Artificial Delay In Order Processing Time

Full Review
Note: This was originally posted as an Express Review.  I've redone it to be able to add the additional information at the bottom.

Having a been a loyal and frequent customer of newegg for the past 7 years, I can only describe their recent decline in service as disappointing.

After placing several hundred orders over the years (both business and personal), they now decide that my address needs to be verified on every order?  No change AT ALL in my shipping address or credit cards numbers outside of the obvious expiration date updates.

Where over 99% of my past transactions have processed and shipped the same day, they now linger in Newegg's processing system for a day or more.

Their customer service says "we only promise 1-2 business day processing."  Clearly this artificial delay appears to be an attempt to push the customer into the optional per order "rush handling" charge (always been available but never needed before) or the ShopRunner 2 day shipping membership (recently being promoted, similar to Amazon Prime).

Take away Newegg's quick processing time, and they become just another vendor with good (not great) prices and reasonable shipping charges (and don't get me going on their use UPS-MI for shipping)

Addtional Clarification of my Dissatisfaction:

To illustrate in objective terms why I feel Newegg's service has declined, I went back and pulled statistics on the order processing times.  Every order produces an email for order confirmation, payment processing completion, shipping notification and an invoice.  For this purpose only the first two are relevant.  I have the confirmations for my last 157 orders dating back to 5/5/2009 (unfortunately I have no emails of any sort prior to that date due to a change in email providers).  The date/time of the order confirmation email was subtracted from the date/time of the payment processing completion email to get the processing time.

The average processing time of my last 9 orders dating back to 06/28/11 is 1455 minutes. The average processing time of the first 148 orders is 71 minutes.  (If 2 wild anomalies are tossed out of those 148 orders then the average becomes 25 minutes).

This is significant for me because fast shipping is a major factor in choosing Newegg over other vendors.  Being just a couple of hundred miles from one of their warehouses meant I usually (maybe 70-80% of the time) had my merchandise in hand the following day.  Now, if the the current trend in their processing time continues, I can't even be certain my order has even been sent to the warehouse for shipping.

Edit: Fixed a math typo.