Firstly I live in Switzerland.

At the end of October I sent back my I9-9900k to the store I bought if from (techmania.ch) for a replacement, and they said they had to forward it directly to Intel.

They reportedly shipped the CPU on November 4th, but I have yet to receive any news.

Since I don't have a spare CPU, the wait is starting to feel long, so I just wanted to know whether it was normal for the process to take over a month?

I've pretty much read everywhere on reddit that Intel RMAs were fast and smooth...

By the way, is it a common thing for a shop to forward a CPU RMA to the manufacturer, or is it just specific store policy ?

Pretty much every other PC component I have returned were traded with a new/equivalent one right away. Even without factual proof of the hardware malfunctioning.

TL;DR : CPU in RMA for 5 weeks, is it normal?