Ebay Shipping via USPS

[Ischgl99]

not to mention, that each would need to have a lot more employees and equipment.
I don't fully understand the system, since there is a stopping point in Phillipsburg NJ, close enough to me.. it's supposedly a dist point.
Then mail heads to Jersey City and Kearny NJ both HUGE dist systems. I don't understand the JC and Kearny ... why 2.. I don't understand what the phillispburg one does, since it is small, but is considered a dist point. Everything coming into NJ stops there, before continuing on.

Yes, the employees would be a huge cost, and everyone is complaining about finding reliable employees, so that could be a disaster trying to hire for that.
I looked into this a while back when I was curious why all the my local mail had Hartford cancellation stamps on them, what I found made a lot of sense with their regional sorting facilities. Your example with Phillipsburg makes sense if JC and Kearney are larger distribution centers feeding the entire Northeast that then feed the smaller local distribution centers. That is also a transportation center, so easy to put mail on trains or planes that are going to other parts of the country. I’ve had shipments come to me here in CT through Kearny before my distribution center in Hartford, so I’m guessing they handle most, if not all, the mail in this corridor. The volume of mail in the Northeast is huge, JC and Kearny might not have had enough space to handle it in one facility, so they built up two. Just a guess on my part.

 

[jwmay]

I sometimes wonder what the bigger picture is when packages seem to take circuitous routes. But then I figure they’re doing it the best way anybody has figured out so far.

 

[Ischgl99]

I sometimes wonder what the bigger picture is when packages seem to take circuitous routes. But then I figure they’re doing it the best way anybody has figured out so far.

That’s my thought too. What might seem to us like inefficient routes could mean tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars in savings to an organization the size of USPS.

 

[Inferno]

I had a flight earlier this year that I had to go from Portland to Seattle to catch. So the airline booked the flight from Portland, switch planes in Seattle, then fly to LAX.
There was a lot of problems with planes and such so we got bumped to a MUCH later flight.
We ended up on a flight that went from Seattle to Portland and then to LAX.
But there was no direct Portland to LAX flight available at that time.

So. It sounds like the USPS and Airlines use the same broken algorithms to determine "best route" for saving.

 

[mmcmdl]

Fleapay is quite the site . Son sold a scope mount last week for $250 and buyer never paid . Relisted for a higher price and sold in an hour for $280 .00 Already paid . These are on my site but not my items , but we work together .

 

[ltlvt]

That's USPS - impacts all shippers & peoples. I have had shipments go from the regional PO to a different (local) PO to another (local) PO and finally to my PO (and boy did that one get me PO'd!).

And now for the rest of the story. They had to raise the price of a stamp to pay for this stupidity. My old school brain tells me that "Money cannot fix Stupid"!

 

[sdelivery]

All organizations now a days are laden with dead wood at the executive level.
Most being incompetent and just draining the profitability of the organization.
But hey you got to have somewhere for all these college people to go, you promised them high paying jobs for going to college.

 

[bcp38]

The tracking does not always reflect the actual location of the item. It's possible the package never went to OKC, just that it was mis scanned. The way it works is they scan a bar code for a whole pallet/container of packages even if some of the packages were removed but not scanned out

USPS has something like 250 flights a day, outside of the holiday rush they aren't at capacity and making extra trips

 

[projectnut]

I would totally agree that the salaried workforce at GM got the short end of the stick along with the taxpayers and the stockholders. While neither my wife nor I worked for GM at the time we were both in the other two categories. At the time it was hard for me to believe stock that once sold in the $80.00 range suddenly became worthless, and long agreed on pensions were cut to the bone.

We also had a POS 2008 Buick Lucerne at the time. Every time we turned around something else either fell off or broke. The heated windshield washer tank was just removed as part of a recall because they kept starting fires, the blind side traffic detector was replaced twice, the lane keeping feature was a joke, the driver's door handle fell off, the driver's memory seat was repaired 5 times and eventually replaced, and the list goes on and on. With all the problems it had we spent more time in the dealership than we had with any previous car. The final blow was when the service manager at the dealership told us how lucky we were that they were even repairing the vehicle under warranty since it was built under the old GM that was now bankrupt. Until that time, we had always bought GM cars, I even worked in one of their assembly plants while going to school. That was the final straw. We switched brands of vehicles, and I don't see ever going back again.

Learning from the experience of others I was glad I had the option to take a one-time buyout when I retired. I didn't trust the new management of the company I retired from any more than I trusted the management of GM. It turned out to be a good decision. The company was split into 2 new companies, and the one that I would have been working for was sold. They're still in business but struggling compared to where they were 20 years ago.

 

[Ischgl99]

That makes sense, but what does not make sense our mail is sorted in FT Worth Texas. So, it went to Ft Worth then sent to OKC then back to Ft. Worth. This does not make sense. I don't give a damn who made what rules in 1800 or that Congress makes USPS 100% fund their pension fund. I worked for General Motors and when the UAW gave Obama the presidency Obama turned around and screwed the salaried work force out of 70% of our pension. Even though our pension was fully funded. Our lawsuit went all the way to the Supreme Court and the supreme court refused to hear our case. No explanation why just a big fat NO. So much for We the People. Obama bought the election with taxpayer money. And now you ask what Obama has to do with all of this USPS issue. To common folks it does not make sense for postage to go to FT Worth then to OKC then to Ft Worth again. But you can bet your ass someone is making money off of all the stupidity. The same way someone made money screwing the salaried workforce out of 70% of their pension. It does not make sense that our pension was 100% fully funded and we lost 70% of it. Who got the 70%? NUFF SAID

That’s why I refuse to work for any company that has a pension instead of 401k, you are at the mercy of the company you work for and dependent on the pension being properly funded. If you lost 70%, then it wasn’t properly funded even though they said it was. With a 401k, that is my money once vested, and I can move to another company without loosing any of it, or worrying if my company goes bankrupt.

Your package could have been put on the wrong truck, or as bcp38 said, an incorrect scan. It could have also been in a pallet of other mail being sent to OKC and needed to be sorted in OKC and sent back. I sent a package last year to someone in Texas from CT through UPS and it went to Seattle first on the wrong truck by mistake, so that does happen. But I agree with you, if they are intensionally sending mail to Oklahoma and then back to Ft. Worth, then that sounds incredibly inefficient.