I sell my used books on Amazon and I have to say that recently the quality of USPS delivery has degraded. I shipped a package on the morning of December 31, 2011. It was dropped off at the Post Office around 8:30am in the morning so I had a reasonable expectation it would leave the Post Office on 12/31/2011. Five business days later the package was listed as being scanned for departure at the SAME Post Office I dropped it off at. The package then spent a few days in North Carolina plus a few more in South Carolina. Then no more updates until it was delivered January 17, 2012. I filed a written complaint with the Post Office about the fact that the package sat at the local Post Office for 5 business days without movement. I was angry because it made it look as though I hung onto the package for 5 days before delivering it to the Post Office. Predictably I received NO response, presumably because they could not explain the lapse.
I track shipment and delivery dates for all my books and recently about 25% of deliveries are subject to inexplicable delays. I used to be able to set my clock by USPS. Packages were delivered quickly and not a single one went missing. Priority Mail was amazingly efficient with delivery in 1-2 business days versus the 3-5 business days I am experiencing of late. Media Mail and Parcel Post were equally efficient in the past but no longer.
We can all thank Congress for saddling USPS with a pension prepayment plan that is bankrupting USPS and causing services and jobs to be cut. If you really care about the degraded USPS mail service you may want to contact your Senator and Congressman to report your experiences.
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