So when I sent an envelope through USPS’s Priority Mail on Friday, and was told it’d “be delivered” Monday, I was apparently an idiot to think that it meant it would get into the hands of the person I was mailing it to on Monday. Instead, they obviously meant that the envelope would get to the local post office on Monday, and from there, they’d deliver it to him whenever they felt like it.
I have no idea why they’ve been sitting on the envelope for the past two days without any tracking-reported delivery attempts or package slips, but the more days that pass, the closer I’ll be getting to telling my friend to just storm the post office and demand his envelope at Uzi-point… :rolleyes:
Well, first of all they did say “2-3 days” and Sunday doesn’t count in that estimate for Priority Mail (Express only), so technically this is only the 2nd day. (They mean 2-3 working days, which may not be an obvious distinction to most people.) Secondly, the carrier may just suck at scanning and might have actually delivered it.
Hmm, on re-reading your post, I guess it depends on when it got to the person’s post office - though I think they do send out special Priority delivery runs as needed for stuff like that. If you know he hasn’t received it, he should call the office and ask to speak to the delivery supervisor.
I would agree with your very good points, if only I:
a) hadn’t just talked to my friend, who hasn’t gotten squat (granted, this could be due to another problem entirely), and
b) hadn’t been told at the post office specifically that the envelope would “be there on Monday,” thus mostly blowing away the possibility that I somehow misinterpreted the “2 - 3” days thing.
My error was to concentrate on the “days” part of the delivery options; my main mockery is for the apparently different conceptions of what it means for an envelope to “get there by Monday.”
The clerk shouldn’t have said that. Well, either that or he or she should have said “ought to” or “probably will” or something of that nature. (I once had a clerk at a different office go almost nuts when my out-of-uniform letter-carrier husband mentioned it’d be two days for a Priority Mail letter to get to our nearby destination, and repeatedly emphasize that it wasn’t guaranteed. I had to assure her that yes, I understood that.) The only shipping that’s guaranteed is their Express. Priority gets special handling and is absolutely, without question supposed to be delivered the day it arrives at the office - barring anything weird like signature-required extras - but there is no money-back guarantee unlike Express.
The USPS is a joke. I’m sorry to any postal employees out there, but it’s the truth.
I once tried to send a package to Italy. After two weeks, when the recipient still hadn’t gotten it, I looked at the tracking information, which showed that the package had left the airport for Italy two weeks ago, and returned to the same airport a few days ago. I called the post office, waited three days for them to call me back, and finally found out that they had sent the package to FRANCE by mistake, it had been sent all the way BACK to the US, and was only now making its way to Italy.
They also routinely take over a week (five working days) to deliver letters from New York to Boston.
I’ve stopped using them for anything that I even remotely care about.
My husband will admit that sure, there are plenty of fuck-ups in his profession. But I still think that it’s a pretty good deal that one stamp can get your letter next door, or from Florida to the far boonies of Alaska. I got a package to Tripler out in Afghanistan via USPS Global Express in under two weeks, and his return package took about the same time to get to me.
(BTW, USPS no longer uses United Airlines to transport mail by air to other offices, due to unreliability/late delivery. They pay UPS instead!)
Oh, no question about that. It’s when you pay extra to get it there fast, and it doesn’t beat regular mail - that’s when there’s a reason to gripe. I mean, regular first-class mail sent on a Friday is probably going to be at its US destination by the following Wednesday. But Leaper paid extra to move it along faster, and it apparently didn’t get there Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday.
You know what? I am a total fucking idiot. I am a spacecase. When I was posting, I thought it was Monday, even though today I know it’s Thursday. Seriously. I apologize, I totally screwed up in my responses.
Leaper, ignore my commentary other than the factual parts about guaranteed delivery, etc., and the part about calling the delivery supervisor, and have your friend call them today. Someone fucked up bigtime and I’m expecting it’s the carrier. (If not, a clerk might’ve lost it somewhere in the office before it made it to the carrier’s case.) Priority is supposed to get very special handling.
(Did you ever have one of those weeks where you’ve been working through your lunches for weeks and barely take a break (except for right now ), and you’re not looking forward to the weekend coming because that just means your deadlines are coming up faster? And where you’re nearly the only person in your office who didn’t take off Monday because you have stuff to do? Yeah.)
Leaper, did the item you sent via Priority Mail weigh more than 13 ounces? Because using Priority Mail to send anything that could be normally sent via First Class (i.e. anything - including a package - which weighs 13 ounces or less) is a waste of money. The USPS’s dirty little secret is that Priority Mail is just a fancy-ass First Class. It’s good for the bottom line when people send letters and “important mail” via Priority, because you’re paying four bucks for 39 cents worth of service.
If you have something really, really important to send, use Express Mail instead. Much tighter tracking, and needs a sig to deliver.
Don’t worry about it. When you’re having the sort of week where it would be a blessing and a mercy if it were still Monday, your brain will do that sort of stuff to you. Hope next week’s better for you.
I may be wrong, but I don’t think once mail leaves the US that the USPS has any further control over its delivery or disposition. And however long the USPS or France or Italy or whoever took to deliver it, at least they didn’t break it and/or steal it the way UPS does routinely. I truly believe that UPS has a “open up the boxes and take what you like with our compliments” policy for its people.
I won a hockey jersey on an e-bay auction, and it took three weeks to get from California to Georgia. I could have driven out there and picked up the damn thing in less time. And I worried that it was lost the entire time. Even though it was insured, there was no way the jersey could be replaced, especially not at the price I paid for it. (Heeheehee - the jersey auctions here start at $250 - and I got this one for $157 including shipping and insurance!)
On the other hand, I mailed out some books for a paperback swap club I’m a member of. I sent them “media mail” which can take up to three weeks for delivery. Most of them arrived within a week. And media mail is cheaper than first class.
As I understand the mails, the sending country still has to direct the mail to the destination country. That’s why you write the destination country in your own language. Mail addressed from the US to Italy going to France instead would then indeed be the USPS’s problem, since they put it into the France shipment to begin with.
I’ve been talking with an employee at my local post office, who’s been talking to a supervisor at the Tucson post office (where my envelope was last seen, and my recipient’s hometown). The results, according to the local employee:
a) No one seems to know where it is. It IS a large facility, after all.
b) They’re blaming my friend for “not picking up his mail often enough,” and that it might’ve gotten stolen as a result (there’ve been thefts in his area of late, apparently). My friend denies the charge.
c) The scanning they do for delivery confirmation isn’t worth jack. All it tells me is that it got to the Tucson post office. It was never scanned again, so no one seems to know whether it even left the building or not.
d) I’m SOL. I didn’t put insurance on it, because there wasn’t anything very expensive in it, and besides which, it wouldn’t have done me much good anyway; I put a HOMEMADE gift in there, so cost wasn’t the issue.
So now I’m apparently out the money for Priority mail, one calendar, and hours of work making my gift, unless somehow, somewhere in the mail ether, that envelope actually turns up and gets delivered.
), and you’re not looking forward to the weekend coming because that just means your deadlines are coming up faster? And where you’re nearly the only person in your office who didn’t take off Monday because you have stuff to do? Yeah.)