US Postal Service

[Jinglepaws2]

Wake up! DeJoy (or DeJerk as I refer to him) has sizable interests in competing carriers that want to force USPS out of existence so they can gobble up a bigger piece of the pie, will have less competition, and can raise prices even higher. Trump made him Postmaster Master General 1) as a political payback for Dejoy and his cronies contributing a chunk of change to Trump's presidential campaign, 2) in an effort to derail mail in voting because Trump believed it would benefit his re-election chances to screw up mail in voting and 3) DeJerk is doing everything he possibly can to destroy the Post Office from the inside out. So far, he's doing a bang up job of just that. Why the Postal Board of Governors hasn't kick him to the curb yet mystifies the mind.

 

[MowManMow]

I'm 16 days on waiting for a USPS package from Dallas Tx, to Conroe..... just says "Moving through the usps system"

Just had a package make it clear across the US to the next town over just 30 minutes away from me then took off & landed two states over. Tracking stopped there. 3 days later it magically shows up on my porch..lol

 

[bertsmobile1]

Just had a package make it clear across the US to the next town over just 30 minutes away from me then took off & landed two states over. Tracking stopped there. 3 days later it magically shows up on my porch..lol

Most times when that happens it is a tracking error.
Stand by a supermarket checkout and note how amy times the scanner s misread a bar code & the operator has to pass the item through a dozen times before they give up & type in the code manually,
When track & trace was introduced I argued against it because I knew what would happen.
Customer service departments would be swamped with people confused because it looked like their delivery had passed them by .
Getting some thing to your door can go in a strait line , or zig zag across the country it all depends upon capacity & depot management
Some have no provision for storage so every thing that comes in each day has to go out .
Some depots have extra capacity & some don't
And of course if you have 150,000,000 items a day passing through a system that was never designed for that scale there will be problems.
Add to that every one remember the one that went hat wire.
No one remember the 300 that were delivered in good time & in good condition , just the one that went weird.
People have no idea about how the system works
They think that every depot consigns a truck to every other sorting depot directly every day and of course they all go overnight by truck even if that means the truck would have to have been doing 200mph all the way .
When Peter Ariens was here, he wanted to set us Stens deliveries so he could guarantee next day delivery anywhere in OZ.
He then realized to do that he would need to have 9 warehouses of which only 2 would break even .
I am sure many of you know cities where it takes close to a full day just to drive from one side to the other let alone stopping 200 times on the way through .

People from outside transport & distribution are always full of critism about how bad it is & how much better it could be
People from inside the industry look at it with awe & wonder that it actually works as good as it does.

Much like people from outside mower repair will tell you it only take 1/2 to service a mower so a 2 week back log is all because we are lazy, unskilled, untrained & disorganized

 

[Scrubcadet10]

people seem to lack reading comprehension that this somewhat off an Off Topic forum section.

 

[DK35vince]

Don't you have a lawn to worry about??? I have no idea what the mail has to do with this group.

Every part I buy for my tractor, zero turns, UTV come by mail.
I order them all online.
Can't remember the last time I went to a dealer for a part

 

[StarTech]

Bert. What got me confused years ago here is that we have main sorting facility locally but all our mail and packages has to go 150 miles away to be sorted just to come back to same post office it originally left to be delivered. But considering how they throw mail and package in the sorting facilities it is a miracle anything to where it is going without going all over the place which at times it does.

The only thing for me to do is to use the carrier that provides me with best service and avoid those that don't. Just common business sense. If USPS improves then I will start using them again.

Today I got a package notice that shipped UPS Friday and should only be one day business day out but apparently UPS is taking Valentine's day off so it schedule to be here Tuesday.

And Bert I can agree those that don't do the work have no idea of what is needed to be done. It like me taking over half a day to repair a rusted out deck on a Toro ZTR today. The main problem was that one of the idler mounts broke out but as cleaned and welded other areas just keep popping up needing addition time to repair. I finally got 95% of the damage repaired but the rest is just not repairable. The customer thinks it could repaired within 30 minutes.

 

[ILENGINE]

@StarTech Sounds like things are going for your about like this week has gone for me. Just put a $161 carb kit in a Command 30 hp earlier in the week and had it running like a well oiled machine, and had ran it Tuesday to move it around the shop and everything was fine. Go out 8 am Wednesday morning and start it and is now running on one cylinder. Further testing showed that one of the DSAI modules had failed, so then had to order and install a MDI conversion kit.

And just found out today that Lady that had written me a bad check back in September has plead no guilty and is requesting a jury trial for a $270 check. So will now get my money drug out even longer. But had already decided that I will never see my money because about this same time she was arrested for Home invasion with bodily injury and is facing 6-30 years if convicted in the next county over.

 

[7394]

Got re-funded on my return I posted about, in a different (now Locked) thread.

 

[bertsmobile1]

How Track & Trace works, or rather does not work
Star who is now in Detroit wants to send Rivets who has semi retired to Long Beach Cal a package
So Star rings up Loss & Damage freight to ship it because they are the cheapest .
L & D are the cheapest because they have no trucks & just sub-contract everything out .
So now the job is in the computer Detroit to Long Beach economy 5 lbs which is tied to a con note number
Because there are a sqillion con notes and a lot of them are the same , that then get tied to a job number which is unique to L & D freight.
The L & D computer has the package , we will call it P1 at Stars workshop
Vic the van driver picks it up, but he is a subcontractor so his data terminal can not link to J & D's computer so T & T still shows it as being on Stars floor .
Vic presorts for all of the subcontracting he does so it goes in the South West bag to be delivered to a feeder truck that delivers to L & D's depot in Cincinniti
When he swaps jobs with the feeder , again it does not get scanned because the scanner has no facility to transferr the P1 to the feeder truck, just the S_W bag . The feeder drops it off it get scanned in so in a split second T & T has it going from Detroit to Cincinniti .
next the Cincinniti depot drops it into a crate so the computer moves the job number from their depot to the crate, and it keeps track of that crate, not the individual items in that crate till that crate is broken down for final delivery.
Now the crate gets loaded in to Tom the Truckies 20 ton truck and then the crate number is transferred to the truck.
So T & T will show your packages as being where Tom's truck is
Tom drives the truck down the road to Louisville where he unloads it on a transfer dock where the crate does not get scanned in
So T & T has it as "uploaded Cincinnitti depot current destination where ever Toms truck is
Next Tom goes to Ontario so T&T will show your package as being in Ontario , not on the floor Louisville because until the crate is scanned in again, T & T has it in the back of Toms truck.
The Louisville depot loads crate 1 into another subcontractors truck to go to L & D's Dallas distribution depot where it gets scanned in .
When this happens L&D's computer shifts your job number to the Dallas distribution center whereas for the past 3 days it has been reporting your parcel as being where ever Toms truck was .
The Dallas depot loads it onto a 40 pallet truck that is going to Monterry so cheap Mexican labour can do the fine sorting before it gets consolidated into a full rail cars worth of freight to Long Beach So again T & T will show your package as being where ever the train is .
AT Long Beach the rail car is broken down & the local delivery stuff is sent to the final distribution depot in LA
So if you look at the T &T history is appears that Stars package went almost all the way to Long Beach, then back up to Louisville then down to Monterry then back up to Long Beach then up to La then finally to Rivets who has died from old age waiting for it to arrive .
This happens because just about no one does the entire move themselves.
They all use contractors for some if not all of the depot to depot bit and in most cases the weird travels are not because your freight is bouncing all over the country like a a pin ball , it is because it is sitting on a dock waiting to be scanned in but the T & T computer always shows it as being where it was last scanned .

And then there are miscans
I had a consignment from Hong kong marked as delivered 1/2 hour before the plane it was on touched down in OZ .
ANd then when my package was sorted, it could not be delivered because it had already been delivered
Starting to sound like a Monty Python sketch yet ?
And it s a 3 hour drive directly from the airport to here .

 

[StarTech]

@StarTech Sounds like things are going for your about like this week has gone for me. Just put a $161 carb kit in a Command 30 hp earlier in the week and had it running like a well oiled machine, and had ran it Tuesday to move it around the shop and everything was fine. Go out 8 am Wednesday morning and start it and is now running on one cylinder. Further testing showed that one of the DSAI modules had failed, so then had to order and install a MDI conversion kit.

And just found out today that Lady that had written me a bad check back in September has plead no guilty and is requesting a jury trial for a $270 check. So will now get my money drug out even longer. But had already decided that I will never see my money because about this same time she was arrested for Home invasion with bodily injury and is facing 6-30 years if convicted in the next county over.

Yelp I had those weeks here. I just had a customer to want is Craftsman mower repair to come in two days later when the parts were arriving to cancel the repair work. Then when I returned the mower he thought I had it repaired. When I said no it not repair as you didn't want it repair he flew mad.

I actually had about three weeks of bad luck but things seems to working out now. And had similar thing to happen with an ignition coil. I got a mower running, shut it down as a thunderstorm was inbound. The next day it would not start. Somehow the lightning strike a 1/4 mile away fried the coil.

I have learned my lesson that I have to use small claims court to recover my money at times. It cost one customer over $300 to get out of a $100 repair job. Of course I haven't seen any repairs from her or her relatives but that is fine.