Back in early November, I ordered seven books from Quality Paperback Book Club (actually, they go by just QPB now, as quite a few of their titles are hardcover). Since it was a “free shipping” promotion and also getting close to Christmas, I expected a delay of some sort. Two months later, I checked the website to see what the status was, and it said that the books had been shipped - in mid-November. It turns out that QPB used a third-party delivery service of some sort; apparently, they delivered it to my local post office, which was supposed to finish the delivery.
I went to the post office to see if they had it in the back somewhere; they couldn’t find it, but they did come up with a tracking report, which said that they had tried to deliver it (or at least it “was on the truck for delivery”) in mid-November, but it wasn’t delivered for an unexplained reason, and a few weeks later, they tried to send it back.
I contacted QPB to see if the package had been sent back; their customer service types had no idea what I was talking about, and would just say that the package had been delivered. Assuming that it had gotten lost in the mailing system somewhere (did I ever tell you about the time I had a shipment from Amazon take over a year from delivery to receipt?), I re-ordered the books in mid-March, and they arrived without any problem.
On May 5, I got a note in my mailbox - “We attempted to deliver a package for the second time, but couldn’t” (it doesn’t say why they couldn’t), and that I needed to pick it up. I have no idea where the package has been for the last five months, nor why it suddenly showed up again…and yes, I now have two copies of a few books.