Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
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
Kedavis: It’s also worth noting that shipping valuable items by USPS can be a loser even if insured.
I never send any checks via the mail unless I have to because of a PO Box. Thieves are opening the mail, manipulating checks and trying to cash them.
The PRC has a 100% mail ballot this year and is using a ballot tracking system called BallotTrax. You use the county’s voting site as portal. The system had my ballot as mailed on 10/5, and it still hasn’t arrived. The site directs you to call to request a replacement. Over 6 1/2 hours on hold later, I hung up (don’t worry, I was doing other things while on hold.) I then emailed the office yesterday and requested a replacement. BallotTrax just updated to say that a replacement has been printed and (drum roll) mailed.
Santa Clara County has a lot of drop-boxes where one can delivery ballots directly. I chose the one directly in front of a Superior Courthouse, and got an e-mail three days later saying the ballot had been received and would be counted. The ballot was slow in arriving in my mailbox, but it got here undamaged.
In April, the USPS lost a prescription that was dropped in the mail to me from a pharmacy that is about one air mile from my house. (I got lazy because it was tiring to go through the process and waiting lines at the store.)
The store told me to pursue it with USPS, which was a total dud. I filled out the online form, and the last thing I head from them was essentially “We looked for it. We are closing this case.”
I especially liked the sense of mission they displayed.
The reason the USPS is chronically short of funds? Years ago, Congress passed a law requiring the postal service to pre-fund their union pension funds. Each year, billions of dollars of revenue go to the Postal Workers Union pension funds, instead of being routed back to the agency to improve services. I don’t know how long this is supposed to last, but it is probably a very long time. Unless Congress changes that law, the postal service will fighting a losing battle, with more and more services going to UPS and FedEx.
There was an article in the Wall Street Journal this Monday about all of the delivery services being 100% of capacity NOW, not nearer the holidays. Many small shippers are being told there is no guarantee that items they ship in November and December will reach their destinations by Christmas. Not only UPS and Fed Ex, but DHL and most other delivery service networks are at full capacity already, mostly due to the vastly increased demand for their services for on-line shopping.
Yes, I’ve mentioned that pension-funding issue on other threads were USPS issues came up.
It would be a good thing for Trump to bring up. I too have had packages go missing in Federal Way from Georgia in route to me in Alaska. No explanation, just gone. I also had an item sent FedEx (Anchorage has one of the largest FedEx hubs on earth) that were somehow handed over to the USPS by FedEx for the final drive from Anchorage to Wasilla? What the ****? I don’t know what’s happening but there seems to be some sort of unholy alliance between USPS and Amazon, and other shipping industry trickery in the mix. Whatever the reasons, I’d love to hear Trump address how screwed up the shipping situation is and express some kind of competition heavy plan.
Well, depending on where you shop and who you buy from, your “fedex shipping” might actually be FedEx SmartPost (I think it’s called), which basically means FedEx takes it from hub to hub, and the PO brings it to your “door.” DHL has what they call eCommerce which is pretty much the same, and UPS has something else but I don’t recall the name.
My understanding is that at least one of those drop boxes was broken into. I really don’t want there to be a coup.
So to be thorough I looked it up. The UPS version is called UPS Mail Innovations.
Makes little difference what they call it because if they say FedEx or UPS it should come FedEx or UPS. Those trucks both drive down my street every day (no mailbox) but when someone at the shipper decides to use a pseudo-FedEx it’s the customer without a mailbox who gets screwed. Has they said they’d ship it USPS I would have used my PO Box. It’s just cheap, blatant false advertising.
The rims were still encased in the factory plastic wrap, totally untouched by human hands. There is no difficult proving their cost. However, 8 days later, there still has been no word. I could ride my bike from here to Boulder Colorado in 8 days. Even shipping by truck, as they are claiming they were, should take less than that. I am wondering at what point they will admit they have lost them.
Try insuring jewelry as a rider on your home owner’s policy. You can have the piece photographed and appraised, described in detail and assigned a premium by your insurance company. Then you pay the assigned premium to insure the piece for maybe 10 years. One day, oops, you lose it or it is stolen. After filing a claim to recover your insured loss, the insurance company says they can have the piece replicated for half or maybe even less of the insured price. But wait, I have been paying a premium for years based on that appraised value, which was accepted by the insurance company. No matter…we have a guy that can make it cheaper and that’s all you get from us. I asked them, “What if I owned a Picasso and insured it with you and then a fire burned it up. Would you tell me that you have a guy down the street who can paint an exact replica for a hundred bucks, so that’s all we’re paying?” it’s a scam…long and short.
Insurance has never been about paying claims. It is about making money for the company and its stockholders, plain and simple. What comes immediately to mind is the mortgage insurance I bought when I got the previous mortgage I had on my house. At some point I read carefully through the provisions and discovered that I was too old to be covered by the insurance which was meant to protect my then wife if I should predecease her before the mortgage was paid off. When I attempted to cancel the policy which was outrageously expensive the bank dragged their feet for nearly six months collecting premiums monthly. I was finally able to get rid of the whole mess by getting a new mortgage at a better rate from another company.
Since they offered the insurance – indeed, in many mortgage situations they REQUIRE the insurance – and they knew your age, I’d like to think you (or your widow, I suppose) would have had a slam-dunk win in court if it came to that. But sadly, there’s a good chance it would have gone the other way.
What most people miss is that the “insurance” is the scam. It is the reason for the company’s existence and the rules it operates under. But mostly it’s policies are assets for value that is used by the company to generate investments. Mostly insurance companies are financial asset management companies.
Just a follow up. I got a note from the Customer Service person I spoke to on Wednesday. The email was titled: USPS Service Request has been resolved. This is the body of the note
Dear Eugene Kriegsmann,
Thank you for contacting the U.S. Postal Service®. This is in response to your recent inquiry regarding delayed mail.
As a result of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, Postal ServiceTM Priority Mail® products and First-ClassTM packages may temporarily experience delivery delays due to limited transportation availability.
Please be assured, the Postal Service’s goal is to move packages as expeditiously as possible, and we are committed to ensuring timely processing and delivery of essential packages. The Postal Service continually reviews its network capacity to provide the American public reliable, efficient, and fast delivery service.
Thank you for your patience and understanding. Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience this matter has caused.
Sincerely,
I checked the tracking information. Nothing had changed. The package was still “In Transit” with no anticipated arrival date. What this email is saying is that the excuse they gave me about Covid causing all of these problems resolves the issue of their losing a package valued at $2000. If I hadn’t purchased insurance sufficient to cover the loss I would be screwed, and they would be off the hook. I stopped worrying about it yesterday. What I discovered is that if a package is sent via Priority Mail and it is not delivered within 15 days, I can file for my insurance claim. I have all of the information scanned into my computer, and I will enter it on Friday which will be day 15. These people need to find employment somewhere else. They are not competent to do the job for which they were hired. Worse than that, they are responsible for costing the taxpayers unnecessary expense because of their incompetence. In this case, $2000. I am sure there are many more examples. This isn’t a unicorn.
Be sure of that “15 days” thing. The last time I asked anyone at the PO about how they count days, they had a long-winded explanation of how they don’t include the day it was sent, or the day it should have been delivered, or weekends (even though they deliver on Saturdays), or holidays…
By the time you run it through the USPS Calculator, 15 days might be a month.
The USPS site was very specific about the time. It did not say “working days”, just days. However, like everything else they say, this will be treated with as many grains of salt as is necessary. At this point it is obvious that the package disappeared somewhere between Kent Wa, the depot north of here, and SeaTac airport where it would have been taken to be flown to Boulder Co. The last tracking shows it departing Kent. Then nothing. It apparently sat in the Kent Depot for two days before it was moved. That in itself is questionable. It may well have been stolen there. I will let the USPS people figure that one out. I just want my money at this point.
What gripes me is when you’ve paid EXTRA to get the thing there in a timely manner and they sit on it–never mind losing it or not delivering it all. If I know something’s going to take the same length of time to get to me whether I put on a first-class stamp or pay $8, guess what choice I’ll make.
I think that paying for Priority Mail as opposed to 1st Class is becoming more and more absurd. I am pretty convinced that my package was stolen which would have happened no matter which class of mailing I chose. As far as the claim goes, both 1st Class and Priority require the same 15 day wait before a claim can be filed. The difference is cost is likely much greater than the $8 you postulated. It will be a cold day in hell before they get another such charge out of me.
Oh, yeah, after I posted the last post I got an email from USPS with a link to a survey as to how satisfied I was with Customer Service. I don’t think they are going to be much pleased with my response.
You may find that when dealing with various bureaucracies especially government ones (which technically USPS is not but in many ways they still act like one), words like “days” have separate definitions. They don’t put (“days” means business days excluding blah blah blah) at every single usage of the word, nor do they asterisk it and put a footnote for each page where it’s used… But somewhere you’ll probably find a definition for “days” as they use it.
And for that matter, since it’s usually the exception, if a place means “calendar days” rather than whatever their special definition is, they might specify “calendar days” since it’s the exception, and much shorter than their usual definition.
What I’ve had happen occasionally is that due to fortunate circumstances somehow, an item might be ready to deliver to me in 3 days or 5 days, rather than the 5 days or 7 days at the rate that I paid for. Rather than deliver it “too early” compared to what I paid for, they wait.
Tried to copy and paste the schedule from USPS, but it doesn’t copy and post properly. It does quite specifically state that you can file 15 days after the mail has been posted, but not later than 60 days. There isn’t much room for misinterpretation. I will fill out and send in the claim on Friday. If the time is not appropriate, it will be rejected. Until then……
You may be okay in this situation, since 15 days amounts to the passing of 2 full weeks from the date of mailing. And if – as was in the case in the past – you had to make the claim at a PO, you might end up waiting 16 or 17 or even 18 days if day 15 was a weekend or holiday…
I doubt they even care. It is thr Post Office. They don’t have too.