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Defund the USPS
I had a fairly irritating experience this week which is yet to be resolved. I purchased a set of carbon fiber wheel rims in order to build a new set of wheels for my new bike. The rims and hubs turned out to be incompatible, so I had to return both, the hubs to my local bike shop, the rims to a shop in Colorado. Concerned about getting the rims back to the dealer I shipped them via USPS Priority Mail last Thursday. The charges were $35 for the service and an additional $30 for insurance on the rims which have a cost of $975 each. They were supposed to be delivered on Monday according to the tracking notice, but they have been posting expected arrival dates as one day beyond the actual expected date, so I thought that they would arrive on Saturday.
According to the tracking, they left my local post office for a more centralized office a bit north of here. Apparently, they stayed in that office until Monday when they finally shipped to Colorado. I received a notice on Monday night that they would not arrive on time. Boy! Was I surprised! The notice did not change on Tuesday or Wednesday. Nothing updated. It took some searching but I was able to find a Customer Service site and filled in the form. Very surprisingly I got a call back that afternoon from a representative.
What I was told is that due to Covid (which has pretty much become the standard excuse for every possible demonstration of incompetence) the postal service was understaffed and buried in excess mail. They are flying fewer planes, so my package for which I paid premium rates was “likely” shipped via truck. No refund was offered for the demotion in service, and no date for its arrival.
As of this morning, a full week into the shipping, there is still no change in the current tracking. This is a package insured for $2,000. It is being handled with the same level of concern and competence as a piece of junk mail. I am only blessing the moment I decided to buy the extra insurance.
I live on a dirt road with rural mailboxes near its end where it meets the paved road. I have had any number of packages or pieces of mail left undelivered because the delivery person had reached the end of his/her day and decided to go back rather than finishing his/her route. On those occasions, I have received a notice on the tracking page that a delivery attempt was made, but was unsuccessful. I have followed up by asking the postmaster how one could make an attempt to deliver to a mailbox and be unsuccessful at it. I never really received an acceptable answer. The advent of Covid has simply provided the post office and it minions with an excuse for their incompetence.
Now, these are the people we are supposed to trust with our ballots. Fortunately, in Washington state, there are boxes set up by the various counties to collect ballots. They are pretty convenient. Mail-in balloting has been available here for some time. So far, it seems to work pretty well, unlike the Postal Service.
End of Rant!
Published in General
I doubt that it will make you feel any better, Eugene, but I’m finding that timely results from any of the services is erratic. Fed Ex, DHL, UPS–they are all struggling. I’m not justifying their service–they need to get their act together!–but it’s pretty darn frustrating, especially when the timeliness was important!
The USPS said they were ready for this election – they are not. I have had so much trouble with mail even before COVID that I now only ship packages through UPS.
I have had things that never got delivered. One had tracking and I could see it was received by my local post office but never went out for delivery. Doubt it was stolen (because it was nothing of much value) but probably just lost. Before moving here 16 years ago I never had issues with the mail so I assumed it was just my local office that was screwed up.
There is no in-person voting where I am but they do have drop boxes for folks who don’t trust the USPS. I will be using the drop box.
Our delivery for UPS and FedEx in Atlanta has been pretty good in general. I wonder if local talent pools have anything to do with it.
Same here in the Charlotte area. USPS has been good as well.
The USPS finally returned a piece of certified mail that I had sent to the US Treasury. I’ll leave you guessing as to what it might have been (hint: it wasn’t chocolates). It looked liked someone’s dog had gotten ahold of it and it was four months after I mailed it. That was about the third time I had problems with certified mail. Now we can pay online with an e-check. I love it! But you can’t do that with a set of custom bike wheels. For that I’d use Fedex or UPS.
Eugene,
I’m glad you’ve brought this subject up. We are seeing a host of new techniques employed by our elections people all for the first time for this election. That alone should make you question it. Weirdly, just before I left work at about 5:45 pm last night I got a text notification that our elections folk had set up a conference call for anybody who wanted to ask questions. I tried to ask a question but they never got to me before it ended. However, as I listened, I realized just how extensive the changes really were. Remember these answers only apply to Florida which has had good competent Republican Governors for some time. Governor DeSantis has stationed police guards next to those pick-up boxes you are talking about. When things are new you may not have thought through the possibilities. What if a particular pick-up box is in an area that will heavily go for a particular party? If somebody waits and then destroys the content of just those now full boxes in that area they could cause a biased result.
My question would have been about the mail ballots. From some of the answers from the officials of the elections board, it sounded like those ballots were all marked with a bar code so they would be identified with the particular voter. This would stop anybody who tried to vote more than once, once by mail-in, and once on election day at the polls. However, this still wouldn’t stop somebody from stealing these ballots, filling them out, and forging the signatures. They have the software that might be able to recognize a forged signature but I’m not sure how effective this is. If somebody who is very smart is out there coaching the lefty crooks who would be doing this for money I don’t know how far they might get. When it’s brand new you never know. Sound advice is not to buy version #1 but in this case, we don’t have a choice.
Of course, all of this massive change happening all at once was explained by “COVID”. This is the goto excuse for absolutely anything that gets done in a slipshod or crazy or just radically new untested way.
Now don’t forget to wear your mask when you go to the polls. Yeah sure, thanks so much for your concern!?
Regards,
Jim
I once followed the tracking on an item I ordered from New York state to my home in Tennessee. It made a 4- or 5-day detour to Puerto Rico before it was delivered to me.
Having a similar problem @cdor. Mailed something certified to the US Treasury in April. Still not delivered.
When we lived in Pennsylvania on our farm I knew my mailman personally since I was a child. One day right before Christmas he knocked on my door. He asked to come in. He said he was in trouble. Someone had given him a bottle of good bourbon as a present and he had been sampling it all day and run his mail truck in the ditch down the road. Could I get my tractor and pull him out? Of course I did and he then came to my house and we cleaned it up and pulled the fender straight. Maybe your wheels are in a ditch somewhere.
My understanding is that the Democrat governors are going to hold the mail in vote open to give all their ballots the time to show up.
Normally, they’ve been good. However, I recently sent a certified letter, return receipt. After I saw online the letter had arrived in the town but had not been delivered for three days, I called the recipient and confirmed they had received the letter. That day, I got the return receipt in my mailbox, but the tracking web site had still not updated as delivered. Oh well . . .
I am still waiting on my taxes sent at the end of March to show up at the IRS. I keep getting threatening letters about my tax returns not showing up.
Yeah, it’s still a bit like that here, down the road (and not even a “furr piece”) from the location you’re describing above. My mailman (I’ll call him “Tom”) is pretty helpful and does his best. We’ve had some chats sometimes about the ridiculous restrictions about the most minor of things (I suspect most of them were put into the contract at union insistence) which prohibit him from doing almost anything that would result in superior service. He regularly violates those restrictions on his customers’ behalf.
As for what happens when a package is hurled off into the ether, I’ve noticed many more problems with deliveries, failures, tracking messages that either don’t reflect what’s actually doing on, or don’t provide the level of service paid for. And has been stated here, it’s always “the pandemic” that’s blamed for the inefficiency and incompetence.
Don’t worry, though! It’ll all be fixed by the election day. Put your vote (and one for your dog, one for your cat, one for your hamster, and one for your late granny and grandpa) in an envelope and drop them all in the mail. They’ll be delivered sometime.
And America will wait until they are.
FJ/JG,
First, they must be created as needed then they can “show up”. It’s a high art that only Democrats can really perform.
Regards,
Jim
Sometimes one needs to just send communications. I electronically file taxes and pay by e-check. If your mail was a check, you should definitely go online
Follow the prompts…it’s so easy, you will never use the USPS for paying bills again. I assume you use online banking. If not, WOW again! I don’t think I will ever have to buy checks again. I never allow companies access to my account for “autopay”. If there is a dispute, you have already lost…they have your money. On accounts where I have the same debt every month, I set that up myself, my account, my control. My bank even sends checks for individual payments, like an electrician or plumbers’ service calls, if they don’t take credit cards. The USPS has lost the business of millions of pieces of mail. Yet they still do an incredible volume. I pray they come through for this election. It could be a mess.
Tax person thinks that’s what happened to my ‘package’. Mail was delivered but nothing confirmed by USPS.
Well what would we expect from an agency run by Donald Trump? German precision? When you put a moron in charge of the Government and have him higher “all the best people” you get what you paid for.
UPS and FedEx I’m sure can do the job.
Have you been hacked? You have turned into a parody.
In my area, the problems with the USPS predate the Trump Administration. And isn’t the USPS supposed to be quasi-independent anyway? I suspect it’s been poorly run for decades, by both parties. COVID and the push for all-mail elections have simply revealed the underlying issues.
Speaking of German precision, it’s “hire,” not “higher.”
I forgot the details, but Mark Levin got a call from a republican state legislator asking about this subject. Democrat governor, but republican legislature. Levin quoted the specific clause in the US Constitution that gives final authority to the state legislatures, not the state courts or the governor, where the national elections are concerned. He then asked if they repubs had the guts to actually exert their authority.
Makes you long for the days of hanging chads…
PH – And I’ll bet everyone got their mail on time…..!
FSC,
Right you are. Chads Schmads, you ain’t seen nothing yet. In ancient times we relied on physical evidence and a chain of custody. Now we are in a web-based world. The evidence is electronic and only the highest cybersecurity can protect it.
BTW, I’m not using mail-in or early voting. I will walk to my local polling place. It is about a 2-minute walk from where I live. I shall march in with my best near worthless cheap mask covering my mug and demand a ballot having presented my plastic papers.
Maybe I’ll paste the “I just voted” sticker they give you on my forehead. Just for a change of pace.
Regards,
Jim
Someone should tell him the USPS is a semi-private agency now. It’s USPS.com, not USPS.gov . . .
It’s also worth noting that shipping valuable items by USPS can be a loser even if insured. I’ve had things damaged by UPS before, or delivered to the wrong address and they couldn’t figure out where they left it, so I got a quick, easy refund. (A couple times, days after I got the refund, the person who had received the item at the wrong address, brought it to me.)
But with USPS, I’ve had packages that wound up with tire tracks across the outside, and they still claimed the problem was “insufficient packing” so they denied the claim.
On the plus side in your case, you can show what the new rims actually cost you. If it’s anything used, USPS can decide how much it was REALLY worth, and pay your insurance claim on that basis – if they pay it at all – no matter what coverage you paid for.
As far as I’m concerned, if I mail a brick insured for $1 million at a cost to me of $1000, and they lose it, they should pay me the $1 million. But instead they’ll go to Home Depot, see that a brick is 25 cents, and since yours was “used” they’ll hand you a dime and call it good. Which means I’ve lost $999.90 just on the insurance premium.
Honest shippers will tell you that they pay “actual value”. You can insure all you want, but you’ll get actual value. I sent some DQ-10a speakers for a re-build. They were insured for $500. When they were returned, they were insured for $2500.
Yes, but if you mean the company shipping you something, that’s irrelevant to my point. My point is that even if the item is worth $500 and the shipper insures it for $500 with USPS, if it’s damaged or lost, USPS might decide that your $500 item was really only worth $100, and that’s all they will pay you. If they pay at all. It’s far more common that they’ll claim the packing was inadequate, and they’ll pay nothing.
I was apparently not clear. I shipped the items by FedEx and was told that they pay “actual value” so I should not attempt to insure beyond that value. In their then-current shape, $500 was a realistic estimate of value. After the complete re-build, the actual value was somewhere between $2500 and $3000, so the items were insured for that amount when returned to me.
Notice that I said “honest shippers”. That’s what I dealt with at the specific FedEx location. They could have taken the money, but didn’t.
Yes, but I specified USPS, which was the subject of the OP.