USPS Shipping Headaches!

Have you ever tried mailing something to yourself?

Everything mostly makes sense except the delay in Denver. It went to Toledo which I assume is the local consolidation point for your zip code, then to Detroit which is probably the regional consolidation point, then to Pontiac to go onto an airplane at Oakland County Intl Airport (6th largest non-passenger airport in US) to fly to Denver.

Why it is delayed in Denver is the question. Everything else is to consolidate mail; kind of like I have to fly to Atlanta, Chicago or Minneanapolis to get to Nebraska from Ohio.

It could be - a lot of mail goes space available freight and so you have to look at where the airlines fly to...

Coin197, the stuff I sent to you was also delayed in Denver hub...imagine this is the regional distribution center. There's your problem. Used to be a rural carrier, have some horror stories! The thing to note is when item came into and left each facility. There is a definite " final exit" timeframe for each USPS facility, small POs to regional. If item come in after that time, may be 20-24 hours before it leaves, not 2 days! That's cause to complain to Postmaster of US, only way to get any action...if enough bad "attaboys", management and employees change!

Can't find it now, but a few years back I've read a particularly hilarious tracking log commentary. [EDIT: found, here it is!]

Basically, some guy from the USA needed to send a package to the Netherlands Antilles, in the Caribbean (that was back in 2010, so they hadn't split yet).

So it arrives at one of the big sorting offices, and they see Netherlands in the address, so it gets sent to the main European office in Paris.
The European office knows that the Netherlands Antilles are in North America (barely), so they send the poor thing to the North American sorting office in Memphis, Tennessee.
The Memphis office sees a package to the Netherlands, and proceeds to send it back to Paris.
The Paris guys are surprised to see it back again, shrug their hands and send it back to Tennessee...

...That's where the known log ends. No idea what happened later (probably a few more hops across the Atlantic).


I've had a fairly similar story happen to me two years ago (and five years ago, another package somehow took 59 days to get from the USA to me - I later checked the tracking for that one, and the log said it arrived in about two weeks, so in that case I really don't know what happened).

And I'm still waiting for that one package with assorted foreign coins I was sent from New Zealand in, IIRC, October - it didn't have a tracking number, because the options that included one were unaffordably expensive for the sender (something along the lines of $35 shipping), so I really have no idea whether it's just shambling it way from NZ, or whether the post just misplaced my notification slip again and mailed it back to sender.
(I should probably PM that guy and ask if he got it back - if it was indeed returned to sender he should have probably gotten it back already.)

Despite all the complaints about the USPS, considering the logistics of sending a piece of mail it's rather very economical.