I thought that for an extra $7 you get a digireel with two empty tapes for pick-n-place machines. At the least that’s what I got a few times now until today. I ordered 500 components so about $500 as a digireel. What I saw today is likely two separate tapes stitched together. I’m not picky but my pnp is. The added tape has a different film and the adhesive tape also has a different frictional coefficient. This causes my machine to waste about an inch or more of components. If they just tape up bits and ends together and call it digireel, that will cause my machine to hick up and unexpected locations and a lot of parts waste. I wonder if this is standard practice for digireel and mouserreel or I got screwed again. Once I ordered 1000 capacitors from digireel and it came in 12 separate bags! Another time I ordered 150 qfn chips in tubes from mouser and the packer cut all tubes in half to save space in packaging. I didn’t have that size tube and it took me a whole week to get empty tubes from them. Another time I ordered stuff from onlinecomponents.com and their tubes were just in the box with no antistatic bag or desiccant and a reel of moisture sensitive component had a hole in the packaging. I wonder if the relevant workforce is just full of incompetent people or what.
Probably so. The politicians have no clue as how much it COSTS to have an employee, so they keep adding on new costs to please a few voters. Glad I am out of the business. Good luck. Don't expect things to change for the better.
I use several china suppliers and so far I have had no problems over about 5 years. The only thing that can be a pain is the long lead time. I do not blame your supplier's employees, they do what there management tells them to do. Maybe they will get smart and start training the employees. I would guess they came in close to the end of the month.