I mean they must be somewhere. What does “lost” mean? That they have lost track of its whereabouts? That it has been stolen? Or it just fell through the cracks and landed in an alternate universe?
Ripped off labels is one way. I have twice gotten a nice manila envelope containing a shipping label attached to a torn piece of cardboard, that had my name and address, with a letter saying they had no idea where the hell the rest of what it was attached to was.
Unfortunately, both times I had absolutely no idea what had been sent, as I hadn’t ordered anything, and nobody I asked had sent me a package either. So I had no possible follow up.
I like to imagine there is a football phone, or some other similar crap, in a Raiders of the Lost Ark Warehouse of undeliverable shit.
I had a box of Amazon books lost at my local post office. Tracking said the box was at the PO. Don’t know what happened but amazon replaced them for free. Not lost but I had a roll of film crushed by the PO so it could not be developed. (And right around the same time a film lab lost my film before they developed it. )
The label could get detached, torn, smeared, or otherwise become illegible (as wolfman said).
It could have fallen underneath a truck and gotten run over.
It could have fallen from a delivery vehicle on the street and got picked up by somebody.
It could have been delivered to the wrong address.
It could have been delivered to the right address and been stolen.
It could be in the bottom of a sack or cart that is now in storage with other supposedly empty sacks and carts.
It could have gotten caught in a conveyor belt and gotten ripped apart.
It could have fallen from a conveyor belt and be underneath some machinery.
It could have fallen from a cart and be in an elevator shaft.
It could have been missorted and be on a boat on the way to Tibet.
It could be in a US or foreign customs facility.
It could have been in a trailer that was destroyed in a truck or train accident.
It could have been set on fire when the package next to it containing lithium batteries exploded.
Use your imagination. Probably anything you could think of has happened to a package at least once.
do they still have a dead letter office? Airlines have place in Alabama for luggage that is lost, you can go there and buy it after it is unclaimed for a certain amount of time.
OP here. This was a small amazonian package. It was them that reported to me that it was lost and gave me a refund. I saw written that there was an option to resend another item of the same. In chat, amazon chat person said no, not an option, only option was a refund, and I could always buy the item again. Clicked on buy same item and saw the price had gone up.
Once, many many years ago, before Amazon was a gleam in Bezo’s eye. I ordered 10 books and agreed to buy so many within the next year. 6 months later I got an invoice for the shipping on my “free” books.
I called the customer service number and explained that, I had ordered them so long ago, but never received them. I then proceeded to cancel my order.
almost 6 months after that I got a box, in good shape, label was intact, with my 10 books inside. No excuse, no note, mo explanation.
No, I didn’t contact them or return the books.
The USPS works in mysterious ways.
Well, you have to admit that pi is an untidy number. (Going Postal reference.)
Just last week my daughter received a package in the mail that had her address label on one side and someone else’s on the reverse. She opened it and the contents were for the other person. Seemingly her label had been transferred from her package to the other while they were next to each other. Whether this happened at the shipper or somewhere in the USPS processing, that one incident resulted in 2 people not receiving what they ordered.
Indeed they do!
Get Gephardt investigates secretive facility where USPS sends and sells your lost mail
USPS buildings sort mail according to a scheme. Sometimes different versions of schemes are out on the floor at the same time, and that can result in mail being stuck in an eddy (think river currents), and that mail goes around and around and around, never escaping that eddy until the sort schemes are synchronized. I’ve seen it, I’ve been inside a massive USPS, the “Oakland Main” in Oakland CA.
I’m currently keeping an eye on a package that is taking a really long time just to get across town. Took 3 days just to go from one area center to a different one and so far yet another day+ in transit to get the next one which is probably the local dist. center and not my actual post office. So figure another couple days to get to there and then ??? to get to me.
Since other stuff is still getting here in reasonable time, I’m concerned there’s something wrong with the package and/or label. It’s electronics so I’m worried.
Of no great relevance to the original post, but interesting nonetheless…For 20+ years my brother and I operated a freight forwarding business. The cargo we handled was, in some respects, not ideal from the perspective of a carrier. Originating from trade shows there were all types of packaging, sizes, etc and frequently not packed properly. We would cringe when we were tended small flat pieces, such as would be used to ship graphics. These pieces, more than any other, were lost. I guess it was just too easy for them to get sidetracked.
Years ago my sister sent me a package around the end of October. It never arrived, and we submitted a lost package form to the Post Office. The following April, I received a package that contained the original package from my sister, along with a note saying that it had been found in the bottom of a supposedly empty mailbag in a warehouse.
In my experience of shipping tens of thousands of packages a year the biggest cause of lost packages between terminals is trailer fires on the highway. At the end point it’s being left at the wrong address- about half of those are sorted out by a Good Samaritan who walks or even drives the package over to the correct recipient. Theft from a porch is getting less common. I suspect that’s due to people keeping less regular work hours (meaning there is less certainty there is no one in the house) and those doorbell cameras. I have also heard a case (when I was shipping in Washington state) where a new driver got so far behind frustrated that he just dumped his undelivered packages in the woods.
Years ago, I purchased a digital camera online. This was back in the day when digital cameras were really expensive. Then it was delayed in shipping and I wasn’t going to get it before my vacation, so I bought another one.
When the original came I boxed it up for return. I took it to the Post Office and insured it for $500 (the value of the camera, rounded down) then sent it back.
The seller never got the return. I filed the claim with the Post Office- I had to provide proof of the value of the item and a letter from the seller confirming they had never received it. I got a check for $500 + the original cost of the postage and insurance.
While I don’t know for sure what happened, I’ve got a good guess. The camera was small and, I don’t think the box was bigger than 2 or 3 inches in any dimension. I think some postal employee saw a really small box insured for $500 and decided to take it. Now I always ship small items in a somewhat oversized box.
This anecdote is 50 years old, so I suspect procedures might have changed just a bit. Anyway…
I was part of a group that got hired during college to work summers as letter carriers. We spent a couple of days first inside the central facility sorting mail to learn what we were going to face.
This was Rochester, NY, the home of Kodak. Back in the day, you couldn’t do slides at the corner drugstore. They were sent in to Kodak for processing and mailed out. Mountains of tiny boxes, the width of two adjacent slides and a half-inch high, appeared at the post office. A number of workers lined up facing a semicircle of huge sacks, each labeled with the name of a state or several. We joined them. We got handed a bunch of boxes and told to start. We flung a box in the general vicinity of a open sack’s mouth. Usually they fell in. Sometimes they fell into the one next to it. Nothing stopped because of a mistake. The sacks got full and were taken to a truck to haul to the appropriate state, where I assume that the errant boxes would be culled out and placed in another bag and shipped again. The final correct delivery percentage must have been high or else Kodak would have screamed at the local Postmaster and gotten better results. Still, even 0.1% of a few million is a big number.
This casual approach was endemic, part of the reason the Post Office became the Postal Service a few years later and invested heavily into automatic sorting machines. When I started substituting for carriers taking a day off I quickly learned that there was no way for me to easily check what names belonged at what address. Mail with the old address went to people who had moved. The regular carrier learned which to place aside. Nobody told me. Everything addressed to an address went to that address when I carried it into the field. Did all the recipients give the unwanted mail back? Knowing people as a group, obviously not.
The route that contains your home is still sorted by hand. I can tell when a sub is on because we’ll start getting mail for my dead in-laws. As long as humans are involved you don’t need to assume theft as your first answer. Theft will be on the list, certainly, but accidents are much higher.
Sometimes it is employee carelessness. I had to mail a bank check to my brother and decided to register it. It goes slower but it goes under lock and key on every leg of its journey with full documentation.
It was supposed to take 5 days max to get to him. After 7 days we got antsy. Using the USPS.com tracking feature it appeared to have vanished going from the main post office to his local branch. At first both sides tried to wash their hands of responsibility. My brother pressed them; it was found in the local office, and it was admitted that it was sitting on the desk of the person supposed to be in charge of those types of “tracked” letters,
unprocessed because the schmuck had gone on vacation. I’m sure the postal workers’ union protected his ass and his job but if anyone was a candidate for firing, it was that nitwit.
So lost can mean “just sitting there, ignored”.
Let me understand. You’re saying a person should be fired for not promptly delivering a letter that arrived while he was on vacation?
I would think it was the facility manager who would be responsible to make sure there was someone covering that worker’s duties while he was on vacation.