An order of mine from Amazon started in KY and went to Boston area, I am in NC.
I assume it was put on the wrong truck or maybe the barcode was read wrong. BTW, Fedex is handling this for the PO. It goes via FedEx until it hits my local PO.
that’s logistics
Sure you didn’t get the wrong tracking? Also is this a) sent by Amazon b) fulfilled by Amazon for someone else or c) third party seller?
It’ll probably clear itself up but an email can’t hurt.
sent by Amazon and sold by them.
I’m not worried, just curious. It’s in WV now so I guess they fixed the problem.
Dunno about state. I know it sometimes goes to a different country.
I had an order from Barnes and Noble leave their warehouse in New Jersey enroute to the Cayman Islands. It took 4 months and was first sent to France.
The capital of Cayman is George Town, a name that is relatively common in the Caribbean basin. Sometimes mail bound for GT in Cayman goes by way of the capital of Guyana - Georgetown. Or occasionally via George Town, The Bahamas or Georgetown, St Vincent and the Grenadines.
It arrived at my local PO today so the detour only delayed it by a few days.
Not sure if this is related, but for business purposes I have a post office box that I get the wrong mail in about 3-4 times a year. And the address on the parcels will be wayyyy off from mine.
Peter Beitz
PO Box 1234
East Bend, WI. 56789
And I’ll get a letter addressed to:
Ralph Bingham
44 Maple Way
Salem, Oregon 97304
If this happened ONCE I’d be freaked. But it happens every couple of months.
HTF did it get to West Bend, and YTF did the East Bend post office put it in my box?
It used to happen a lot more often before zip code machine-readers.
I worked as a summer temp at the Post Office summers during college, back in the 60s. Since this was Rochester, home of Kodak, lots and lots of mail was in the form of photos being returned to customers after processing. Slides were sent in small packages about half the size of a cigarette pack.
The process - and I am not kidding, though this sounds like something from a movie satire - was that a half dozen or so of us temps would be lined up before a giant half circle of large mailbags, each labeled with a state or set of zip codes. You picked up a slide pack and tossed - literally tossed from up to a dozen feet away - the pack into the mailbag. And then again. And again. What if a pack fell into the wrong bag? You picked up the next one and tried harder. Or didn’t.
There are probably still some 60s vacation slides trying to find an address after being shuttled from Vermont to Wyoming.
My mother once sent a postcard from California to Thailand. The Thailand address was clearly indicated in English, capital letters. But, at the bottom of the message part of the card my mother whimsically scribbled a bit in imitation of Thai script. My mother knows no Thai, and in fact the scribbles looked more like Khmer script.
Sure enough, when we got the card there were postal marks indicating it had detoured through Phnom Penh!
I don’t have any numbers, but it is not uncommon. I work for a company that ships a few hundred packages a day. Occasionally we get a call from a local customer whose package did not arrive. When we track it, we only get a scan at the local center. A few days later it shows up in Chicago at that sorting station having apparently been tossed into the wrong truck. They realize its not where it is supposed to be and ship it back.
I can’t find the cite for this, but a few years ago, our local paper reported mail for the Falkland Islands ending up in Falkland (Scotland). Since the introduction of a Falklands Islands postcode, the Royal Mail usually manages to get its mail to the correct hemisphere.
That’s FIQQ 1ZZ to KY15 7BU
Not the same situation as the OP, but still tells you about the USPS.
We have a relative whose street is a state name. Like in 1700 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Sometimes the mail gets routed to that state instead. And then bounced back.
I have even printed the bar code under the address. The USPS helpfully puts a new bar code sticker over it with the wrong state. How a computer printed address can be misread and then the existing bar code overruled is beyond me.
It would seem to me that the bar code should always be obeyed until it gets to the local PO and then the local PO can bounce if it is truly incorrect.
Mail destined for Mexico winds up in North Dakota often enough the my sister-in-“law,” who works for the USPS, was moved to complain about it.
A bar code includes a check digit, so if a single one of the bars is messed up (dirt makes a short bar scan as a tall bar, say), they reject it and put a new bar code on it.
A related question: How often does mail sent from outside the US to the US state of Georgia end up in the country of Georgia? I ponder this every year when I send the annual Christmas card to my friend in suburban Atlanta.
EDIT: His card has never gone astray from what we can tell.