I had a similar situation this month with an
ebay order (a vintage magazine). It was shipped as Media Mail, from Connecticut, and it never seemed to leave that state. The tracking just said "USPS in Possession of Item" for two weeks...
It's not a big deal financially, since it cost less than $10, and I got a refund. It's a bummer that I don't get to have the item though.
Normally, USPS tracking is pretty good, seems comparable to the major private carriers. It's rare that it skips lots of steps. They did fail to meet their service promise on another package this month though, a Priority Mail package from Tucson to San Francisco. It took a week, when it should've been two days tops. Shipping that slow between adjacent states should be a lot cheaper than Priority, maybe the old "Parcel Post".
The bigger problem we have is wrong deliveries or mis-delivery. It's related to tracking in that they'll scan it as Delivered when it was not delivered, at least not to us. When I put in a case for missing packages that they scanned as Delivered, I ran into some profound stupidity and institutional apathy. The guy said "Well, it was scanned as delivered, and the GPS confirms it."
The problem there is that it's a
cluster mailbox. The GPS is only telling them that their carrier was in the vicinity of a cluster mailbox. It doesn't confirm anything about where they put the package – which mailbox, for example. They had put it in the wrong box, which they do a lot. It's such an obvious thing – that given a cluster mailbox, a package scanned as Delivered and which the recipients are reporting they never received could easily have been put in the wrong box. I was amazed that he didn't account for that, that it wasn't a well understood phenomenon at this point in history. Also, given that clusters use
locking mailboxes, the fact that it wasn't in our box was decisive. It was definitely not delivered
to us, since it wasn't in our locked mailbox, and no one had broken into said mailbox. It's a logically different scenario, with different implications, than a missing package that was left on a porch.
I think it's important to keep in mind that the USPS is a coercive monopoly with captive customers (regarding
letter mail, which no one else is allowed to offer – they leverage that monopoly and its saturated pre-existing routes to offer lower rates on package delivery and express services than the private carriers can offer). It's also an extremely
large coercive monopoly, possibly the largest in the world (certainly the largest coercive monopoly mail carrier). Those facts have sturdy implications for their efficiency and quality, and the sense of entitlement and apathy you often see in their employees-for-life. It's actually impressive sometimes when they offer something innovative like Informed Delivery. They've got pockets of innovation, though it's not consistent over time. Humans don't know how to make a coercive monopoly a high-performance organization, or even simply as efficient as a private sector non-monopoly counterpart over the long term. We've never seen such a thing, and there's no science or framework for achieving it. As long as they're a coercive monopoly, they'll act like one.
Posted 12/27/2021 5:59 pm
...not a happy camper.
