Do post offices still have a separate slot for local mail? If they still do, I’ll bet it ends up in the same tub as the rest of the mail these days.
I recall back around college age I walked into the post office where I’d just moved to. Which had a wall with a set of slots each labeled something like international, local, heavy, and all other. Being a curious sort I ogled through the slots to see what I could see backstage. Which was one big wheeled tub beneath all the slots.
Clearly at some time in the past those slots dumped into different smaller containers. Otherwise why go to the expense to make the slots & signs? But at least as of 1980ish, that was no longer the case.
We have somebody here who retired from a career at the USPS where they were a mechanic working on the sorting machines. Which are huge complicated things not found at local POs serving a single zip code. It’s probably more efficient (read “less touch labor”) to truck mail across town in bulk tubs to sort it mechanically then truck it back if needed than it is to pay somebody at each local PO to handle & eyeball each piece of deposited mail to see which ones could be diverted for delivery right from this PO.
For those who don’t know, and actually do care, here’s what the process looks like at the FedEx Memphis Hub (1m48s YouTube video).
This is quite likely more advanced, faster, and more efficient than what the USPS has and does, but the fundamental concepts are quite likely very similar.
And in the case of FedEx and the other common carriers, they quite often do fly something half-way across the country only to fly it all the way back for a delivery destination that’s only a short distance from the origin.
But with multiple sort facilities (see section heading titled ‘Sorting facilities’), those distances tend to decrease.
The answer is simple: it’s cheaper. How? The cost to decrease the sorting error rate is more than the cost of shipping it to the wrong intermediate stage. For a fictitious example, improving the sorting error from 0.1% to 0.01% might require a multi-million dollar machine and ongoing training and labor costs to keep it running at the needed high reliability, while the marginal additional cost for shipping is only 0.09%.
ISTM most of the cost of shipping is in the “first mile” and “last mile”. IOW, from the shipper’s home or warehouse to the first courier facility and from the last courier facility to the customer’s home, office, or …
Stuff rattling around inside the courier’s extended network has very little marginal cost until the misdirected cargo gets to be an appreciable fraction of the total network workload.
Might explain why I have a package en route that started in Texas and is bound for California, but is currently in Florida. I did not order this from Amazon (got a better price elsewhere), but it’s traveling via Amazon Shipping.
It’s getting harder to avoid Amazon, isn’t it?
not to hijack, but recent changes from USPS says postmarks will now be done at sort center, not where you mailed it
I’ve got a package coming, and it seems to be taking a straightforward route:
-
Santa Fe Springs CA to Lathrop CA;
-
Lathrop CA to Delta BC;
-
Delta BC to Winnipeg MB;
-
expected delivery tomorrow.
I assume it got flown from California to BC; cleared customs at Delta; got flown to Winnipeg; arrives by truck tomorrow.
The nearest international airport to Lathrop is 70 miles away in Sacramento. Are you sure it didn’t travel by truck or rail?
Dunno. I just know about LA and California. 
Not too off-topic, I hope…
Have you ever noticed how the package progress notifications are so poor and useless? Yet this is a service that is touted to be useful.
Example: Telling me that my package has now been picked up, but not specifying where isn’t that useful. There are warehouses all around the country (and the world), and knowing where the source is could provide a clue as to its expected progress, but that isn’t supplied.
All good things come through Atlanta.
Yeah. Many are pretty useless. Some aren’t.
My personal fave (not!) is one that USPS uses. “Your parcel is moving through the system” occurs a couple times between them reporting they picked it up in City A and it’s now at the regional distribution center near me in City B. I suppose their thinking is they’re reassuring me it hasn’t stagnated someplace. But they know where they captured that “moving through” data point. Why not share?
Based on my experiences, I’m pretty sure it’s not a data point, and that it’s generated automatically after a certain period (24 hours?) with no info. I recently had a package where that update (“in transit, arriving on time”) posted at exactly midnight on two occasions, and then the next update revealed that it had been sitting at the sorting center during the second “in transit” update.
Aaah. The false reassurance. Nothing has gone wrong. Gone wrong. Gone wrong. Gone wrong. …
Bastards.
Back when Delta had a stranglehold on Atlanta and Hub and Spoke was the flavor of the day; the old joke in the southeast was; whether going to heaven or hell, you still had to pass through Atlanta.
Perhaps the package is in a container sent to the regional distribution center, so there are no intermediate scans between City A and City B?
My impression is that when the loaders are in a hurry (like when an incoming truck is late and the outgoing needs to hit the road) they forego the scanning.
Agree it’s likely a sign that my individual parcel is inside a big truck / container they aren’t going to rummage through to scan each item inside.
But if they know where the truck is at any given timestamp they could include that data in the package status message. Aftera ll, they’re the ones who decide when to send it and what it says.
And if they don’t know where the truck is, they’re just assuming it’s merrily going down the highway somewhere in the e.g. Central timezone, then the message is somewhere between a lie and a best-case assumption.