I sense that they've been struggling since Jonathan Horne passed away and left a customer service void at JNR. They seem to be earnestly trying to regroup but grief is not as mundane as a switch to be flipped. A year and a half isn't so long for a beloved friend to be absent.
Jonathan Lee Horne Memorial Music Fund
That JNR community disruption combined with the crazy backlog of vinyl manufacturing has combined to create a lot of bumps in what previously was a fairly reliable system for JNR.
Regarding the phantom USPS tracking numbers ... that's a weird quirk of the shipping/logistics service they're using, as best I can tell. I've corresponded a bit with Moose about it so there's growing awareness of the problem but not much resolution that I've seen yet. It seems that the shipping service fills in a fake tracking number when something is shipped without a tracking number. In my experience, it's been all of their lathe cut 7" singles.
If you're waiting on orders that are 100% for "back catalog" items (pre-2000) that you think must certainly already be on their shelves, I would reach out to JNR and ask if your order has slipped through the cracks.
If you combined pre-orders and back-catalog items, they may be waiting until everything is in-stock before shipping. They try to keep shipping updates for pre-orders predicted here:
Shipping Updates | Joyful Noise Recordings . But they're still at the mercy of the pressing plants, which are at the mercy of supply chain issues for materials needed for pressing vinyl, etc.
It's a shit-show, and as with most endeavors in our capitalist world, those with the most money tend to be disrupted the least and can pay their way to the front of lines.
