Well…add Fed Ex to the group! I sent a package from Wolfermans. It left them supposedly on Feb 6. The soonest it will be delivered is Tuesday the 16th. Really?
I’ve ordered from Wolfermans in the past and things were delivered within days. My order said it would be delivered by the 12th.
It’s in fed ex purgatory.
USPS is still delivering slowly. I sent a package priority to my daughter, took 8 days to get there. NE PA
And slower delivery may become permanent.
I don’t consider what I’m about to say is political, but if the mods think so, then please delete:
The harm being done to the USPS is dangerous. There are millions who either due to habit or lack of tech prowess do not receive bills electronically, but by mail. These actions will cause lots of bills to be paid late, with accompanying late fees applied.
Louis DeJoy needs to be removed to save the USPS. I would say this if he was Democrat, Republican, Whig, Tory, Lyndon LarRuche party, whatever. Saving USPS is not political.
And now fed ex is saying that the “severe weather” might further delay the shipping of this package…which is food. Gotta love it.
It’s beginning to look like pony express is maybe a faster service.
In 1861, riders traversed the westward route in seven days, 17 hours to get a copy of Lincoln’s inaugural address to California. The Pony Express was by far the most effective way to communicate cross-country at the time—at least until the telegraph came along.
I mailed a 5 x 7 envelope to my daughter in Northern Virginia and a smaller note card to my daughter in a Baltimore suburb on January 13th. The envelope reached Virginia in 3 or 4 days. The card still hasn’t gotten to there. My December cable bill arrived 8 days after it was due. It is crazy!!
If your cable company is like the one we use to have, they probably charged a late fee and said it was your fault for not knowing when the bill was due regardless of when it arrived.
Our mail carrier was out for a couple of weeks and the subs failed to deliver most of the mail. The supervisors never take any corrective action. I feel sorry for the regular mail carrier who works so hard and hears most of the complaints.
I was fortunate. The cable company did not charge a late fee. I always pay as soon as I get the bill. The gentleman that I spoke to with the cable company said that they had had a massive number of calls like mine. We hate them, but I will give them credit for not charging us.
If the cable company had a ‘massive’ number of calls about receiving bills late, maybe they mailed them late? Maybe it was their outgoing mail system that was the problem and not a massive number of mailmen who didn’t deliver on time?
It probably takes only a small percentage of bills to arrive late to overload the phone system with complaints about it.
Yay hooray. My package was delivered to my friends today. But…my email said it was left in front of their garage. There are four adults who were IN the house all day. Guess it’s too much work to ring the doorbell!
But they got the gift and really like it a lot.
Or DHL. Had to share this somewhere. I ordered two swimsuits on sale from a company in Dallas. They sent me shipping info that it would be sent via DHL then delivered by USPS. One week later, no update so I called. They contacted DHL who said the package was never received. I was given a refund without even asking, kind of disappointed because these were a close out, only one suit each in my size.
Earlier today, for fun, I checked the tracking. Lo and behold, it said the package had been in Compton CA (two hours from my house) at 11:00 am PDT, then in Melrose Park, IL at 1:00 pm CDT. They must have beamed it cross country! So I called DHL, they said the package is in Melrose Park and yes, it might have gone from Texas to California to Illinois to go back to California. She said an international package going from the US to Canada might be routed through Germany.
There’s a separate USPS tracking number, and they only have the Compton info.
Since I already have the refund, I will wait patiently and see where this package goes next. If it really exists.
Update - my last report was on April 9. I’ve been occasionally checking the tracking numbers out of curiosity when out of the blue, the package showed up again on April 28 in the main Chicago post office as missent. It then went to the Elk Grove Village sort facility (closest to O’Hare). Bada bing bada boom, it was delivered safely tonight in San Diego. There’s a second bar code label over the corner of my label, not blocking anything, no name or address. Different tracking numbers. I looked up that USPS number and saw that it was delivered to a Chicago mailbox on April 9.
So someone in zip code 60616 got my swimsuits, and at some point returned the package to the post office. It did not appear to have been opened at all. It might have sat at that address for two weeks for all I know. But before that, both codes probably got scanned at different times. It thought it was two packages!
Both suits fit and my husband thinks they both look good on me. I’m not sure if I should notify the sender - they refunded me after the first week without my ever asking and my husband says they wrote it off. Perhaps DHL will send them a notice that it was delivered.
I mailed a small flat envelope of Hanes masks to my son back in March of April of 2020 when cloth masks were sort of hard to find in stores. He received them last week. 
Do you feel like Tom Hanks in the movie Castaway, delivering that last FedEx package?
I was thinking of this while reading about the cargo on the ship stuck in the Suez canal. Whatever is on that ship may be delivered in 10 years.
I win the USPS story. When our kid was in the Peace Corps, we sent a fixed rate international package once a month. Every package got to her except one. It just never got there.
Five years later, the USPS delivered that package back to our house. It had gone to the PC country, but never was delivered to our kid. Who knows where it sat for five years, but when they found it, that country sent it back to the U.S. where really it should have been tossed. The USPS delivered it to us…no charge.
When you send an international package, you need to indicate if you want it returned, and if yes you agree to pay the return postage. We said NO. But it got back to us anyway.
The funny part…it was cat toys for her newly adopted cat. By the time the box got here five years later, the cat was living here with us!
Beginning Friday, the U.S. Postal Service will start to “implement new service standards” for first class mail and periodicals — slowing its target delivery time by about 30%, USPS spokesperson Kim Frum told NPR.
According to Frum, some of the changes will result in increased time for some pieces of mail to go cross-country and other long distances. However, she tells NPR that 61% of first-class mail and 93% of periodicals will not be affected by these changes.
Single-piece first-class mail (smaller, lightweight mail) traveling in the same region will still have a two-day delivery time, Frum said. First-class packages, however, will be impacted by the new standards starting Friday.
Additionally, beginning Oct. 3 and ending on Dec. 26, the postal service will temporarily increase prices on all “commercial and retail domestic packages” due to the holiday season, Frum said.
We have exchanged Christmas packages with a German exchange student family for about 5 years (since the first Christmas my daughter visited them in Germany and their daughter visited us – there were subsequent visits for each). Its fun being creative with gifts to include and we look forward to their package every year.
We have always sent the packages USPS. Didn’t have any issues until 2 years ago. Tracked our package to the airport into which my daugther flew on her trips. About an hour from their house in Germany so all good. No updates for a couple weeks though. Next update was package is in Brazil. Ooops. It sat there for 3 months. I am sure it was a mix of “what do we do with that?” and “who is paying to get that back to Germany?” It eventually was delivered but much of the fun was lost. We used UPS last year without issue.
That same year, their package to us was delayed as well. But I eventually received a call from our local post office saying they had a package for us but needed to know where to deliver it. We are the only household in our city with our last name so they could have found it with minimal effort. But the address was on the box but just not in the US format. They had our name, followed by city/state/zip and then our street address. Makes some sense logically: get it to the city first and then to the street. But that totally dumbfounded our local P.O. The reaction when I called up and gave them the street address was very funny. Just a moment of silence then an “Oh.” Package was delivered the next day. German family has always used a commercial freight carrier but USPS delivers (last mile concept).
If delivering junk mail, magazines and other bulk mail were to be done only once a week, I’d be okay with that.
The bills we pay via our bank’s online banking that require checks if the recipient doesn’t accept ACH transfers already take over a week to arrive when they’re in town and longer if they’re out of town.
Our new regular mail carrier does a pretty good job, but all of the substitutes here are dreadful. UPS is generally far better than USPS or FedEx. Of course, the exception occurred when we’re waiting on closing documents that were overnighted to us on Monday and have yet to arrive. It seems they took a detour to a location about five states away from us. Now they’re being emailed to us, so I’ll be busy printing for the next hour.