USPS mistake?

[Hillbilly77]

I've had the USPS misplace a couple things on me over the years.

Most recently they misplaced an NRA decal that I sent to a member here. After a couple weeks he PMed me and said it never showed up so I sent him a new one. A week or two after that the original one showed up close to a month after the postmarked date.


Just this morning I mailed a Postal MO for a gun purchase.
I spent the extra 3 bucks for certified mail tracking. I didn't want to take any chances.

 

[GaryS]

I put most purchases on my credit card. One reason is the airline points that add up and allow us to fly to visit the kids and grandkids.

Another is it's easier to track purchases and handled refunds. Plus writing checks at stores is a PITA.

All of that being said, the USPS has to handle a lot of junque that UPS and FedEx don't have to handle. Still, the vast majority of it gets through.

I ship and receive items though the USPS and rarely have a problem. OTOH, more than once Amazon items shipped via UPS (in particular) have just disappeared in transit. Especially small envelope sized packages. Once they fall out of the UPS tracking system they are unretrievable unless and until someone physically picks it up from where ever it fell and scans it back into the system.

We pay virtually ALL bills on a credit card,, then pay the credit card on-line with a paperless check.

My wife has always handled paying the bills,, it used to take over an hour,,
and that was with me helping her,,,
now, it takes a few minutes a month.

My wife comments how happy she is with the on-line system EACH month,,,

 

[vytoland]

the USPS is operated by humans.....humans are NOT perfect.....

 

[H Richard]

I have gone to nearly all electronic payments via a on-line program through my bank. The only occasional question is a small creditor I pay that isn't on electronic receipt of payment, and the bank service must cut an check and mail it. With that one bill I usually mail my own check. What I really like is the "scheduling" of my payments. I can set the payment to be electronically delivered on a certain day, just a couple days before it's due. No need for them to have use of my money any sooner.

 

[coltle6920]

Doesn't seem like we had these problems when the mailman delivered right to your house.

Cluster mailboxes have been the norm for 30yrs plus.They seem to be the cause of many of our woes.I've had issues since day one.The only thing I share with another resident is the house number.Otherwise the street and last name isn't even close.We've become friends over the years and even manage to laugh about it every time one of us shows up on the others doorstep.

 

[Watchdog]

Not bashing the USPS, but listen to this story:

What's the point of your story?

 

[BearBio]

Better than the $800K UPS Lost!

They offered to refund the $32 for shipping!

 

[Rastoff]

I do believe, for the volume of mail the USPS handles they do a good job 98% of the time.

I understand what you're getting at, but I sincerely hope you're wrong with that number.

According to the USPS site, they process about 506.4 million letters and packages every day. If they only get it right 98% of the time, that means they lose/mishandle over 10 million packages or letters every day! I think they're better than that.

 

[johngalt]

I understand what you're getting at, but I sincerely hope you're wrong with that number.

According to the USPS site, they process about 506.4 million letters and packages every day. If they only get it right 98% of the time, that means they lose/mishandle over 10 million packages or letters every day! I think they're better than that.

I have no idea what the actual statistics are, but think about what goes into sorting the mail. Their computers have to be able to recognize hand written addresses and zip codes, and some people have very sloppy handwriting. Plus they have to be able to handle lots of various sizes and shapes of letters and packages. The addresses could be written anyplace on them. It is not a simple problem.

 

[LostintheOzone]

They will hold for a maximum of 30 days. That is stated quite clearly on the yellow hold card. I personally have gone over the 30 days and they have kept it anyway, but they don't have to.

I know.

We were in AZ the first winter we spent on the road. Originally they were forwarding our mail to different locations. That didn't work because of their inability to stop and start a new location within a reasonable time, like 10 days. So our mail was trailing us and each place we moved the delay became longer. So my wife called our local PO and ask them if they would just hold our mail if we forwarded it to them. The PO said they would hold it for 6 weeks.

Long story short we did the forward back to our local PO and they didn't hold any of it. Just returned it to the sender. When I started getting calls from the senders I knew something was up. We got home and I went to collect our mail and 6 weeks worth of mail was returned to the sender. They got our mail because it was forwarded to them but for some reason they thought we no longer existed even tho they had the card sent by my wife to forward.

Like I said, don't trust them to hold your mail. You're better off forwarding to someone you trust to hold it or just get someone to pick it up for you at your box. I paid the neighbor to do it last time and didn't loose a single piece of mail.

We pay all of our bills online now so the PO can't cause us any serious problem except tax documents. It's 99% junk. I only collect it a few times a week.

 

[jrclen]

I retired from the Postal Service where I worked in the maintenance department. Most sorting is now done on high speed machines. Letters literally fly through these mechanical, computer controlled, belt and roller fed wonders. Everything is humming along great until the letter comes through into which someone has dropped one of those hard candy hearts at Valentines day. That hard chunk of candy runs between the hard rubber rollers and suddenly all hell breaks loose. The candy stops the rollers and the ten or twenty letters behind it are shredded beyond all recognition.

The machines mostly use bar codes for sorting. One machine will actually read the address and then spray on the bar code. Occasionally the bar code will be wrong or smudged. That letter can become "loop mail." Loop mail is when a letter from the machine in San Diego is sent to Milwaukee. The machine in Milwaukee sees the mistake and sends the letter back to San Diego. And yep, the machine in San Diego sends it back to Milwaukee. And around and around it goes. To fix that, the machines now spray a second bar code on which hopefully will cause the next machine it runs through to spit out the letter for a human to see.

Another one I saw when I started out as a mail man years ago was drunks or kids dropping a half can of beer or soda into the blue mail box on the corner. The letters are soaked of course and those addressed with a water soluble sharpy or some such thing are no longer addressed, they just have a black or blue blob of ink smeared where the address used to be.

And then there are the employees who hate their jobs, hate the company, and hate their bosses who play drop kick with the parcels marked fragile. Just because.

Much miss delivered mail is caused by the carrier throwing the handful of mail the machine has presorted wrong, into the box without looking at each piece as they are supposed to do. Yes, I'm guilty as charged.

I'm not defending the USPS because they occasionally screw up my mail too. But sometimes there are interesting reasons for the screw ups.

 

[sousana]

Routine for me to get mail addressed to neighbors. One time I even had UPS deliver a package to my home, and the darn thing was addressed to a gunshop on main street of my city.

 

[LostintheOzone]

Routine for me to get mail addressed to neighbors. One time I even had UPS deliver a package to my home, and the darn thing was addressed to a gunshop on main street of my city.

What was in it.

 

[ChattanoogaPhil]

For a government protected monopoly and tax exempt operation, USPS has figured out how to deliver letters pretty well, at least from my personal experience. Packages... not so much... particularly when handed off from UPS and FedEx. They seem to do better on Sunday deliveries with Amazon packages.

USPS should be less and less part of the package equation as UPS and FedEx improve package density for home delivery and won't need USPS as much. Amazon building their own transportation system will be the third shoe to drop on USPS. The future of USPS will be in the hands of junk mailers.

 

[Onomea]

We have pretty good luck with USPS. And I find the employees in the post office and the delivery people efficient and friendly, at least in Hawaii and Oregon, where I have dealt with them in recent years.

For those who travel for extended periods, there are commercial mail drop/forwarding services. The one I use has various options which determine price. I think I am paying $12 a month. When away from my US place, like now, I have my mail forwarded there. When it arrives, they scan the envelope and send me an email to check out the scan. I can then have it shredded, forwarded someplace else, or scanned to read before deciding what to do with it.

The USPS will forward your mail to an address you designate for up to six months. You can renew once, so this works for up to a year at a time.

 

[cmort666]

In the space of a month this year I had two packages that either were failed to be delivered on time, or AT ALL. In both cases, the carrier LIED about the circumstances. In the first instance, the excuse was not only a lie, it was PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE. In that example, the USPS failed to respond to my repeated inquiries. Fortunately, having been down that road, Amazon IMMEDIATELY refunded my money.

Whenever possible I try to avoid having things shipped to me USPS.

 

[LostintheOzone]

In the space of a month this year I had two packages that either were failed to be delivered on time, or AT ALL. In both cases, the carrier LIED about the circumstances. In the first instance, the excuse was not only a lie, it was PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE. In that example, the USPS failed to respond to my repeated inquiries. Fortunately, having been down that road, Amazon IMMEDIATELY refunded my money.

Whenever possible I try to avoid having things shipped to me USPS.

I'm finding delivered on the tracking days before I see it.

Sometimes I never see it.

 

[Chubbo]

USPS

I live in the country, and have a USPS specified mail box. Our mail service is rendered by, three or four, different carriers, a different one every day, and their service varies, from one that goes out of her way to give excellent service, to One that always, leaves other's mail in our box. Another always leaves the door of the mail box wide open to the weather. Our mail has not been delivered in the last six months before 6 PM, and as late as 9 PM. In our mid Ohio area it is, pitch black dark, by 6 PM, and I fully expect one of those carriers, stopped dead still, in the dark, sorting the mail, to be killed by the traffic, whose speed, on our narrow two lane road, averages around 65 mph. As to the USPS' efficiency, I just received a knife sold to me by a dealer in Indiana a little over 100 miles, away, that traveled around 1,000 miles, and took 9 days to be delivered. How's that for efficiency? Currently, I am still waiting, after two+ years, to recover two antique loading tool sets, or the cost of them, lost by our efficient USPS. A few years ago I lived in central Florida, in a Airstream travel trailer Condo. Several people living in that condo were expecting Christmas presents of cash in the customary little envelopes mailed by relatives, and friends, in the USPS mail. The cash presents were never received, and, I was personally shown, a water filled ditch, full of opened mail on the road to our condo. I don't know if the people were ever compensated for their loss, Oddly, the lady mail carrier, was never held accountable for this, and continued to deliver the mail. To put it mildly, I am just a little disappointed in USPS' service.

 

[ChattanoogaPhil]

Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night...

[ame]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzcaJDn0ltM[/ame]

 

[cmort666]

I'm finding delivered on the tracking days before I see it.

Sometimes I never see it.

The never delivered package was shown as "delivered" a day early... In a mailbox half the size of the package.

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