I fully understand that it isn’t practical for FedEx (or whoever) to ship something direct, and might go to a sorting hub even if the package is just going across town.
But sometimes the route makes one go
Appleton, WI to Oshkosh (OK so far)
Oshkosh to Chicago (getting farther, but a hub)
Chicago to St Paul (I’m basically in between these two, but OK a hub in my state)
St Paul to Osseo (hmm)
Then FedEx hands the package to the USPS
Osseo is about 4 miles closer to me than Appleton. Why not hand it to the USPS in Appleton (or Oshkosh, the point it was closest to me)?
Because FedEx SmartPost has to coordinate with the USPS processing hierarchy. They don’t just show up at counter of a post office in Appleton and say “Hi. I’d like to mail this.”
USPS direct entry rates depend on distance, volume, and level of presorting. SmartPost has to make the best call in order to optimize each of these factors. There is probably a bulk mail entry facility in Osseo that serves your town. But the volume of packages going to your town is not sufficient to economically do a direct entry at the carrier facility that serves your home.
While Appleton may be physically closer, if the usual bulk mailstream does not flow from Appleton to your house, the Appleton post office would have to ship it to Osseo first and would charge accordingly.
The usual objective is to inject your package into the mailstream at the facility closest to the delivery point where you can meet a minimum volume requirement.
The FedEx/USPS exchange does appear messed up. I’ve seen a package leave our metro area, go to a town way, way out in the tullies and then come back.
OTOH, Amazon delivers stuff straight to the big USPS sorting facility for the region, goes to our local PO overnight and it’s here that day. (Which also means we get Sunday deliveries from Amazon via USPS. Yay.)
I had one of the big shippers send the box of DVDs I ordered from New Jersey to the Cayman Islands via France. Uh… across the Atlantic and back is cheaper?
Say you are a shipping company and you own two trucks. One truck goes from L.A. to N.Y. The other truck goes from L.A. to Seattle, then to N.Y.
The truck going directly to N.Y. is full. Plenty of room on the truck going to Seattle. So you put additional packages going to N.Y. on the truck going to Seattle - those packages which have paid less for shipping.
You don’t go out and buy/rent an additional truck to go directly to N.Y. just for a few additional packages.
It hasn’t happened in a long time but I remember in the early days of ordering from Amazon (late 90s, early 2000s) I would sometimes watch packages seem to bounce randomly around the country before they finally headed in my direction.
Not directly apropos, but my favorite shipping story was me sending Christmas presents from KC back to my family in Minnesota.
Grabbed a box from the basement, loaded everything in, dropped it off at UPS, about a week before Xmas.
Xmas eve, there is knock on the door, and the UPS man is there with a package (this was back before knock and run was a thing). It’s the box I sent. There was an old label on it from someone (probably Mom) shipping stuff to me that I hadn’t noticed.
So presumably the box went to MN, and then someone there saw the old sticker instead of the new sticker, and sent it back.
The driver helped me tear that sticker off (leaving the new one), and he took the box back for re-redelivery. Sadly, at that point it disappeared into the bowels of UPS, never to be seen again. Upon reflection, maybe the driver didn’t actually take it back to the depot. The lack of reciprocal presents did put me in the dog house for a bit, but everyone got over it.
I once worked min an office in Hiawatha, Kansas,that subscribed to the newspaper from nearby Falls City, Nebraska, about 20 miles away.
The newspaper was mailed, and went on a truck from Falls City to Lincoln, to be sorted. From Lincoln, it went on a truck to another sorting facility in Topeka, Kansas. That truck went through Falls City and Hiawatha, en route to Topeka. Then on another truck, to Hiawatha.
So the paper actually went Falls City to Lincoln to Falls City to Hiawatha to Topeka to Hiawatha. More than 300 miles, and wound up 20 miles from its point of origin. And it arrived in the next day’s mail every day.
I believe I may have started a thread on this. A couple of years ago I ordered a Ushanka from a company in Moscow, I followed its tracking and it was shipped across Russia to Vladivostok, across the Pacific to Seattle, it then went through several places in the US until it reached the east coast (New York I think) before traveling across the Atlantic and into my possession.
I work for a logistics company - one of the outlets we deliver to on behalf of our customers is in the next street - less than a minute on foot. Another outlet for a different customer is almost exactly opposite across the main road.
All of our transport is subcontracted - and it continually boggles my mind that in order to ship packages to these two outlets, we pack them, load them on a truck and they go to a sorting hub in the city (20 miles away), then a distribution hub somewhere more local, then back nearly to the place they started. We could just walk them over there if we chose to.
But it does actually make sense that we don’t - exceptions are a nuisance and they are the things that go wrong.
I live in southern Maryland, about 2 hours from Baltimore. I mailed a package to my sister in Baltimore. USPS sent it from here to there via Charlotte, NC. She should have gotten it in 2 days. It took a week. Fortunately, it wasn’t time-critical.
Yes and no. All it takes for your hypothetical local deliveries is another subsort within the building and that can be the “dead letter” slide. Generally most sort facilities have a station where packages that don’t scan correctly end up. If you have a significant number of deliveries that would support a local driver then that frees up space on planes/trucks and saves money on the fuel used to transport it.
If I had to guess I’d say the op’s package was loaded into a container that got bumped due to overloads.
The exceptional nature is the problem. We’d not only have to set up our own transportation arrangements, but we’d have to develop the proof of delivery mechanisms, returns methods, etc. Exceptions go wrong.
