I’ve never, for the live of me, seen a more unpredictable service when it comes to international packages.
With the Japan Post EMS you’re 100% sure that once acceptable your package will get to it’s destination within the stipulated time if not even before. with the USPS express mail service, if you send the same type of items to the same address four times, it’s more likely to be delivered on two of those, and on time on one of the two. The other times it gets sent back without any reason and without a refund. Then, depending on who’s at the counter at the accepting post office they’re either helpful or clear a**holes about it.
It’s not just USPS - they all suck at times - too few people and too much shipping. Lubbock is 120 miles from Midland, and is the main distribution hub for UPS. We have had at least a half dozen shipments either “lost” or redirected back to Lubbock and had to get the vendor to reship the product (including Apple - they “lost” a set of earbuds and when Apple shipped a replacement a week later, both the replacement and the original showed up on our doorstep the same day).
The USPS is particularly bad these days. Mail is taking longer than ever to get to its destination. A larger portion than ever before is, simply, getting lost in the system. No one seems to know what to do about it. The methods used to track mail have been abandoned. And, if you go into the local post offices, anyone who had any idea how to handle the system in the past have long since retired or are counting the minutes until they can retire and the new counter help is absolutely clueless.
Name one business, other than United States Postal Service, that can continue to reduce services, perform those services in shoddy manner, miss ALL deadlines, and CONTINUE to raise their prices?
Samsung (I’m looking at the lack of earphone jack and sd card reader)
Fancy wine producers
The boating companies that import all our stuff from china
The stuff we get from china
Our government (not a business)
Disney (Parks)
Anything that has to cover the entire landmass of the continental US is going to be less efficient than comparable service in Europe or small Asian countries. That includes package delivery, rail lines, and telecommunications coverage. We looked at houses in mountains back in CA that had no cell service and the only internet options were satellite or local microwave. That’s in 2019. 30 miles from Silicon Valley.
Complain about the USPS if you want, but right now, we’re in the middle of an ice storm and the only vehicle that has driven by, aside from the snowplow that didn’t accomplish much because it’s ice, has been the mail truck. Amazon has a warning on the top of their page that shipping times are delayed due to weather in our area, but the mail came today.
Yes, the mail truck makes it to my mailbox every day. However, I recently sent a certified RRR from New Jersey to Tyler Texas, not quite around the world and something less than a rural destination. The first letter was declared lost after a month of being unable to determine if it had been delivered. A replacement letter is currently unaccounted for even though it was mailed on January 18th. Only a couple of years ago, you could track certified mail in real time. What happened to that? It seems to me that the post office has actually degraded its systems which had worked perfectly only a couple of years ago.
Why not send with a different service if USPS lost the first one? Doesn’t either FedEx or UPS offer comparable tracked services? Or is it a legal thing that requires USPS? I’ve not had to use certified mail often, but the few things I have to send that way show up fine, but they just go across town.
For me the thing that fails the most often is whatever shipping Amazon chooses when I’m ordering something I really want, especially if it was available as a next-day delivery, but I feel like that’s probably due to Murphey’s law.
Interesting. My own luck with USPS over the last couple of years has been dramatically better than FedEx, who used to be the best but in the last two years have lost 4 or 5 of my packages (two lost just since December), utterly destroyed one and left it on the porch without noting that the box had been totally crushed and had huge holes on multiple sides, and been so systematically late that I basically cannot believe them when they say something is out for delivery because they as often as not then make no actual attempt to deliver it.
Funny. That’s UPS with me. I have 2 claims open, 1 going to Canada from Sept of last year, and one going to Vegas since December of last year. Claim still unpaid.
