I called FedEx support and they explained me why this happens. Turns out, people who deliver packages/mail have strict deadline to deliver their packages and on days when there are just too many for them to finish delivering everything, they mark it as delivered and actually deliver the package on the day after.
Two months later I open up the mailbox and there's the original shipment.
I have to wonder if they actually track anything. It feels more like they make an estimate of the delivery route/time and play it back to you regardless of whether it's actually happening.
This is all speculation based on my experiences with USPS.
I honestly believe many delivery drivers (not just USPS, but Amazon, UPS, FedEx, etc) are brazen because they get away with it 99% of the time.
It is possible that this is what is happening, but I don't think it is likely.
It's all down to your individual carriers and local depot management though. My local Fedex Ground depot doesn't seem to care at all, so my only recourse is to avoid having things I care about shipped Fedex. Which by itself is another reason the USPS needs to be kept operating - so at least we have three options instead of the characteristic duopoly of modern antitrust enforcement.
- they don't get scanned into tracking until they get processed at the facility, which can take a day
- they sometimes get scanned "out" when they're loaded onto the truck, rather than at delivery point.
Since the directive is now to leave on time, rather than wait for all the packages to make it onto the truck, I bet they're getting scanned out and then waiting on the floor for the next day's truck to actually get delivered.
UPS/FedEx etc use handheld scanners at the delivery point, so they have to deal with employees faking delivery and making up for it later.
This is what has been happening to USPS, folks:
1. Because of COVID19, flats volume has collapsed, while package volume has skyrocketed. Flats sorting machines can do absolutely nothing for packages for reasons that are left up to the reader, so USPS has been shutting them down and moving them out of processing facilities in favor of package sorting.
2. Because USPS is losing lots of money overall (higher package volume doesn't make up for the collapse in flats volume)[1], it has been cutting back on overtime, just like any other employer would.
3. People hear about 1 and 2, hear about/experience packages being delivered more slowly, and think that this surely means that "the Trump administration is trying to sabotage the post office to suppress voting!!!!". They do this without thinking about it at all:
3a. As stated, flats volume has collapsed, so there is still a lot of excess capacity.
3b. Even if every single voter were to vote by mail only, this would mean at most two additional flat pieces per voter (one ballot to the voter, and one ballot sent back). Think about how much mail (not packages, mail) you already receive daily on average. Do you really think two additional pieces would collapse the system? Of course not, any more than the USPS collapses every January when the IRS and every single employer, bank, and other financial institution sends out tax-related documents. (The USPS hires seasonal help in December for packages, not for Christmas cards.)
3c. If this really were a sinister Trump administration voter-suppression scheme, it's a pretty weak one that can be defeated by dropping ballots off in person, and/or voting in person.
4. An actual serious issue is states and counties that aren't like Oregon (which has been 100% vote by mail for two decades) trying to convert to vote by mail without preparation. Think of how much mail your home receives for the previous tenant (and the one before that, and the one before that). Think of this all having to be done by early October, to give voters about a month to receive and return ballots. This is what the administration has been pointing out, something rarely heard amidst the nonsense about mail-vote suppression.
[1] Congress mandating the USPS to prepay pensions is a good thing. The postal service is an industry that is, by definition, in secular decline (barring unusual events like COVID19) because of the Internet. Congress recognized this in 2006 and thus required USPS to prepare over 10 years to get its pensions ready, because there's no reason to believe that future revenue (and future employee-count growth) is going to sustain pensions for retirees otherwise.
The FDA loses money.
The FCC loses money.
These are public institutions, not for profit enterprises. They're funded partially by fees and usually largely by congressional appropriations.
You beg the question by beginning by comparing the USPS to other carriers. It's one of the few public institutions required by the constitution! Even the Defense Department doesn't get that privilege, and it loses hundreds of billions a year and doesn't have the same requirement to fund pensions for employees who haven't been born yet.
Lastly, delaying flats and prioritizing packages during a situation when many, perhaps most people will vote by mail due to a public health crisis is if not malicious, dangerously ignorant of the societal implications.
Yes, the USPS can handle the volume. But for the sake of our elections, and based on issues we may have with counting ballots, postmark and receipt date laws that vary by state, can we agree as a bipartisan issue that mail delivery now, of all times, shouldn't be compromised?
I do agree that right now is not a great time for radical changes though!
In those situations, their "competitors" largely just drop off their packages to USPS and let them handle the costly trip.
TLDR is, USPS needs a warrant to open first class mail. Private carriers may be able to open with impunity. Who do you want handling your mail-in ballot?
DMV actually nets out a surplus in most states given the fees it collects.
When states cut its operating budget, it's because they're looking across the budget for ways to cut costs. This is only irrational from a budgetary, as opposed to service delivery, POV if the cuts somehow undermine revenue collection, like reducing the number of IRS auditors.
I at no point made a comparison between the USPS and any other carrier.
>It's one of the few public institutions required by the constitution!
No. Article I merely authorizes the federal government to establish post offices.
>Even the Defense Department doesn't get that privilege
On the contrary, the same Article I repeatedly discusses the federal government's warmaking powers on land and sea.
>and it loses hundreds of billions a year and doesn't have the same requirement to fund pensions for employees who haven't been born yet.
How do you define "losing money" for the Department of Defense? Obviously it is not a money-making enterprise. That is, there is no way to measure its success or failure on a financial basis. Such a thing is possible with the USPS.
I didn't say that the USPS has to make money. But it is possible to measure its financial performance in a way that isn't possible with most other government agencies, including DoD.
>Lastly, delaying flats and prioritizing packages during a situation when many, perhaps most people will vote by mail due to a public health crisis is if not malicious, dangerously ignorant of the societal implications.
Nice speech; too bad I said nothing of the sort. As I said, there is a lot of slack in non-package processing capability because of the massive COVID19-related decline in non-package volume. The USPS trying to rearrange logistics and personnel accordingly, while avoiding overtime because of the money-losing issue, is what caused the nonsense the past few weeks (which, thankfully, seems to be dying down as people look into the issue and realize said nonsense).
Previously DeJoy had threatened that states which don't pay for first class postage would be delivered slower.
From 2010 to 2019:
-Overall annual operating revenue has increased from $67.1B to $71.1B
-First-class letters has dropped from 77.6B to 54.9B
-Shipping/package volume has grown from 3.3B to 6.2B
-Marketing mail has dropped from 81.8B to 75.7B
I would not call a 29% drop on first-class mail over a 10-year period with a 100% growth in packages a "collapse."
I wonder how this stacks up in comparison to FedEx and UPS who are surely seeing a drop in letters/flats through their system. It would be interesting to track down the same numbers and compare.
People assume UPS can deliver letter-sized envelopes just as well as the USPS but they simply can't. I'm working on https://nanagram.co and up until recently we used UPS. The average delivery was 7-9 days at best with poor tracking. I switched everything over to the USPS in July and even with all the pandemic the post office is more reliable than UPS and also a little cheaper. We've been seeing deliveries in 2-4 days and before the pandemic 1-3 days.
WTF is happening with USPS [2020-08-18]
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/wtf-is-happening-with-...
https://overcast.fm/+FOORtkRGM
(Long concerned with USPS wrt postal ballots, I learned quite a bit.)
USPS has three categories of mail: letters, flats (flat items too large to be considered letters), and packages.
https://pe.usps.com/text/dmm300/101.htm
If you can't even get beyond two sentences without a factual inaccuracy, it does cast some doubt on whether anything else you wrote was accurate.
To put another way, "flats" are larger "letters" and can be processed in similar ways, because both are bendable, and thus machine-sortable in a way that "parcels" are not. This is also why letters, regardless of height/weight, that exceed a certain thickness automatically become parcels, because they are no longer bendable.
It's dead on the money, beyond the minor trivialisation of "2 papers". It's 2 papers... per person. Still well within their capacity though, considering the sheer amount of other mail moved normally.
> 3. People hear about 1 and 2, hear about/experience packages being delivered more slowly, and think that this surely means that "the Trump administration is trying to sabotage the post office to suppress voting!!!!".
I think this is a bit unfair. D. J. Trump has repeatability express his hatred for mail-in voting, and him, and his administration, has expressed several time that they could/would gut the USPS to prevent mail-in voting.
So while your analysis might be true, and the current state of the USPS has nothing to do with the current administration, it is unfair to present the current fear of voter suppressions as unreasonable.
People are mentioning serious delays in mails, barely about packages.
I think the median and mode delivery times would be helpful numbers rather than just mean.
* Prescription refills
* Mail to/from overseas soldiers
* Bills and bill payments
* Regular letters
Those other categories could be much worse, or could be better than Shippos' data here. Most of the reporting out there claims that other categories (like prescriptions) are severely degraded.
You say "slightly slower". The metrics behind the delays are much longer and your numbers only seem to include time in transit.
Second reason your summary is inaccurate: DeJoy's changes are rolled out in small pockets of the country thus far. The article seems to be indiscriminate from where those changes took place. The averages here are hence better than from those places where the changes have done the most damage.
Where are you getting this causation from?
https://www.inquirer.com/news/philadelphia/usps-tracking-in-...
I do see much less mail in mailbox than I had before. I also had informed delivery set up and now I'm told I'm not eligible (when it worked a month or two before). Frustrating, because this is time when the informed delivery would actually let me know if I'm actually missing some mail.
As in, they get shat upon by a small but not insignificant number of regular carriers who know how to game the system let alone see CCAs are beneath them in every way. You want the truth about how this service has been running for years, well before recent issues, just google CCA horror stories.
This whole debacle is an engineered slow down by the union using the typical quiet encouragement that never has official backing but crawls along emails and word of mouth.
The worst Post Office examples you see in the press have always been this bad. There is no consistent management across the system. One place is well run and the next can be nightmare fuel.
tl;dr this is all an election year con job designed to make you come to one conclusion relying on the disposition of many to automatically assume any negative story concerning the current administration is true; while the current administration sucks on many levels much of what is claimed isn't always exactly true.
ps: HN is being bombarded by thinly veiled election year propaganda and sadly eats it up. the number of stories deserving to be flagged reaches ridiculous levels at these times.
But how does your theory explain the sorting machines being scrapped, and more specifically DeJoy's order to not reconnect machines without his direct approval? Surely if he were an above board postmaster merely trying to reign in the union, caring about low level equipment decomissioning would be less of a priority?
It hurt my eBay rating too before I could catch it happening. I’ve resorted to using the scans form just to make sure they’re the ones taking blame, not me.
Is there some kind of an initial "scan" upon drop-in to the box and then a second scan when they pick it up?
If not, then I imagine the metrics would only be discoverable from USPS themselves, which of course, they are going to muzzle.
You would need to search the tracking number and see when the first scan occurs. Shippo is only looking at shipping label creation date which could be offset quite some time from when the package gets scanned. Large businesses might have enough employees to where they can pack, label, and ship out an order that day but small businesses might have someone hand delivering packages to the post office every other day.
Example one of the ones I got dinged on:
Jun 30, 2020 7:29pm Tracking number provided
Jul 3, 2020 6:45am Accepted at USPS Origin Facility BEAVERTON, OR 97078
It was dropped off Jul 1 in the early morning. Ended up sitting there for two days before they got around to scanning. Admittedly it has gotten better the last couple weeks but it can still take them a day.
The easiest way around this though is using a scans form which is just a printout where they can scan once and it marks all of the packages as accepted at once. It still takes time to prepare the form, print and find someone at the dock or drop window to scan it - they don't seem to particularly like doing it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22Fr-g-B0vs
Mail service dysfunction has been going on a long time, and has been a joke for a long time.
Perhaps this is a proxy for measuring personnel/process changes, but totally misses the sorting machine dismantling going on throughout the nation.
It's the heavily-discounted "slow" shipping like medicine that is having trouble right now.
