Mine bring the package up to the house if it won’t fit in the box. They bring the fly predators up even though they do fit in the box. Guess I’m lucky. The clerks at both offices (big one in town and small rural one) are all very nice too. They’ll even find you a box and tape it shut if you need one.
UPS won’t pick up from my house. Oh, they say they will, but they don’t. Husband uses FedEx (his have to go overnight, first morning delivery), I use USPS for packages. Never had a problem.
At least you’re getting your packages somehow, though I don’t blame you for being thoroughly molten!!! I ordered a saddle from Nevada. It was shipped April 23rd. Tracking did not show up at all until last week, when it indicated it was stuck in Florida! FLORIDA??? It stayed there for a long time, no tracking updates at all. Saddle arrived today, May 11th. Seller and I BOTH thought the thing was lost, called Post Offices on BOTH ends. PO pretty much said “Not Their Problem”. Makes me wonder…does PO stand for Post Office, or P****D OFF!!!
Usually it’s not someone who is empowered to act though, just the weekend crew.
I can SO empathize with you, but have no solution.
When we first moved here, we had the world’s BEST mailman. If he was delivering something perishable & I was down at the barn, he’d drive down there to give it to me. And when I was injured & on crutches, he (after I answered the door obviously) came in & put the mail on the counter. (Probably against the law, but really - who cared? Not me on my crutches.) We’d shoot the breeze, & once I found out that he & his wife enjoyed wine, every Xmas I’d gift him with several bottles of different nice wines - & always a sparkling one for New Years.
When he retired, it all went to hell in a handbasket. We had packages either left on the ground in the grass next to our mailbox (which is about 1/4 mile or so from the house) or so tightly jammed into the box that once we actually pulled the mailbox off its post getting the box out. Sometimes the nitwit would bring a package up to the house, but put the rest of the mail out in the mailbox. And, like others here, there’s nothing more irritating than getting that “You weren’t home” slip, when you know you WERE home & that you’re pretty much ALWAYS home, but now you have to drive into town to pick up whatever. Oddly enough, every Xmas this moron puts a Xmas card from herself & her family in our mailbox - as in, “it’s that time of year - gift me”. No way. Guess someone must’ve kicked her in the head this past Xmas, because all of a sudden she’s suddenly stepped up her service. Time will tell. 
I absolutely despise the post office.
I once sold a pair of breeches on Ebay to someone who needed them within two weeks. They were to go to Ohio. I live in Michigan. I included a tracking number. Where does the package go? It was like a “Flat Stanley” that you may have sent out in grade school. The package went all. over. the. fricken. United. States. Yeah, those breeches got to visit Wisconsin, Tennessee, Kentucky, I think even Georgia, before finally ending up in Ohio to a not-so-happy buyer. Luckily, they too could see each destination the breeches ended up at and didn’t give me a bad rating due to the time it took for them to receive them, but I still felt bad. I also purchased a text book for class that I needed ASAP and the book was sent via SmartMail (I think?) which meant UPS had the package and then gave it to the post office, who sat on it (mind you, 10 MINUTES FROM MY HOUSE) for 8 business days!!! I even called to see if I could pick it up. My response? “Sorry, ma’am, we do not know where your package is.”
DH works for UPS and although it is a little more expensive, they provide a free tracking number, free insurance (up to $100 I think), and I never have to worry about my package being delivered to someone else (which did happen with the post office after a very expensive Dover purchase - status said “delivered” when in fact it wasn’t, but I had to “prove” it with the PO- luckily neighbors were honest - well, they DID open the box but they probably had no idea what to do with Sport Medicine Boots and a fly mask, haha- so they did bring it to me).
Unless I am ordering something under $20 I will NEVER use the post office. They seem to play the rules to their liking and they never seem to want to assume responsibility.
[QUOTE=ThisTooShallPass;6308904]
Why Monday? Even my very rural little PO is open on Saturday mornings. You may have to knock on the door, but someone is there, as USPS does still deliver mail on Saturdays.[/QUOTE]
Open 9-11, nobody in charge, and tomorrow is farrier day.
That whole tracking thing is a joke. USPS adopted it but really didn’t have a clue what they were trying to do, so most parcels are recognized by the employees by the address and the tracking isn’t linked to that. So they really don’t know where it is, except that it’s in a great big pile of other parcels with tracking numbers. They know they got it, and scanned it, and when it was scanned but that’s about it. Now if we all got barcodes in our mailboxes they could be a little bit more accurate about where they delivered it to but I can’t see that working too well either.
A friend of mine sent me this on Fb http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwCr8vAXtJs&feature=relmfu . It’s interesting but supposedly leaves out a lot and doesn’t explain why stuff can vanish.
I live in a neighborhood… my mailbox is at the end of my driveway. Our mail lady is beyond lazy. If we have a car parked on the road and she can’t get to our mailbox in her little truck she just doesn’t deliver our mail that day. We have multiple cars… sometimes my husband moves one car to the road in the morning so he can get a different car out, but doesn’t always move the other car back into the driveway. This has been frequent this week so I swear this week we haven’t gotten any mail (except the day I happened to get home right as she was coming and I took the mail from her)… because she WILL NOT get out of her truck to walk 5 feet and put it in the mailbox. Of course this is the same woman who will CRAM a package into our mailbox so she doesn’t have to deliver it to the door… with no idea what could possibly be is said package.
Once a week we get other peoples mail in our box or else we get our mail that has obviously been else where. Our mailman is a bit of a loose cannon so care is needed in how it is handled. He is also a drunk and sadly each time I’ve seen him swerving across the road the sheriff’s department has been busy on emergency calls. There are two counties involved so hard to catch him. He will bring packages to the house when they won’t fit in the mailbox though.
I, too,have a long drive up to the house from the road. I also have a gate. Mail person will not open the gate and drive up. As far as packages go, she and I have finally reached an agreement. If the package is small enough to fit in a garbage bag, she’ll hang it on the gate, if not, tough. Better than nothing. But imagine my surprise when an item I ordered on line, and paid for UPS shipping was instead diverted to the post office for delivery!!! And of course, I got the pink slip for that one. I was really put out. I watch the UPS truck drive by my gate almost every day, so why was my package diverted? No on could answer that question for me.
A local vet was so upset that no one would deliver his packages the 1/4 mile from the road to the house that he installed a large locking container at the road for them to drop packages in. Once the package was put in the driver snapped the lock and it was secure. Not a bad idea.
I adore our mail carrier. She rocks. If we’re not home, she puts packages on the doorstep or inside the front door if it’s wet out. Was most depressed when she was out for several weeks for an on the job injury. finally figured out how the local post office handled her absence. No replacement coverage, they just decided that we didn’t need daily mail delivery. My mail was being delivered only two to three times per week during her absence. No mail days were followed by double mail days.
We live on a road that comes out onto the feeder road of IH10 two miles north of the city limits, not way out in the country. The house is one mile from IH10, and the post office says they will not deliver mail (even special delivery or express mail) more than .8 mile. I have to drive into town whenever we get a package if it will not fit into one of the two small package boxes in the cluster of mailboxes at the end of the road near the highway. I asked the carrier if she could call me when she is at the mailboxes and I will come get the packages. Sometimes she does, sometimes she doesn’t.
The postal carriers outside the city limits are private contract workers. They drive their own vehicles and pretty much do (or do not do) whatever they like. Attention to detail is not one of their strong points. We have a terrible problem with mail frequently being put in the wrong boxes. I always check the mail before I leave the mailboxes so I can either put the mis-delivered mail in the correct boxes or put it in the outgoing mail slot so they can resort it. This happens almost every week. Some of my neighbors are not so thoughtful. I just received an invitation to my out-of-town old high school friend’s daughter’s wedding yesterday. The wedding was April 7. A neighbor had the invitation put into their mailbox in error back in mid March and it sat on their kitchen counter for well over a month before they remembered to take it back and put it in our mailbox! Needless to say, I was not happy and my friend probably was somewhat offended thinking I just ignored it! I also have occasionally not received bills or bank statements, so now I do almost everything I can do online rather than trust the mail service.
Like many others these days, I try to deal with the post office as little as possible. I know the internet has really hurt the USPS, but their increased rates and reduced customer service levels will be their real downfall. I guess they just are not seeing or caring that they are losing business because of the poor service they provide (or do not provide at all). FedEx and UPS are here almost every day (my business office is also on our property, but on the other side of the property from our house) and they are so much easier to work with.
The USPS sucks. Plain and simple. I would pay double the price to have a package delivered via UPS.
As someone said earlier, it really is no secret why the organization is in such financial trouble. I wouldn’t mind doing away with them all together and having everything either delivered electronically or via UPS.
Our rural delivery lady is very nice also. I don’t have a driveway anywhere near that long but she’ll come in and bring packages to the barn or house. Now the PO staff is a different story. I had a run in with them over the winter trying to get a package mailed right before their sacrosanct lunch hour began when all the assistants leave for lunch at the same time! The lady locked the door in my face while I was carrying a large awkward package and told me to use the self serve thing which I could not do for that package it turned out. I was furious! My thread ranting over that got deleted as it was more OT, but I feel your pain.
Like most of the folks on here I try to use USPS as little as possible. I was outraged recently at the “bailout” that the US gov’t was trying to do for the PO. Seriously, if they are as incompetent as all of this, why in the heck spend US taxpayers money to keep an institution like this functioning at this level when the current incompetence is to this point??? Let them scale back and do what they do best…that is what they were planning to do but OH NO, the Senate has to bail them out of their impending bankruptcy. I’m so tired of crap like this.
The USPS is a dinosaur and its demise is being hasten by burdensome labor contracts and poor management. The government should let the private sector compete with it. Those politically motivated bailouts are atrocious and an assault on the taxpayers.
We have our packages shipped by other means whenever possible. It would be nice if we could do the same for letters.
Our drive is about 300’ and the postlady delivers packages that don’t fit into the roadside box to our house. While she’s very nice and on the ball, the people at the downtown post office are, well, kind of up there on the duh-h-h list.
One way the USPS could help reduce costs is by making deliveries on alternating days to residential and rural areas. Half would receive mail on M-W-F and the others on T-T-S.
[QUOTE=Frank B;6309796]
The USPS is a dinosaur and its demise is being hasten by burdensome labor contracts and poor management. The government should let the private sector compete with it. Those politically motivated bailouts are atrocious and an assault on the taxpayers.
We have our packages shipped by other means whenever possible. It would be nice if we could do the same for letters.
Our drive is about 300’ and the postlady delivers packages that don’t fit into the roadside box to our house. While she’s very nice and on the ball, the people at the downtown post office are, well, kind of up there on the duh-h-h list.
One way the USPS could help reduce costs is by making deliveries on alternating days to residential and rural areas. Half would receive mail on M-W-F and the others on T-T-S.[/QUOTE]
Occasionally when I need to mail a letter that ABSOLUTELY NEEDS to get there within a certain time frame, I’ll actually stick the letter (in an envelope) in a padded envelope and mail it UPS. I’ve heard that doing so is against the rules or something… but I don’t care. USPS sucks. :lol:
you pay for it…dearly, so screw the rules,a s long as the letter does not spontaniously self combusts…
I live in a house behind another house but it’s clearly marked EVERYWHERE because I went so far as to make hand painted signs to show we are here. The post office regular delivery guy is great we get our mail, he gets a day off, forget it. I had mail sent back as “unoccupied” because the house next door was empty. I get mail from multiple addresses on my street all the time. The only advice I can offer is one a lock package box, like apartments use and give the mail carrier a key. Hopefully they’d use it to drop off packages at the road if your drive way is deemed too long (aka lazy carrier). Also don’t be afraid to file a claim which has worked for me to get the attention of the local post office when they start screwing up too much.
I’ve had same bad experiences with postal postal workers, for years; I had a large box shipped, with new horse equipment in it stolen by postal workers. Thank God I decided to get the insurance on it & I did manage to recoup $200 on that, for the cost of an Indian rug that was also in the box. The horse equipment & whatever else was my loss, though, since I’d not saved receipts.
Then there’s, based upon experience, the concern that letters sent won’t “get there” & the regular putting of others’ mail in my box, uncorrected after umpteen face-to-face talks, & visits to the post office & filling out forms? No improvement.
Where do postal postal workers COME from? Church lady sez, “You mean Satan?”
I don’t know about other areas, but in our East TN community the RFD drivers are indendant contractors, not USPS union workers. The folks in the PO are. There are three counter workers. The two males are quite personable; the female breathes fire on a regular and frequent basis.
Our drive is 500’ long. We have two delivery folks. One will drive up and leave a package at the house or barn. The other will leave us a “pickup slip” and we have to go to town to get it (a 7 mile trip). But the law says that they only have a duty to drop at the box. So if they come to the house or barn that’s “above and beyond.”
USPS has its problems, but I can still send a letter to either Key West or Point Barrow or a soldier in Kandahar or a sailor on a ship off Hong Kong for the same fee. That’s kind of amazing when you think about it. It’s one of the essential “infrastructure” items that knits us together as a nation. It would be a shame to see it fail for any reason.
G.
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