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:
============================================================
- 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
============================================================
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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I fail to see what a single incident has to do with the performance of the USPS. Isn’t this like those who claim a single weather event proves climate change?
FYI – I’ve been receiving and paying bills through the USPS for more than 30 years and cannot recall a single missed bill or undelivered payment. To me, that’s pretty damn good. Does my story disprove your story?
A1SteakSaucy,
I’ve noticed several “single incidents” in the article and thread.
You’ve been fortunate. I sincerely hope your good luck holds.
Don’t know whether this is true, but still a good story:
The internal mail delivery in a New York office was so poor that to ensure that a document would travel from one floor to the other reliably, folks would let FedEx do the job. It was more “efficient” to send something to Memphis and back overnight than to rely on the incompetents in the company’s internal mail department.
The modern post office make me chuckle when I remember working on some local history projects in college and way back when, there was a morning post delivery and an afternoon delivery.
When my son was serving in Iraq I was thankfull for the USPS and their flat rate package deal. I would go to the Post Office, grab a bunch of their boxes, fill one up and then ship it off, sometimes two or more per week. I think the limit was twenty pounds and I don’t recall the cost but it seemed cheap. It typically took ten days from rural Indiana to the COB he was at somewhere north of Baghdad. I’m sure the military did the heavy lifting of the logistics after the USPS dropped it off with the Army. Still, as a worried parent, it was a morale boost on both ends and it scored some points for the USPS wih me.
I wish the political idiots would get out of the way and let the USPS operate in manner that makes business sense and quit using it as a political tool.
@scott roney
“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.”
In Wisconsin, there are rural communities that don’t get home delivery from USPS (only PO box service) but do get home delivery from UPS. My mothers parents lived in such a community.
The contention that USPS provides better service than the private carries may be true for some rural communities, but it is far from universally true.
A few years ago, I ordered a 2012 calendar from a bookseller in New York (I live between Baltimore and DC–for those not familiar with our geography, the New York sender was 400 miles northeast of us, 600 km). It was sent by USPS. Within one day, it arrived at a post office in New Jersey, about 200 miles northeast of me. It then proceeded down to Jacksonville, Florida (700 miles south of us, the other side from NJ), arriving there a week later. Then it came back up my way, to a sorting center in Capitol Heights MD, 15 miles from me. From there you’d expect it to arrive at my doorstep the next day, right? Wrong! Next it went to Sandston Virginia, a hundred miles further from us, in the opposite direction.
It did eventually arrive, and fortunately before 2013.
Californians avoid high taxes by buying from out of state. Use the money saved to rush the shipping. Even slow shipping might come faster, as you and I have found.
Price of shipping at USPS just went up again.
Jim sez: “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…”
Rural areas are not profitable for package delivery for the obvious reason that there is not enough business concentrated in a geographical area to make it profitable. Long routes for a single package don’t pay the cost of delivery. This is why in many locations across the country the private delivery services depend on the USPS to make the final delivery! People on this blog are probably not aware of that because right-wingers don’t like the idea that privatization is not ALWAYS the answer. And as far as all that junk mail clogging your box, it actually helps economically because it’s more revenue.
Not that long ago (late eighties to early nineties) I lived on a remote western Pacific island (an Australian External Territory) and much of the mail came on the ship (sometimes it got wet :)). That was “Surface Mail”, which is pretty much defunct now as bulky stuff goes by air on a freight plane, apart from mail to remote islands with tiny aerodromes. Airmail came by air, obviously, and had priority as the airline was a “Royal Mail Carrier”. That airline went bust, and the new one was not a “Royal Mail Carrier” so they’d only carry mail if it could fit on the plane (passengers and their luggage having higher priority, obviously). The next highest priority was Air Freight, which was prohibitively expensive. At times, the backlog of airmail got so big that it was loaded on the ship, so it was not unusual for 4 or 5 months to elapse! This was even more recently as I went back twice, once in the early naughties and again in middle naughties. The mail service, while frustrating, was far better in the eighties, but of course by the naughties there were other avenues for mail (email, fax machine at home etc). Talking of letters doing the rounds, I had one airmail letter that went through two Melanesian island groups before finally landing at my island (much closer to Australia, where the letter had originated). It was covered in rubber stamp imprints. I suspect I still have the envelope somewhere.
Why complaining about the parcel delivery?
I once ordered a dish washer online just 10 one week before we went into our holidays. So I made a bankwire (online) Friday evening to accelerate the delivery. Following Tuesday I call the to ask when the washer will be shipped. The company told me that the money did not show up on their account yet.
I was in there books finally on Wednesday and thy shipped the dish washer. I took no 24 hours and the dish washer was delivered to my front door. To sum it up: bankwire 5 days, delivery (distance 400 miles) of a 2ft x 2ft x 3ft parcel with about 110 pounds: 20 hours, isn’t this sick?
OK, somebody has got to stand up for the logistics business. There is some shoddy practice out there but…
How much are you going to pay your self while you walk 178 miles? The USPS ain’t just carry your stuff and how much was the postage now?
I think you are missing on the Pony Express time of: 2.37 days or 56.88 hours. Looks like you based it on 75 miles per day, but that is only the riders time. Different riders continued with the package. From the little book you referenced. Page – 40 bottom
“This point, one hundred and eighty-five miles out of Sacramento had been reached in fifteen hours and twenty minutes, ins spite of the Sierra Divide where the snow drifts were thirty deep and where the Company had to keep a drove of pack mules moving in order to keep the passageway clear.”
Please adjust the time for the Express, but remember they only carried letters and not packages.
This is what happens when I order from CA:
March 17, 2014 , 9:08 am Out for Delivery BAINBRIDGE, GA 39817
March 17, 2014 , 8:58 am Sorting Complete BAINBRIDGE, GA 39817
March 17, 2014 , 8:44 am Arrival at Post Office BAINBRIDGE, GA 39817
March 17, 2014 Depart USPS Sort Facility JACKSONVILLE, FL 32099
March 16, 2014 , 9:52 pm Processed through USPS Sort Facility JACKSONVILLE, FL 32099
March 16, 2014 Depart USPS Sort Facility SAN JOSE, CA 95101
March 16, 2014 Electronic Shipping Info Received
March 15, 2014 , 10:07 pm Processed at USPS Origin Sort Facility SAN JOSE, CA 95101
March 15, 2014 , 8:52 pm Accepted at USPS Origin Sort Facility FREMONT, CA 94539
Order from South FL and it will take a week or more to go 500 miles
re: scott roney says March 16, 2014 at 8:51 pm
… Rural areas are not profitable for package delivery for the obvious reason that …
Somehow, I don’t think the entirety, or meaning of my post made the grade with scott; maybe I just don’t ‘write well’ … Now, in striking contradiction to what he writes above UPS (and I assume FEDEX) *do* deliver ‘packages’ (you did write ‘packages’ above – no, scott?) to ‘rural’ areas. Maybe you were instead thinking ‘regular, daily mail delivery’ vs ‘packages’ at the fixed cost of a first-class mail ‘stamp’, but, that is not what you wrote …
scott roney seems to be thinking ‘well within the box’ on this, reading/repeating the well-known mantra or orthodoxy of the ‘mail business’ (thanks for the little bit ‘o history and reasoning, scott, but, necessary only to perhaps those totally unawares and under the age of, say, 12?) Stay in that ‘box’ scott; the world outside it can be scary for a ‘99% percenter’ … you *do* know, scott, that the FSA (Free Stuff Army) gets direct deposit of their EBT card funds nowadays? There isn’t the ‘dependence’ on the mails like there once was (vis-a-vis ‘waiting for the welfare check to come in’).
.
The brevity of the post and my time available to devote to this rather tedious matter somewhat necessitated the generalization of delivery to “rural” posts. So good job you busted me! I will stand by my assertion that there are indeed many areas all of which are found in the larger demographic colloquially known as “rural” that are in fact not profitable and not serviced by the private carriers. BTW, I am not enamored of government for government sake. If private enterprise can provide the service, by all means it is usually the more economically efficient means. I still stand by my assertion that there are many things that their are indeed many things that fall under the broad category of “the public interest” that only a public institution is able to provide. I suggest you read some of the reporting on what Duke Energy has done to the state of North Carolina and its extensive polluting with toxic coal ash. Do you enjoy potable water? Do you need it? Do you enjoy clean rivers and lakes to recreate in/on? Their are literally millions of people who highly value those things and it is in fact in the public’s interest for the state of NC to have an effective EPA to monitor the activities of private enterprise who are not interested in spending the economic resources necessary to protect “the environment” The oil industry is another easy example to cite. Your non-sequitur / ad-hominem has no nexus with the discussion. So I’ll return the ball to your court and say that only a moron firmly ensconced in the bubble would repeat the Faux News mythology of SNAP recipients dining on lobster and seafood. The national average monthly SNAP benefit is $133.00 – horrors! Those lazy lay-abouts are the recipients of our hard-earned money confiscated by a profligate and bloated federal bureaucracy to a bunch of dead beat moms to damned lazy to get a job and earn that lobster-fest on their own like we do! lol C’mon Please Jim up your game a bit will you, because repeating Fox Noise sound bites are the first and most significant sign of a failed mind. BTW moron, rates of SNAP usage correlates with the unemployment rate. The unemployment rate correlates with the “normal” business cycle. The last downturn in the business cycle AKA the recession officially started in (yeah I’m going to say it) in December 2007 after six years of a Republican administration. Only a Faux News watching fool would believe the SNAP mythology purveyed by conservatives. Yawn………
Ah yes, good old fashioned “post office bashing.” I find this sort of thing amusing. The only, and I do mean ONLY department that directly, every day “serves” the US citizen, and it is almost always the subject of abject bashing. “They lost $5 billion dollars last year. Their benefits are too good.” And of course, we always get the bashing on slow service.
Two thoughts. Tell me, how much money did DHS make for the government last year? You say they cost the government $100 billion or so? Yet you expect the post office to show a profit or break even. You get what you pay for, accept in the case of government services, that is. You hate to pay the post office for anything but you don’t mind getting slipped a feel at the airport or irradiated to further improve your health.
Finally, I can guess your package was shipped economy ground, right? Too bad they didn’t use a similarly priced service of the post office and used priority. It gets there in the same time it does by UPS, but costs a little less. But of course, most companies will use parcel post knowing that you “expect the post office to be slow anyway.” Bash away, though, and maybe someday you will be lucky enough to not have the service available at all.
re: scott roney says March 16, 2014 at 8:51 pm
Lets look at, and compare, a few different utilities/services you and I depend on each day.
1) Electricity – generated and delivered (all exc for a few areas) by ‘private’ (non-govt) business (and/or industry).
2) Food – grown by ‘private’ business, transported by ‘private’ carriers, sold by ‘private’ business.
3) gasoline, diesel (motor vehicle fuel) – exploration, refinement, transportation, sales by private business
4) Mail – oh no, only GOVERNMENT may supply this!
– – – – – – – – – – – – –
A little history for scott, who may or may not be a native ‘merican, per wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Free_Delivery
Rural Free Delivery (RFD) – a service which began in the United States in the late 19th century, to deliver mail directly to rural farm families.
Prior to RFD, individuals living in more remote homesteads had to pick up mail themselves at sometimes distant post offices or pay private carriers for delivery. The proposal to offer free rural delivery was not universally embraced. Private carriers and local shopkeepers feared a loss of business. The postal service began experiments with Rural Free Delivery as early as 1890.
– – – – – – – – – – –
Shazamm!
.
Tom O says March 17, 2014 at 11:21 am
Ah yes, good old fashioned “post office bashing. …
AS IF you know the intent and mindset of every poster posting here; good show, Tom!
.
1. USPS employees do not work for the U.S. Government.
2. If you had PAID for pony express shipment, it would have cost you a months salary!
Nah. Before they separated the “USPS” from the government, the promise – mostly filled – was next day mail to anywhere in the continental USA. And that was when sorting was done by hand mostly (if not completely). All the modernizations haven’t done a thing for getting mail to its target, and especially the privatization.
We didn’t NEED tracking back then, because things got there so much better,
Postal rates didn’t go up like they have since then, either.
In addition, when I was a young kid, in the early 1950s, mail was delivered twice a day within cities. A First Class envelope cost about 2 cents then. Mail posted in the morning mail would be delivered in the afternoon mail.
The service given by the then-government-run U.S. Post Office was much better than the later USPS. The service has been in decline since they privatized it.
The curse of two hubs. Chico is just far enough away from Hayward that the package needed to touch two hubs.
I wouldn’t depend on UPS either – a letter for Saturday delivery got left in the sorting hub, then went on a mop-up flight across the continent and by truck and boat to destination rather than by airline. UPS is not swift and does not hustle to catch up.
My dad used to comment when we lived in Santa Cruz, that the local Post Office had to send all the mail over the hill to get sorted, including mail destined for the our town.