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Old 01-12-2017, 11:01 PM
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benman94 benman94 is offline
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Join Date: Jun 2011
Location: Detroit, MI
Posts: 1,190
My father works for the Postal Service and has for 38 years.

You get the service you pay for. If an item is shipped parcel select, retail ground, first class, etc, it is going to move slower. Priority mail and express mail take priority (thus the names). If you really need the parts by a certain day and time, ensure that you select the appropriate shipping service.

Mail volume is still incredibly high. It always is before and after the holidays, and Amazon and other online retailers are causing some growing pains for the USPS. 13-16 hour days for some of the employees from early December to mid-January are more common. If you can come up with a better system for moving the nation's mail, I'm sure Congress would love to hear it. No other postal service on earth, private or public, provides such a physically vast and populous nation with the uniform and relatively high quality service the post office does day in and day out.

If you had shown up at the processing plant, they'd have told you to leave. Your parcel is still likely in a massive hamper destined for your local post office where it will be sorted to your delivery route and delivered.

The USPS phone system does suck, but it doesn't really matter in your case. The parcel is still being processed. Until it physically arrives at a post office, the clerks at your local office can't do a damn thing. Even if they could, they probably wouldn't. Again, if you need it faster, get off a buck and have it shipped with a better service, like Priority or Express Mail. Your parcels are no more important than anyone else's parcels of the same class. They operate on a FIFO system, and you're getting what you paid for.

It is entirely possible that a departure scan was missed and that your parcel was actually at the post office awaiting sorting down to the route and final delivery. Scans are occasionally missed this time of year. Chalk it up to an overworked clerk.

Finally, the only USPS services with a guaranteed money-back delivery date are express. Projected days will shift, though usually to an earlier date and not later. Weather, both around the corner and across the nation, can modify schedules of flights, trucks, and trains, pushing the delivery date around some. This is totally normal. Bad storms in Alaska often screw up the bulk of the international services for example, because Ted Stevens International in Anchorage is a major USPS hub for 80% of the industrialized world. This can have trickle down effects in other parts of the country as trucks are diverted from normal schedules to deal with large influxes of mail caused by clearing the backlog of international mail.

If the USPS has lost some of your business that's fine, they aren't perfect by any means; just remember that the alternatives are often worse. UPS has damaged many of my parcels beyond recognition, and FedEx misdelivered a parcel of mine (worth north of $5000) to the neighbors. Thank God my neighbors and I got along well. At the end of the day, I find the USPS gets my parcels to my PO Box back home in the states with minimal problems and for competitive prices. One just needs to be patient in a society that is increasingly concerned with instant gratification. Your mileage may vary of course.

Last edited by Celt; 01-13-2017 at 09:33 AM. Reason: edited out political commentary
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