It took me about 2 weeks to get ours too - and - I was a bit surprised. But, I have some experience in this type of work and I have a theory:
Obviously the DVC department does not do the mailings. The machines that do the printing and stuffing of the envelope are extremely expensive! They either out-source the work or WDW has an internal department that handles it (which would charge the DVC department for the work).
First you have to print the things - and - that means a guy has to load the print tape, load paper stock in to a mega-printer and then adjust the machine to print the form properly. These machines are larger then a SUV and can print over 1000 pages a minute.
When that is done you have to stuff the envelope. The guy working the inserting machine has to load the items to be stuffed, load the envelopes, load any marketing/informational insert, adjust the machine for the proper fold and any other custom setting required for the run.
First the one-page ressies are done. Then, the machine is stopped and adjusted and all two-page ressies are done. Then three-pagers and so on. This must be done as the machine is dumb - it has to be told how many pages will be placed in the envelope before it starts on the next envelope.
The last process is the zip-sort. This is done because the US Postal Service grants a postage discount if the items are pre-sorted! During this process any international items would be taken out and handled seperately. If you will look, DVC is not paying the standard postage rate on that mailing!
While it is all mechanically done it is still a labor intensive process and each step requires special set-up. As a result, it makes no sense to do 1000 each day. Rather, you would wait until you have a good quantity (greater then 5K mailings).
So, my guess is that DVC does a "run" every 7 to 10 days for those ressies in the future. Ressie's in the very near future (which probably accounts for only 1% of the ressies) could be done manually by the MS rep.
So, if you make a ressie the day before the "run" you may get it in a few days! If you made it after the run it could take 2 weeks! Since we members are paying the freight for such work - this costs us less money!
But, I am really not sure why they just do what every other company in the world does and offer to send the confirmation via a .pdf file via e-mail! I think most members would be happy with that and it would save lots of money!
