What the hell is wrong with USPS

So, I mailed a non orchid package to someone in Ann Arbor, MI.@ day and was supposed to be there last monday. It arrives in East Lansing on Teusday..stays at sorting for two days and then shipped in the opposite direction to Grand Rapids, stays there for a day and then shipped to Detroit. It's friday and it finally arrives at the person's building in AnnArbor..only the carrier has put it in the wrong box ..so now , he has to rely on a neighbor's honesty to get it..but of course, he doesnt know which neighbor

Extreme incompetence, or usps is ran by total misanthropic people

Could be as simple as an unreadable zip code. Or which of you is on a terrorist watch list?

The USPS seems to have been tumbling downhill for the last couple years. I've had a number of problems with them.

I think it's time to just eliminate the USPS. 98% of the mail I get is junk and the other 2% could've just been e-mailed to me.

PaphMadMan said:

Could be as simple as an unreadable zip code. Or which of you is on a terrorist watch list?

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no, it's a printed priority mail slip...and it's all correct..I photo everything before I send it out..it's incompetence in Michigan..actually, this has only happened to me in Michigan..if i recall correctly

silence882 said:

The USPS seems to have been tumbling downhill for the last couple years. I've had a number of problems with them.

I think it's time to just eliminate the USPS. 98% of the mail I get is junk and the other 2% could've just been e-mailed to me.

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yeah, it used to be that the 'junk' mail was a way for small organizations to get their message to the people..not its just for advertisers to sell junk.

Michigan has indeed had some serious postal delivery problems in recent years. It's not a good situation.

I always prefer USPS,
However strange things just happened last week , normally, the priority packages from orchid vendors come at exact the 3rd day from the day they put them into the system. Last week , the package came the 4th day , because they decided to route it through the MID-PROCESSING CENTER in New York . Then this even weirder , a Media Mail package sent to me from Hawaii takes one day to show up at my door (it supposes to take at least one month from Hawaii by boat)

I have my own horror story for shipping an orchid to Hawaii. Part of the problem in mid-Michigan is that they eliminated the central office in Lansing, so everything has to go to Grand Rapids, even if the mail is supposed to go to East Lansing.

It's not just Michigan. The USPS here is atrocious and
packages can end up just about anywhere within ten miles
of my house. I've had to drive up and down our rural
road from house to house to find packages several times.
I prefer to pay extra for UPS or FedEx two day rather
than tour the area looking for my orchids.

BTW, I agree about the damned junk mail either paper or email.
I get dozens of catalogs and I emailed almost all of them to stop
sending me stuff. I still get a mail box full every day.

I am fortunate that my recycle bin is en route from the mailbox to the house...

USPS here is ok.

I used to have a paper roller which made tight paper logs for the fireplace. They turned out pretty nice and burned for a long time when we took the time to do it right. We burned a lot of junk mail that way.

I'm sure USPS service varies greatly both regionally and locally. I consistently have much bigger problems with UPS and especially FedEx. USPS deals with many restrictions and mandates that private carriers don't have to. Many rural areas have only USPS service, and the majority of shipping by small businesses goes by USPS because it is their only viable option. Even UPS uses USPS as the final delivery carrier in many cases. Eliminating those services would be a huge disruption. Private carriers can pick and choose their services and customers and rates; USPS must provide service to everyone, everywhere, all the time, with no direct or timely control of basic rates. They couldn't refuse the junk mail even if they wanted to, but that income subsidizes other services that they must provide anyway. Overall, I find their service pretty impressive given the restrictions.

USPS is definitely still needed. I agree that they do a remarkable job most of the time, but there is plenty of room for improvement. Recent cost-cutting measures have been detrimental to service. The changes they have made have not been well-thought-out nor well-implemented.

I credit Congress for a lot of the USPS woes... They mandate that the pension program be 100% fully funded, and considering how good it is, it's a wonder they can stay afloat at all.

No doubt, Ray. Congress, backed by big money sponsors, has been engaged for some time in a concerted campaign to drive USPS out of business. One of the things they have done is to force the USPS to pre-fund the present value of 75 years of its pension and health-benefit fund. They passed the law in 2006 and gave them ten years to accomplish this mandate. It was an unrealistic and impossible demand and has caused all manner of difficulties. Needless to say, they won't meet the ten year deadline, and as a result the payments Congress has mandated may be restructured next year to allow them more time. It will also drag out the financial woes of the USPS even longer.

Lanmark said:

No doubt, Ray. Congress, backed by big money sponsors, has been engaged for some time in a concerted campaign to drive USPS out of business. One of the things they have done is to force the USPS to pre-fund the present value of 75 years of its pension and health-benefit fund. They passed the law in 2006 and gave them ten years to accomplish this mandate. It was an unrealistic and impossible demand and has caused all manner of difficulties. Needless to say, they won't meet the ten year deadline, and as a result the payments Congress has mandated may be restructured next year to allow them more time. It will also drag out the financial woes of the USPS even longer.

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That is what I heard too, about the pension/health benefit that other mailing/shipping companies bribing congress to drive USPS out of business so they can swallow it .
No doubt that once USPS is out of business , we will pay dearly for the cost of using other companies .

Hien said:

That is what I heard too, about the pension/health benefit that other mailing/shipping companies bribing congress to drive USPS out of business so they can swallow it .
No doubt that once USPS is out of business , we will pay dearly for the cost of using other companies .

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We already do. UPS and FedEx are way more expensive than USPS.

SlipperFan said:

We already do. UPS and FedEx are way more expensive than USPS.

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Perhaps that is the reason they are more keen to kill USPS