No wonder UPS, Fedex etc. are doing so well, the US postal service is a joke and not a good one either ! Try tracking a parcel ! Try getting any kind of information !
Try contacting consumer affairs ! I got the phone hung up on me !
I will never ship anything by mail, ever !
C.
Replies
My wife and I ship hundreds of packages a year via USPS and almost never have a problem, could you give all of the details about the shipment you had problems with? I may be able to give you some advice.
John W.
Don't need any advice, they lost a parcel, they didn't know where it was, the insurance couldn't kick in till 21 days after the estimated maximum time of travel, the customer service was awful, I will never use them anymore!
The excuse was the package was too heavy, imagine that !C.
Weight doesn't matter, either. I sent a tax return to the state of Oklahoma in Okalahoma City. Registered, return receipt, the whole nine yards. The folks at the post office delivered it to the IRS in Fresno, California (and they signed for it!). The return weighed two ounces!
I won't tell you all the tales of postal employees saying "It was delivered" as if delivery anywhere is all that counts.
Bob
John, I agree with you about packages. I was an eBay seller for 3 or 4 years, pretty active, and the service for Priority Mail was excellent. I will say, though, I'm glad I never had to troubleshoot anything.
There are definitely black holes in various parts of the country. I heard about some areas back east a few weeks ago, where there's all kinds of trouble getting things delivered on time. On the west coast, UPS and USPS give the Palm Desert area (near Palm Springs) short shrift, stuff takes forever to get there from Seattle, when it would get to, say, Orange County -- not very far north -- very quickly.forestgirl -- you can take the girl out of the forest, but you can't take the forest out of the girl ;-)
Parcel, hell. We can't even get reliable mail delivery....period. Get other people's mail, don't get bills. Complaints to the local PO are a joke.
Another sign of the coming Apocalypse.... ;-)
I shipped a box of books right after Xmas. When they arrived (a neighboring state) it was our box and someone else's toaster. We were able to determine who the toaster belonged to. All of our stuff was MIA.
When I inquired, I had to fill out a five-part form (nothing available online, so a trip to the PO and a 20 minute wait in line). Not only was there no way to track the package, there is no way to track the lost-package form. The local PO has no listed phone number and every time I've checked with them, I get a list of excuses (do you know how many packages we handle, we are just a wheel in the system, it all goes through Atlanta, have you seen the auto sorting systems, you won't be notified if we don't find it, only if we do, it takes time, etc. etc.) Ever a, "I'm sorry you had problems with your shipment?" No way. Their only explanation was the package must have fallen off a conveyor, spilled the contents and some one picked up the debris and put it in the box to which they thought it belonged. How a present marked "To Marilyn" ended up going to Jason is beyond me.
Anyway, 4 months later and we still have no idea if we should go out an buy all new items to replace or if some day books are going to show up. P.S. Jason returned the toaster to the local p.o. with the explanation and address of the intended person, Marilyn. That never showed up there, either.
I cringe when I spend $12 to ship a package UPS, but at least I know it's going to get there. I can tell the date and time every time it moves from one place to another.
Edited 5/14/2007 8:28 am ET by byhammerandhand
Cafe Access Please
I'll add another complaint to the list. When buying this house in 2000, we were living in a neighboring state. The closing paperwork was overnighted to us to sign and return via overnight mail within two days. I took it down to the post office one day earlier than needed to have it overnighted. They promised it would get there by 9:00 am the next day and gave me a tracking number.
Of course it didn't make it. Closing day passed with no papers. Bank and seller were pizzed at ME claiming it was me dragging my feet. Fortunately that tracking number found the envelope sitting on a shelf at the post office 40 miles away. Post Office refunded my money. All parties agreed to sign and date the papers as if it was the actual closing date so that everything wouldn't have to be rewritten.
Of course that was only one of several times in my life I've been screwed by missing or lost or late mail from the USPS.
I had a pretty valuable pacakge shipped to me recently. It was insured and required a signature. It cost nearly $70 to mail. It arrived on our doorstep. No signature was given. $4k sitting on an adirondak chair on my front porch in a very suburban neighborhood for 3-5 hours. Everything was accounted for.
And to think I was upset about the planer-blade Amazon shipment being left out on the rural-road mailbox last Friday! Glad everything worked out.forestgirl -- you can take the girl out of the forest, but you can't take the forest out of the girl ;-)
And to think I was upset about the planer-blade Amazon shipment being left out on the rural-road mailbox last Friday!
You mean you don't have a high-security locking mailbox by now? Or was it left on top of the mailbox?
All in all, I've had better luck with the USPS than with UPS.
It was on top -- poor sentence construction, forgive. Nope, no locking box. At least ours is in the middle of the row, so when the high-schoolers come along with their baseball bats, it usually escapes major damage. forestgirl -- you can take the girl out of the forest, but you can't take the forest out of the girl ;-)
I have a rancher friend who bought a extra large mail box. Put the regular mail box inside the new box and poured cement around it. Put it on a railroad rail post. He has a lot of wood splinters on the ground around it, and fender paint on the post where it look like several people tried to run it down.
I have had plenty of problems with the post office. Last year I went to HK, so I wanted to put my mail on hold. I did it plenty of time in advance so their would be no problem. When I got back, all my mail was stuffed in the mailbox. No hold! About two weeks later, I got a notification from them saying they will put my mail on hold! Fantastic!!!
Here is a good one for you, My USPS Mail Lady has DUI/DWI license plates and is dyslexic. At least the people in the neighborhood have become acquainted by swapping mail.Work Safe, Count to 10 when your done for the day !!
Bruce S.
When I moved from Hawaii to Arizona 2 years ago, one of the chief reasons was so that my mother (88) could live with us or near us. She moved from San Diego and lived with us for 4 months until moving into her own condo 1/4 mile from us.
Since then, at random, she receives at least half our mail at her condo. We get a few of her pieces (mostly junk mail), but 3-4 days a week, we have to go to her place to get our mail.
I can understand why some of her mail should still come to our house, after all, she lived here. But I have never had her address associated with my name. But since our last names are the same, the brain-dead postal service can't get it right.
We have been to the post office a dozen times to get the problem corrected, filled out endless forms, spoken to the post master, the carriers. It's a small town, the Main branch is well aware of the problem. It just keeps happening. They can't, or won't correct it. Absolutely maddening.
I live in Prescott, 125 miles from Phoenix. If I mail something to anyone in this town, it gets trucked to Phoenix, then back to be delivered. Besides the infuriating nature of that system, things I mail at the same time to California or the East Coast get there at least a day before the local delivery comes back.
Inmates running the asylum.
Rich
Edited 5/15/2007 5:05 pm ET by Rich14
If you think your post is bad or slow how about this.
Mary posts a letter in LA to mammy who lives in a small village in Ireland.US post put it on a train with millons of others to be delivered to places all over the world.The letters are sorted and rushed to an Airport and put on the latest jet and flowen at the speed of sound to Europe where they are sorted and rushed to another jet plane and sent to their Country of destination.In Ireland they are divided into Post bags for the different towns around the country.
The next morning at 7am (12hrs and 13,000 mls)later Pat picks up the bag with Marys letter for Mammy who lives 3 mls out the road and heads off.After having a CHAT and a cup of tae and a bit of dinner along the way he arrives at mammys about 6.30 pm just in time for the evening tea.And Mammy had Marys letter 24 hrs. after she posting it.
IS'NT THE SPACE AGE MARVELLOUS ,Slan Leat BoysieI'm never always right but i'm always never wrong. Boysie
The list of issues I have had with the USPS is to long to go into but here are some of the low lights.
Use to get about 10 different mags. They would some times not show up sometimes show up late (got three issues of on mag in two weeks and it was a monthly mag) Put a watch on this and it was fine then the month the watch went off it started again. Did this 4 times in 3 years and the post master kept saying it was a problem with the shippers (I pointed out they came from different states but he did not care)
Sent a bad model train engine in for repair. Never got it back or heard from company for weeks and weeks. Waited the required number of weeks and had the USPS do a track on this (it was insured and sent with a signature required and a confirmation of delivery) and no one could find it. I eventually get a check in mail from USPS for the lost engine. The same day I get a phone call from the company asking me to go into detail of what the problem was. They had received the engine the day before I got the check. I still have the check on my desk (I got a new engine from the company and did not cash said check)
When I was in High school I used to mail (yes we mailed back then) a letter to the girl I was chasing after. who lived about 20 miles south of me and we would mail back and forth about 2 letters each per week. (ah young love or lust or some such) and most of the time it would take two days to get from point a to point b. But about once ever few months it would take almost a week. (want to guess what that did? Lots of arguments before we figured that one out)
Then this week I got a letter that was put in the mail on Tuesday morning (last week) and is showed up at my door on Sat. Not bad as this letter traveled all of 25 miles and moved over 4 cities from where it started. And all of that in only 4 days! OF course this was nothing important only a job offer!
The biggest issue with the USPS is that they are not accountable to anyone. I talked with a post master (that I knew) about how to handle the issue with the mags (in the next town over from where he worked) and he said that if the post master did not want to do anything about it my only option was to write my congressman as their was no on in the USPS that was higher up for me to talk to. This he said was the way it was set up back in the 1700's I guess when people knew the local congressman and the local congressman had time to look into this type of thing.
Doug Meyer
Rich,
You should try asking your local post office if they have a box dedicated to local mail; rural or small town offices often do. If they don't, you could suggest it. You're correct that your local letter should not HAVE to go through the further away hub only to come back later, but that depends on if the letter ever gets mixed in with everything else or not. Better luck in the future :)
Wow, I've been shipping USPS for about 11 years. Hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of stuff over that time. We did have one problem a couple years ago, a package worth more than a thousand dollars was a couple days over due. My customer called just as I was doing a final check of the house before leaving for a week. I called my partner and left him the Post Office paperwork on the shipment and asked if he'd talk to one of the Postal clerks about it.The next day, I was having an early dinner in a restaurant three states away when my customer called my cell phone. My local Postmistress had tracked his package to his local Post Office where it was sitting on a shelf and had arranged for it to be handed to him that day. She had called him, half-way across the Country, to make arrangements for delivery and apologized for the delay.I guess I'm pretty lucky to have a great local Post Office and a good relationship with them.
I guess I'm pretty lucky to have a great local Post Office and a good relationship with them.
Yea, as a mentioned I've had pretty good luck as well. It helps that they have local presence, if you have a good postmaster. Like the time ours called us, on Xmas eve, on a Sunday, saying we had some packages at the PO and they were closed, but we could come get them at the P.O. that day anyway. Try getting that from UPS or FedEx.
Ask me how many "guaranteed Saturday delivery" UPS envelopes I didn't get until the following Monday.
In contrast, there was the USPS letter carrier we had in CA that managed to keep track of when we did, and did not, live the house we owned as we converted it between owner-occupied, rental, and back, etc. Whe we finally moved away we thanked him for the great service; he let on that there were good carriers, and not so good ones. In his opinion, the good ones treated their routes as a small business, and tried to run it as such. The bad ones just phoned it in.
"I guess I'm pretty lucky to have a great local Post Office and a good relationship with them."
True enough. It's always nice to vent once in awhile and the post office is an 'easy' target. I own a mailing company so naturally I deal with the USPS every day, mailing millions of peices per year. While I'll be the first to admit that I've had my share of 'experiences' with the post office I can say with certainty that in every case what I was actually dealing with was a lazy or uninspired PERSON. People are guilty of this in every profession. The post office as an organization is heavily ladden with red-tape and "rigamarole". Each post office is definitely different from another, based on the people who work there and the management. Aside from that, the post office deals with a HUGE volume of mail so even if they are 99.9% accurate they're going to lose/destroy/screw-up SOME mail.
Other issues affect their ability to do a 'good' job. One poster mentions getting mail at his mothers address, likely due to two things. a.) when a change of address is made you must specify that it is either an individual or family change. In many cases this is overlooked so if one person moves out and files a change of address with a certain last name, all mail for that last name will/should be delivered to the new address. This would have likely happened on the first change of address which associated his name with the new address. Then, even though they have made attempts to 'change it back' or 'fix it' it doesnt reliably take effect because only first class mail gets forwarded, and only for a period of time, meanwhile his name with the new address is floating around in databases everywhere and unless the mailers clean their databases mail will continue to be sent to that address. With standard mail there is no obligation to forward, return, or do anything special with the mail other than deliver it to deliverable addresses. Technically, if the postman knew he didnt live there he could throw it away, unless the mail was marked "or current resident" or something similar. In other words, in many cases, the carrier probably IS doing their job, even though it seems wrong. Like everything else it usually boils down to the competence and integrity of the individual worker.
FEDEX GROUND. Cheaper than any other and reliable.
Good advice. In my area, though, they always deliver one day later than promised.
Rich
You heard that UPS and FedEx are going to merge------
They are going to name it FedUp.
Sorry I could not resist.
Scott
And General Electric is going to merge with Alitalia ! They are going to call it Genitalia ....Eh, eh...C.
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