Thread: USPS Shipping

Originally Posted by snake River

Here’s a good one for you guys, but drop off to UPS if you set packages outside of the box

I’m very confused you would leave a package outside just next to a dropbox? You might just as well leave them on the sidewalk anywhere??

Originally Posted by BuckeyeCrappie

It can get better if it gets privatized IMHO

That will never happen.

I have watched packages take trips around the nation before getting to me. I have seen them put on a delivery truck only to be pulled off and sent on a state round trip.

I live in Lake Charles, La. about right between Houston and Baton Rouge. Many things come from Houston heading east past Lake Charles on I10 to Baton Rouge then west back to Lake Charles. If I would be looking out my back yard, I could wave at the truck. I10 is in sight across a pasture. I have packages come from Memphis south to New Orleans west to Houston east to Baton Rouge and finally west to Lake Charles also.

Originally Posted by jusanothajoe

Can USPS shipping get any worse?

In a word, Sure can and will. Oh wait, that was more than one word. oops

I'm sort of glad to hear all this, I was beginning to think it was only here. I've had packages do all that. The local U.S. Rep. even went to the main local PO about a year ago and looked around. He said things were getting better , He was back just a month or so ago looked around and said things were going to get better , YEAH RIGHT, ain't nothing happened yet.

Defiantly agree!! The tracking they have sucks half the time it shows up at random, had an okuma rod shipped from minnesota and the cardboard was all messed up but luckily nothing was damaged. A lot of the work force now a days is in it for the paycheck and not the integrity.

You can thank Louis DeJoy (former postmaster general) for some of the USPS ineffective service. He tried very hard to make reduced efficiency acceptable. David Steiner took over that Postmaster General position in July of 2025. He used to be the CEO of Waste Management and a FedEx board member. Time will tell how long it takes him to get things back on track, if that's possible.

I also have stories about idiotic performance by the postal service. My company used to ship time-sensitive samples overnight to a lab several states away. They were guaranteed to arrive within 24 hours so the testing processing could be initiated on time. Understand that (at the time) the USPS had a guarantee which stated; if the overnight package doesn't arrive in time, the sender is issued a full refund. We always made sure our samples were collected in a timely manner and were submitted to the USPS in time to arrive at the laboratory within the acceptable processing window. For any samples that arrived late to the lab, a portion of the testing was considered invalid, and we would have to explain to the client why. That meant that we had to collect samples that would be processed locally at a state certified lab, to ensure legitimate results. Of course, we'd have to eat the local processing cost. However, most of the out of state samples would arrive at the USPS processing center within 8 miles of their final destination laboratory before 8:00 a.m., yet the postal service couldn't get them to the lab in time, which meant we'd get a 100% refund on shipping. That ended up being ~ 4 times the cost of processing the expired/invalid portion of the testing, meaning that we'd get our samples shipped for free and only need to pay 1/4th the shipping cost to get all results. So, for every one of those jobs, we started automatically collecting separate samples to be processed locally, which wouldn't require us to make a follow-up trip to the jobsite (saving us time & money). It was an incredibly wasteful mistake by the postal service that cost them, but saved us money in the long run. BTW, before DeJoy took over, our packages almost always arrived to the lab in a timely manner (94% of the time), unless extreme inclement weather interrupted the process, which was rare (I have 25 years of documented proof). We have since retired and (thankfully) no longer need to ship anything overnight.

Jim

Amazon has contracted their Prime 2 day delivery services mostly to USPS. I cancelled my Prime account because Amazon's former 2 day delivery service now is handed over to USPS and they aren't bound to a specific delivery date. My packages now take a minimum of 3 days to a week to be delivered Prime. No thanks US Mail Service dudes!