This has nothing to do with climate or the usual WUWT fare, though it does shine a light on government inefficiency, so I thought I’d share this for entertainment purposes.
Last Monday, about 1PM on March 10th, I ordered an item on Ebay; an AC to DC power supply brick for a laptop. It was nothing special, weighed under 2 pounds, but I needed it quickly, and so I took advantage of Ebay’s feature where it will list items that are closest to you to choose where to order from.
Being in Chico, CA I chose a vendor in Haward, CA just 178 miles away according to Google Maps with a drive time of just under three hours. See map at right.
Normally by Fed Ex Ground or UPS I get parts from the Bay Area the very next day. Imagine my surprise when tracking the package on USPS.gov. Here is the chronology:
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- Acceptance Mar-10-14, 17:52 PM, NEWARK, CA 94560
- Dispatched to Sort Facility Mar-10-14, 17:55 PM, NEWARK, CA 94560
- Depart USPS Sort Facility Mar-10-14, 00:00 AM, OAKLAND, CA 94615
- Processed at USPS Origin Sort Facility Mar-10-14, 20:06 PM, OAKLAND, CA 94615
- Depart USPS Sort Facility Mar-12-14, 00:00 AM, WEST SACRAMENTO, CA 95799
- Processed through USPS Sort Facility Mar-12-14, 14:31 PM, WEST SACRAMENTO, CA 95799
- Processed through USPS Sort Facility Mar-13-14, 18:43 PM, WEST SACRAMENTO, CA 95799
- Arrival at Post Office Mar-14-14, 04:34 AM, CHICO, CA 95926
- Sorting Complete Mar-14-14, 09:39 AM, CHICO, CA 95926
- Out for Delivery Mar-14-14, 09:49 AM, CHICO, CA 95926
- Delivered Mar-14-14, 12:43 PM, CHICO, CA 95973
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Almost any mode of transportation would have been faster than the United States Postal Service.
Driving: 2 hours, 52 minutes
Train: 3 hours, 7 minutes (Amtrak train plus bus from Oakland to Chico)
Pony Express: 2.37 days or 56.88 hours (Assuming they covered at an average speed of 12 1⁄2 miles per hour (20.1 km/h), including all stops, per this book. with a typical rider doing 75 miles in one day)
Riding a bicycle: 17.8 hours (assuming I could average 10 miles per hour)
USPS: 3 days, 18 hours, 51 minutes, or 90 hours 51 minutes. That gives an average speed for 178 miles of: 1.9592 mph. Even walking would have been faster.
Based on my experience with years of ordering parts from the Bay Area, both FedEx and UPS standard ground service would have had the package in my hands on Tuesday by Noon, a duration of ~18 hours.
No wonder the U.S. Postal Service is going broke with that sort of inefficiency and performance.
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It’s about 3700 mi. LA/NY. At 1.9592mph, that would have taken 1888.5 hrs, or 78 days, 16 hrs, 30 min. 2½ months, and a few days.
I prefer postal services, Itella, in Finland over international couriers like UPS, DHL and Fedex because the former government option is faster and more convenient. I can pick my Itella packets from automates or staff of a local small store near me in the evening but UPSs insists of delivering to my home during office hours and expects that someone is waiting for the delivery.
Overnight deliveries of letters have been a norm for decades. Small packages are delivered as letters. Larger packages take more time if you don’t pay for the express option which can be as fast as 3 hours in Helsinki area.
Mr. Watts, you certainly seem to be living a sorted existence.
It’s more interesting than that. The genisis was a paper the founder wrote while an undergrad at Yale. In an interview, he supposedly said he probably got his “usual C”. I wish any of my average ideas did so well.
My lecturer in medieval church history told us that in the high middle ages (say, 1100 onward), property disputes involving church lands in rural England would be heard in Rome. The turnaround was unbelievably fast by our modern standards of govt. postal and curial processing. He had come across cases referred to Rome from some up-country monasteries in which the decision arrived back in about 4 weeks!
Sorry, but no sympathy. 🙂 Evidently, even now you feel you have done something damn smart by chosing a ‘local’ supplier or else you wouldn’t have made this a ‘news item’ – where the truth of the matter is that you have done something rather dumb.
If you were right, then by that token, it would have been even better, if the supplier was your next door neighbour. But that is not the case. You need a postal hub for distribution nearby. That’s how things get on the way quickly.
If you live in a remote village, it is no good that your vendor resides next door (as long as you use the postal service!!), because he will have a slow and lengthy route to the depot, and the same thing for delivery. It might be quicker to order it from New York, if the Ebay shop is down the street from the local postal hub there…
Nobody’s fault but your own…
In the UK you can get a price for delivery of a parcel, print off the address and barcode for said parcel, off the internet, and get it collected for next day delivery and it is still cheaper and quicker than Royal Mail.
Yep, private enterprise is a brilliant thing.
Commenting from UK. I’d be interested in knowing if there is any price differential between UPS and Fed Ex?
How about south of France to the UK in six weeks. Not sure what happened enroute, but the package ended up with dozens of stamps and stickers on it…..!
And from this one incident we should then generalize to the entire organization? Oh what the hell, why stop there, let’s go whole hog and generalize to the entire federal government! That would be, in a word, moronic. It seems that those with “conservative philosophical” leanings have a hard time understanding the concept of “Public interest.” Which is something that the corporate world categorically cannot pursue as its reason for being. Funny how several small towns in Wyoming, a state regarded as having perhaps the most conservative population of all 50 states, as they began to experience the legion of deleterious effects of fracking reached out to…wait for it…yes the EPA! Because even Wyomingites can figure out that when it comes to the public good of protecting the environment and ameliorating the raping & pillaging conducted by the corporate interests it is indeed the EPA who has as its raison d’etre the Public’s Interest in matters pertaining to the environment (drinkable water, breathable air, arable land).
You will never find a business that is both efficient and subsidised. If you have one you don’t need the other.
Please tell me the name of the business that is in business for the “Public Interest”? You may not agree that it is in the “Public Interest” to subsidize mail service so that those who happen to live in rural areas not serviced by private carriers (for the obvious reason that it is not profitable) may also have mail service. But many will argue that it benefits not only those who directly receive the services but also the wider community as well because a thriving economy supported by reliable mail service in rural communities means less dependence on government aid programs. But if you think its better to go strictly private in mail service and leave millions without it, fine, go ahead and make your case.
I was entertained by watching the progress of Apple purchases.
A few years ago I bought my MacBook, it was built in Western China.
FedEx flew it from there to Anchorage, where it languished a bit, presumably waiting for a customs official to stamp a piece of paper, then to Seattle, on to Portland and then to me.
Overall, it was no slower than items I have had delivered by FedEx from within the US.
Then, at the end of last year I bought an iPad. I watched it fly from the same unpronounceable place in Western China to Beijing, then on to Korea, then to Anchorage, then to Memphis, then to Seattle, Portland, Salem (Oregon) and finally to me.
I know that the traveling salesman problem is a hard one, but this one just takes someone with a barely functional brain and a map 30 seconds to see that something is decidedly wrong.
UPS isn’t much better than USPS. Twice I’ve had packages listed as “out for delivery” but didn’t get them. When I called UPS I was told “the driver forgot it”.
Union Shop
Your package was handled by no less than eleven people. You should be proud and happy that your patronage is supporting them and their families.
If I understand my postmaster correctly, all mail is now funneled through mail “hubs” where the mail is sorted, processed and sent back out for delivery. I live two miles from a state line, so I do a lot of business in the adjoining state, since goods and services are closer to me there than if I do business in the state where I live. If I need to pay someone in that nearby, over the state line town, I mail a letter from my house and it goes to my in-state hub which is 150 miles away. From there it is sent to the adjoining state hub which is 265 miles away and then goes to the town where I obtained the goods and services, which is 125 miles from the adjoining state hub. That poor little letter goes 530 miles before it is placed in the mailbox of the recipient, who lives less than 20 miles from me. It takes me 20 minutes to drive there, but a letter can take up to 4 days. If it is not snowing. Or Christmas. Or whatever.
re: ralphcramdo says March 16, 2014 at 8:32 am
UPS isn’t much better than USPS. Twice I’ve had packages listed as “out for delivery” but didn’t get them. When I called UPS I was told “the driver forgot it”.
And to think those guys are pretty tightly ‘tethered’ to a GPS-driven two-way data device complete with ‘location’ indicator/direction capability … goes to show that the ‘weak link’ may still be the MIL (Man In the Loop) …
United Parcel Service, Inc. : UPS Deploys Next High-Tech Mobile Computer to Drivers
http://www.4-traders.com/UNITED-PARCEL-SERVICE-IN-14758/news/United-Parcel-Service-Inc–UPS-Deploys-Next-High-Tech-Mobile-Computer-to-Drivers-14116188/
UPS drivers go digital with hand-held computers
http://articles.latimes.com/2012/dec/22/business/la-fi-ups-drivers-digital-20121222
The Evolution of the UPS Delivery Information Acquisition Device (DIAD)
http://pressroom.ups.com/Fact+Sheets/The+Evolution+of+the+UPS+Delivery+Information+Acquisition+Device+(DIAD)
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We first ‘went postal’ during the Nixon era. The U.S. ‘Postal’ Service, a crony capitalist ‘enterprise’, supplanted the government-run U.S. Post Office.
The Free-Marketeers of the time forgot an important detail from Econ 101: The reason that businesses are more efficient than government is competition.
When Big Goobermint grants an exclusive monopoly to a private company, that’s the worst of all possible worlds. Nobody is responsible for anything. Whenever there’s a big snafu, the regulators point their fingers at the corporate executives, and the corporate execs point their fingers at the regulators. It’s a classic Mutt and Jeff routine.
Privatization has its place, but ‘going postal’ is the wrong way to do it.
re: cott roney says March 16, 2014 at 6:44 am
… But if you think its better to go strictly private in mail service and leave millions without it, fine, go ahead and make your case.
Gee, like so many other ‘services’ provided by transport/trucking companies for grocery and fuel delivery (to local grocery stores and gas stations), it would see to be ‘a natural’ to pick up this function as well … were it not for the ‘piles’ of non-essential adverts that clog my mail box each week ..
I already buy *stamps* at my local Kroger at *any one* of the checkout lines .. no need to even visit the customer service desk (or local PO which had a long line when I tried earlier that same day)!
Didn’t ‘general stores’ in the past also act as local postal handlers in a not-so-distant past? They didn’t handle as many advert circulars though … need I go on about ‘local’ entrepreneurship in the way of local or even rural paper delivery … seems to me Amazon (and a few other retailers of product) might be interested in this ‘issue’ as well …
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“The USPS is broke not because of inefficiency but because the government requires them to make a $5 billion payment to cover pensions and medical for retirees.”
Last I looked, those supposedly ‘bankrupting’ pension and medical payments only accounted for a third of USPS’ annual losses. They’re broke because letter mail is dying, they usually offer poor service compared to the competition, and they’re heavily unionised so workers are expensive, Which is probably why the US government want them to fund future benefits before they go bust.
re: ShrNfr says March 15, 2014 at 10:45 pm
Mr. Watts, you certainly seem to be living a sorted existence.
Things did seem to get sordid out in this USPS experience …
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Pay check mailed Feb 14. Check arrived March 14. Travel distance: Six kilometers. USPS strikes again. But it got here at least. 🙂
Originally Railroad Express. Us oldies remember–it used to be commonly known.
I have a friend who worked for the USPS for awhile. He finally left because of the constant hassle by the uinion heavies. He couldn’t work slow enought to satisfy them, and would routinely finish his “daily” route in a couple of hours.
Yes we are spoiled here in Australia for postal services. Under 1kg is overnight delivery from Perth to Townsville. 4900klms by road or 8 hours by air. Road transport is typically 5 days from most carriers.
Ric Werme says March 15, 2014 at 6:57 pm
Once upon a time there was a rail carrier, I think called REI? RFE?
Rogerknights says March 16, 2014 at 3:21 pm
Originally Railroad Express. Us oldies remember–it used to be commonly known.
REA maybe?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Express_Agency
The Railway Express Agency (REA) was a national monopoly set up by the United States federal government in 1917. Rail express services provided small package and parcel transportation using the extant railroad infrastructure much as UPS functions today using the road system. The United States government was concerned about the rapid, safe movement of parcels, money, and goods during World War I and REA was its solution to this problem. REA ceased operations in 1975 …
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