And we wonder what's wrong with USPS LOL


 
LMichaels

LMichaels

TVWBB 1-Star Olympian
Look at this tracking history for something I ordered from a company in California

Delivered

Out for Delivery

Preparing for Delivery

Processing at Destination
Arrived at USPS Regional Destination Facility
PALATINE IL DISTRIBUTION CENTER
March 21, 2024, 6:37 pm

Departed USPS Regional Facility
ELK GROVE VILLAGE IL DISTRIBUTION CENTER
March 21, 2024, 6:30 pm

Arrived at USPS Regional Facility
ELK GROVE VILLAGE IL DISTRIBUTION CENTER
March 21, 2024, 6:26 pm
Departed USPS Regional Facility
CAROL STREAM IL DISTRIBUTION CENTER
March 21, 2024, 5:32 pm
Arrived at USPS Regional Facility
CAROL STREAM IL DISTRIBUTION CENTER
March 21, 2024, 5:26 pm
Departed USPS Facility
WHEELING, IL 60090
March 21, 2024, 4:35 pm
Arrived at USPS Facility
WHEELING, IL 60090
March 21, 2024, 3:36 pm
Departed USPS Regional Facility
PALATINE IL DISTRIBUTION CENTER
March 21, 2024, 3:11 pm
Arrived at USPS Regional Facility
PALATINE IL DISTRIBUTION CENTER
March 21, 2024, 2:01 pm
Departed USPS Regional Facility
CHICAGO IL LOGISTICS CENTER
March 21, 2024, 1:09 pm
Arrived at USPS Regional Facility
CHICAGO IL LOGISTICS CENTER
March 21, 2024, 11:44 am
In Transit to Next Facility
March 20, 2024
Departed USPS Regional Facility
CITY OF INDUSTRY CA DISTRIBUTION CENTER
March 19, 2024, 12:26 pm
Arrived at USPS Regional Origin Facility
CITY OF INDUSTRY CA DISTRIBUTION CENTER
March 19, 2024, 12:25 am
Accepted at USPS Origin Facility
WALNUT, CA 91789
March 18, 2024, 11:10 pm
Departed Shipping Partner Facility, USPS Awaiting Item
WALNUT, CA 91789
March 18, 2024, 11:40 am
Shipping Partner: WINIT
 
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I had one like that recently. I think they were playing pass with it across the original facility before putting it in a truck.
 
I got a brain teaser for ya. This is a tricky one.

We shipped a Valentines package to my daughter in SF via USPS First Class Mail. It was shipped on Feb 9, from Brookeville, MD. It was estimated to arrive at my daughter's apartment building address between Feb 12th and Feb 15th. We figured there was a 75% chance it would arrive by Valentines Day.

Got me so far?

So on Feb 14th at 6 PM, I checked tracking. USPS tracking showed it had arrived at a USPS facility at 10:50 PM on Feb 14th. This would be local time.

Q: Given the above information, where was the package?

Hint: Starts with a "G."
 
I've got that USPS Informed Delivery email notification where USPS sends
an email with scanned images of the mail that's supposed to be delivered later that same day. I'm sure others here have it too.
Some of the scanned items get delivered that day, some the next. Some...well who knows? Some we never see. We have 4-5 different mail people since August...some where a USPS uniform of some sort. Some look like the barista from the coffee shop in town or the cashiers at Whole Foods. It's become a crap shoot at best.
 
Bob Bailey said:
Only 3 days? That's stellar for the USPS :)
Click to expand...
Well , it's not "here" yet, however now it shows "Out for Delivery". My point in this was to highlight how inefficient they are. Yeah, I get it that it arrived in Chicago but look at how many stations they had to pass it through! SMH
 
Wife had a kidney med mailed from Colton, CA. Five days after that it left San Bernardino and arrived in Las Vegas 2 hours later! Can't drive there in less than 3. Sent to local post office for delivery. Rescanned and sent to Pittsburgh, PA! Four days later sent to Las Vegas. Delivered in a total of 15 days. Before it arrived pharmacy sent a replacement using priority and it came in 2 days. Go figure the USPS.
 
Dan Leighton said:
Wife had a kidney med mailed from Colton, CA. Five days after that it left San Bernardino and arrived in Las Vegas 2 hours later! Can't drive there in less than 3. Sent to local post office for delivery. Rescanned and sent to Pittsburgh, PA! Four days later sent to Las Vegas. Delivered in a total of 15 days. Before it arrived pharmacy sent a replacement using priority and it came in 2 days. Go figure the USPS.
Click to expand...
Just something to think about with mail order drugs and pharmacies. All medications have a storage temperature range listed on the label. If the heat or air conditioning goes out in a pharmacy or warehouse, the drugs need to be moved to a properly conditioned area or destroyed. Yet, we can mail our Rxs and have them sit in unconditioned buildings or vehicles for days or more.
 
I checked the notification at 6 PM ET and it said it had already arrived at a USPS location at 10:50 PM local time. I'm in Maryland so it couldn't be Georgia or Gaithersburg. :)
 
LMichaels said:
My point in this was to highlight how inefficient they are.
Click to expand...
I think that's hard for any of us to judge. Given the complexity of their business with over 31,000 local post offices and over 233,000 postal routes served, I'm sure they have some pretty smart analytics people whose only job is to optimize the movement of packages. Yours appears to have moved through 7 locations between California and Illinois. Too many, I don't know. The number of entries are doubled, showing an "In" date/time and an "Out" date/time for each location.

What does sometimes confuse me is when a package passes through one location, e.g. Palatine, then through three other locations and then indicates "Palatine" again. I'm not always sure if that's real or a tracking glitch.

Another oddity is that with the handoff of packages from UPS and other carriers to USPS for the "last mile" delivery to my home, sometimes the vendor's tracking never really works, showing my package having gone into the system and no update at all until it is scanned and delivered by USPS at my mail box!

I've had my share of odd USPS experiences, but most of the time service is as promised, and when handling almost 24 million packages each day, even a tiny, tiny percentage of handling errors results in a pretty big number.

In the end, I hope you got your package!
 
I did. Amazingly enough. I think what's frustrating is all these "handoffs" delays the shipping, is very inefficient and wasteful of resources like manpower, fuel and so on. I've looked at this tracking things sent to people literally a block away. We have a post office right in town. The carrier comes picks up from our RR Box. Item goes into our local PO. From there it goes 60 miles away to Palatine IL. Then many times into Chicago, then maybe back out here to the main PO in Rockford IL, then BACK to the local PO and finally to the house intended. Just all seems so wasteful. It was not like that until things were "reorganized". Used to go to the 61016 PO, than out to the intended address
But, yep surprisingly enough I got my new 51mm espresso tamper and it's great!
 
I just received a wine shipment by ups and they charged me $10 to reschedule it for a day when I was going to be home.
Junk fees....
 
IDK about "junk". If they have to juggle a schedule especially for something like wine it could be understandable. As IDK about MA but here in Illinausea liquor laws are a little on the draconian side and delivery of such is more carefully controlled than delivery of live ammunition. Go figure that one.
 
<scratches head> I'll be the last one to argue that the above routing makes no sense. However.....

Package delivery, whether USPS, FedEx, UPS, carrier pigeon, land tortoise, etc., can all be considered in terms of meshed networks, directed graphs, and that sort of thing. There's a consideration for a source and a destination as well as an optimally short sequence of segments between. As you approach a fully meshed network, the number of segments where there won't be any package travel increases, and those segments have a minimum cost associated with them, whether or not they're even used. There's a reason that at least initially all FedEx packages went to their master hub in Memphis, got sorted out and flown back out under the cover of darkness every night, just to reduce the number of unused edges.

This kind of problem in a fully defined network is bad enough if you have well defined package requirements. Add in the rather random nature of submissions, and this becomes a serious brain game. Optimally solving a nightly problem of this nature very well could take days or weeks with the state of the art information technology. As a result, this comes back to an 80-90% "good enough" solution that works for the majority of deliveries, knowing that some are just going to go awry. It took me a long time to understand that in business, you really can get 80% of your solution with about 20% effort & resources, and that sometimes, improving the solution just is not cost effective.

And all of the above assumes that everything works. No scanners go down, no labels get damaged, no conveyances have maintenance issues..... and heaven forbid, bugs in the network solves. In some respects, it's rather surprising that it works as well as it does, let alone at all.
 
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