<p>I don’t post a lot but I am so upset. I sent my son a care package after an emergency appendectomy in college using the flat rate shipping boxes from the post office. I did it in the past with no problem. This time the box is lost and there is no way to trace it. Think twice about sending anything that you cannot trace. </p>
<p>Any suggestions for alternative inexpensive shipping techniques that are reliable?</p>
<p>Doesn’t the post office have Online tracking option for $.70? They offer it to me all the time…</p>
<p>The box may turn up. My university lost an envelope with $200 cash in it for me once for a month, and they lost a textbook for an entire semester before they found it. I got really mad at the postal service and it was my school’s fault.</p>
<p>Wow, I am an idiot. We sent it through the mail-room in my husband’s office so I didn’t know that there is a tracking option available if you do it online. I also see that $100 insurance comes automatically with priority mail so I am going to pursue a claim. Thanks for the tip.</p>
<p>Check out FedEx ground. You can set up an account, print the labels from home, and get tracking anytime you want. Packages to my D about 800 miles away routinely get there two days after I drop them, and since our local Fedex/Kinkos is open 24 hours, you can drop the package anytime you want. Tremendously less hassle than the post office, and less cost for many packages, particularly since Fedex includes tracking and $100 of insurance on every package.</p>
<p>My wife often sends brownies to our son, USPS and she pays for tracking. I give her a hard time for tracking a box of brownies but she often has to call S and tell him to pick up the brownies because they had been delivered.</p>
<p>Every institution…even those with near perfect reliability has their off days. </p>
<p>I’ve experienced lost mail I was expecting/sent off…but overall…the USPS has been extremely reliable. </p>
<p>Last flat rate packages I received from them was 2 used corporate laptops a friend’s company was going to trash until I called dibs on them. Arrived within 5 days and am currently typing this very message on one of them. </p>
<p>Only issues the laptops had were ones which preceded their being sent via USPS flat rate package boxes.</p>
<p>I have NEVER had a problem with the many, many flat rate boxes I sent our kiddos and others using the flat rate boxes. It is a great deal for many of us.</p>
<p>knock wood…have never had a problem with flat rate boxes either. If it’s something valuable, I do purchase the online tracking. </p>
<p>Is your S in a dorm? Maybe someone else picked it up?</p>
<p>USPS has tracking as well as delivery confirmation.
The flat rate boxes are also priority mail I think, but they don’t deliver on weekends. Also since cutbacks they have had to consolidate post offices so everything seems to take longer.</p>
<p>Our local post office is open 24/7 to the scale & label printer, so it makes it pretty handy.</p>
<p>Glad to know everyone else hasn’t had a problem. Neither had I until now. I guess I am frantic because I made the mistake of putting his drivers license (renewal) in the package because I had no problems in the past. I just wanted to warn people not to blithely assume that the package would arrive. At least track it (I wish the mail room had told us about that option). I mistakenly assumed priority mail was automatically trackable. So, please just be cautious is my message here.</p>
<p>PS My friend’s husband works for the post office and swears they aren’t all bad!</p>
<p>Also, packages get delivered to on-campus post office. He gets an email when they arrive, but he has been checking every other day anyway, to no avail. The mail room at my husband’s office swears that two weeks is not unusual for these packages, but the post office claims “2-3 days” It has been two weeks, but I am still hoping it shows up sometime next week.</p>
<p>I suspect you can get duplicate license renewal docs at your local motor vehicles department. I’d give it a few more days, as there was a holiday on Monday. I have had flat rate boxes delivered as quickly as 2-3 days and as long as several weeks. Sometimes the one taking longer to deliver was physically closer to where I mailed it than the one that arrived 2-3 days later!</p>
<p>Good luck to your S in healing. Hopefully he has the long summer to rest up.</p>
<p>Hope it’s found soon.</p>
<p>I’ve discovered if I get up early on a Saturday and bake, and get it in the mail by noon (when our Post Office closes), when I send it in the priority mail flat-rate box she receives it on Monday! We are about 1,500 miles away. It’s never quite that fast if I mail it any other day of the week.</p>
<p>I don’t understand. Certainly the post office itself must have some kind of tracking on packages it handles since this stuff is all automated now. Are you saying it’s just that you yourself can’t track it online like can be done with UPS packages unless you pay the extra fee? The PO must have a way to know where the pkg was last sent from and whether it was received at whatever the intermediary facility was.</p>
<p>We were told that there is no way to track the package. It was mailed from a company mail room (with a postage meter). My friend’s husband who works at the post office says he can’t help me without a tracking number. </p>
<p>@college-query–I got up and baked on Sunday, thinking I would mail first thing Monday morning. Included a batch of cookies for the roommate that picked him up from the hospital. He already left school by now.</p>
<p>MORAL of the story–always pay extra and get a tracking number!!! If my husband had printed the label online it automatically includes a confirmation number. But he didn’t want to bother creating an online account and the mail room said, “don’t bother” just do a normal label. UGH!!!</p>
<p>The US Postal Service gets a bad rap, unfairly. Even when I have experienced the ocassional instance of poor service, a fast letter fired off to the regional or district supervisor has gotten me a courteous reply (including a phone call) and the desired solution.</p>
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<p>Yes, that would be highly unusual. Been sending flat-rate boxes to the kids for several years now, and only 1 package took 3 days. All of the others were delivered promptly to the college mail room in two days. (Now in a couple of cases, the college mail room was backed up and the box sat on campus for an extra day or two before kiddo was allowed to pick it up.)</p>
<p>btw: We live in SoCal and both kids attend eastern colleges. One college is in a city, whereas the other one is in a rural town.</p>
<p>^^ That’s been our experience as well - sending flat rate packages to the other side of the country (major city to major city) has taken surprisingly short times to arrive - 2-3 days.</p>
<p>OP - If the pkg is sent by taking it to the PO but nothing else special is done, does the PO have the ability to track it or does one need to pay extra for that? It’s still not making sense to me since once it’s in the PO system it seems that they’d have a way to track it even if they don’t offer it to the consumer online without the extra fee. Maybe it’s the ‘once it’s in the PO system’ part that was an issue if it sat in your H’s mailroom for a week or something.</p>
<p>I always use those flat rate boxes and never had any problem. The only hitch is the college post office system. They can totally make getting those packages/letters pokey slow and unreliable.</p>
<p>Is it possible that the college system is messed up, due to the holiday and end of year?</p>