but then it would take longer to load. We know how much we absolutely hate those long waits for meaningless animations and self-indulgent frippery that tells us nothing about the subject of the website (but a lot about the mindset of the site owner, and sometimes the developer), and we prefer to remain one of the sites that disdains such wretched excess... immoderately.

Q8: I have noticed that you have lots of bumper stickers for, shall we say, "nontraditional" religions, but almost nothing devotional for Christians; why is that?
A8: The primary reason is economic; that market is already oversaturated in most parts of the country, and in many cases it's further impacted by the fact that there are lots of churches and religious organizations which give away devotional bumper stickers for free. As a result, there's very little money to be made from that product line, and since we can't stay in business if we don't make a buck or two somewhere, it just doesn't make sense to get into those.

Q9: Why is Question #6 missing from the list?
A9: There is no Question #6. There never was.

Q10: Do you do wholesale?
A10: Yes. Email us for details at info (@) instantattitudes.com (Obviously, you'll need to remove the anti-spammer spaces and parentheses from that email address before it will work.)

Q11: How much faster is "Faster Shipping"? What makes it faster?
A11: Our normal shipping method for less than 50 stickers is via First Class Mail. Yes, that's the infamous "Snail Mail". The "Faster shipping" orders are packed and shipped on the same internal handling schedule as the First Class Mail, but it goes out via Priority Mail, which is usually faster in getting to its destination. One should note however, that if you're sending the order to us by snailmail to begin with, we may not see the order in our mailbox for as much as ten days, so "faster" at that point may not be much of a relative improvement. In most cases, orders are shipped within 24 hours after we receive them; on Friday night, Saturday and Sunday, due to the futility of dropping things off at the local post office, the orders may pile up until Monday.

Q12: I wanted to email you, but I couldn't find anyplace to just click on a link to send you mail. Why don't you have that?
A12: One word: spam. Not the rather tasty canned meat product from Hormel, but the unsolicited bulk email kind. You probably hate those messages; so do we. Unfortunately, the spammers have web search software which collects email addresses that are posted on websites and automatically adds them to the lists they use for sending spam. We'd really rather only hear from actual potential customers (and folks who have really visited the site and who have something to say about it), so our email address is posted in a manner that confuses the spammers' search software. It means that you have a little more trouble communicating with us, but it also means that your email won't be lost in a flood of junk. We tried other ways; the address we formerly used is still getting flooded with spam even though we haven't used it in years.

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