Please let me state that Peter Beales are NOT in financial difficulties in any way shape or form and nor do we appreciate the spreading of such malicious rumours which can be damaging to people's livelihoods. Bare root roses are shipped in strict order rotation and are available to pre-order from April, with the first bare root deliveries starting to go out at the beginning of November once the roses are safe to lift from the fields. This means that before we can ship out any new orders, we first have to post out all the many pre-orders in strict order rotation. As you can imagine this is quite a task and can take a few weeks to catch up on, but it is the fairest way to ensure that everyone gets their roses as soon as physically possible. Rest assured that our staff have been working incredibly hard to get all orders out as quickly as we can and we are now able to focus on quickly shipping recent orders. Further information regarding delivery times can be found on the Delivery Information page on our website and also within our website's Terms and Conditions. Whilst the Government did lift all legal Covid safety requirements earlier in the year, we care deeply about the health and safety of our staff and customers. For this reason, we have been continuing to practice responsible and sensible safety precautions such as social distancing and mask wearing at all times. With the rapidly increasing spread of Coronavirus in the past few weeks this has absolutely proved to be the right thing to do and we make no apology for taking people’s health and safety seriously. Despite the extra precautions we have still experienced staff shortages due to members of the team having to self-isolate. This is always a busy time for us anyway, so the extra staff shortages have meant that we haven’t always been able to respond to messages as quickly as we would usually like and we have therefore temporarily set-up an auto-response on our email system. That being said your email was replied to by a member of staff 6 minutes after your email came in, which does not seem as unreasonable as you imply.