Slow USPS Deliveries - Grumpy Old Men Complaining About Post Office, Ebay, & Kids On The Lawn

Not only is there a huge USPS backlog, but there is some geographically bizarre routing going on. According to a clerk at my post office, some of the regional hubs are so overloaded and backlogged, that shipments are being routed far out of their normal geographic areas in order to bypass these centers... which contributes to the delays.

Two examples of inbound packages I am expecting:

Origin: Wilmington, Ohio
Destination: Urbana, Illinois
Current location: Dallas, Texas
Normally, this would be a 2-3 day journey max. Currently at 12 calendar days and counting.




Origin: Clarkston, Michigan
Destination: Urbana, Illinois
Current location: Jacksonville, Florida
Dafuq? It was sent completely across the country to then come almost all the way back?

Our mail has been arriving around 7:30 PM lately. It used to be between 1:30 and 3:00. I mailed a package December 19th with the last scan Dec 22 in New Jersey going to Kentucky. The buyer has opened a case with ebay. We had two days last week with no mail delivered. Then a couple days later they dropped off the mai, but didn't take the outgoing mail. It is truly messed up.

The re-routing might explain why a medium-sized Priority Mail box mailed to me in Hobart, NY from Stroudsburg, PA (a little over a 3-hours drive) went first to Jacksonville, FL...

Customer received a shipment (first class letter...too inexpensive for tracking) today. From Calif to Pennsylvania simply took one month and a day. Figure it was backed up in PA for most of the month.

Dan,

I can beat that!

I have an item with postal tracking in the system right now.

Item was accepted in NY on 4 Jan and proceeded to, wait for it........San Juan, Puerto Rico, where it has been since 7 Jan.

This would be fine and dandy if I indeed live in PR, which I do not.

Albuquerque, San Juan; meh.

Just hope they don't ask for my passport when I go to pick it up.

All jokes aside, I did have a TSA person ask for my passport at Houston's Hobby Airport last time I was there on my return trip. I assumed I was on Candid Camera or something.... NEW MEXICO, like in the state?

Prediction:

The service will remain horrible for the foreseeable future and the USPS will use it to justify large rate increases and perhaps a bailout or three.

Maybe this will speed things up a bit.

https://yeahmotor.com/cars/coolest-...rods/10/?v=2

Not sure how the 'fresh air' intake vent in cowl is going to work next to those headers...can anyone say 'carbon monoxide poisoning'?
Don

If it helps any, it's not just USPS that is providing its packages with free tours of the United States.

From Pennsylvania to California in only two weeks by Fedex for a one pound package!

LOL.

Jim

(Start reading from the bottom up)

Actually, that tracking route doesn't show any major deviations; it was constantly moving west. Just slower than usual, that's all.

infinitesimally incrementally

Jim

Do people really think that mail and package delivery goes directly from one location to another by the shortest route? You might as well think that the mail person you hand your package to gets into a truck and drives it straight there. Nothing of the sort happens. Your shipment is one of millions of other shipments. Weird shipment maps, with packages going far out of their way, are totally normal and a good thing in the shipping business. Shippers don't have a huge number of shipment or sorting locations. They have only a few. So your package gets shipped to one of those centers first. That location may be hundreds of miles off the straight line route you think it's taking. Then it gets sorted and rerouted to another shipping center, eventually arriving at your home or business. Mail is in shipment 24 hours a day. While you're sleeping, your package to Boise is going to Kansas City first.

Packages and other mail are not like people traveling on passenger trains. People expect to go as directly as possible to their destinations. Packages have no awareness of where they're going, so shipping companies take them to the most efficient location where they can be scanned and rerouted to their destination. It's not at all unusual for a package from Miami to Tallahassee to go to someplace like Kansas City first. And why should anyone care if it does? A person traveling that far out of the way would find it bizarre, but a package goes more efficiently by that route. Mail from Los Angeles to San Francisco may go to a sorting center in Las Vegas first. Packages from New York City to Chicago may all go to Atlanta to be sorted. This is the way shipping had been done for over a hundred years now. In the stamp collecting hobby, I'm sure most people know this.

No, people don't think what you are suggesting. The hubs/sorting centers a parcel routes through are typically REGIONAL, not all the way on the other side of the country. I send and receive anywhere from 30-50 parcels a month, so I'm quite familiar with the hops that parcels make en route to their destination. What we are seeing right now with package routing is radically different from the norm.