I love USPS. Like Social Security, Medicare and even the IRS, it is a public good that reliably provides a service or benefits to an enormous number of beneficiaries in a way private, bottom-line oriented systems won’t and can’t.
Years ago I had a small business on eBay selling used clothing. I always relied on USPS over Fed Ex or UPS to ship sales. It was cheaper and more reliable than these private shippers that boast their advanced tracking features and shipping speed. I also buy whatever I can used from eBay and other online second-hand retailers. This second hand stuff is overwhelmingly shipped USPS. This has always meant anything shipped from a nearby state would reach me a day or two after being shipped. Things from California might take 3-4 days, priority mail. I can remember only one item ever lost in the mail, and that was something that shipped within days of the Anthrax scare in 2001. It was a second -hand designer coat, which I received in the mail two years later.
Until now. Like everyone else, I have experienced mail delays beginning around the time of the COVID-related lockdowns in March. Which wasn’t surprising, as the Postal Service has for years been cash-starved and COVID stressed it further, with homebound people more reliant on mail-order. These things would explain delays due to resource issues. They wouldn’t explain what I found when I started tracking packages using the USPS tracker.
I thought I’d share these screenshots, which show two packages shipped from New York to Maryland ricocheting back and forth between local post offices and, in one case, traveling from New York to Maryland to South Dakota before returning to bounce around among multiple different local post offices.
This screenshot shows the continued journey of the same package in screenshot above. The package originated in New York on August 7 (not shown). From there it went to Washington DC→ Hyattsville, MD→ Sioux Falls, SD→ Washington, DC→ Hyattsville, MD→ Gaithersburg, MD→ Silver Spring, MD→ Takoma Park, MD→ Silver Spring, MD→ Takoma Park (delivery). This took 7 days.
Here’s a second package, also shipped from New York to Maryland. The route for this package was NY→ New Jersey→ Hyattsville, MD→ Gaithersburg, MD→ Capitol Heights, MD→ Hyattsville, MD→ Gaithersburg, MD→ Takoma Park, MD→ Silver Spring, MD→ Delivery in Takoma Park.
Hyattsville, Capitol Heights, Gaithersburg, Silver Spring, and Takoma Park are reasonably close in to Washington DC; perhaps 40 miles between the two farthest.
Can anyone explain why packages would bounce back and forth among multiple close together USPS facilities, and make a trip between two East Coast states via South Dakota? I assume this has to do with the lack of mail sorters, and can only imagine what this means for the post offices ability to efficiently and accurately handle a huge volume of mail-in ballots.