<p>On lost post office mails.</p>
<p>I sent a REGISTERED mail to England, it got lost, after a year of going back and forth, we finally had the post office paid the claim, not much, maybe $50 or so(maximum insurance for international mails), the package worth many times as much.</p>
<p>TWO years after we settled the claim, the envelope showed up in England.</p>
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<p>Fair enough. Then have USPS stick to offering those services where FedEx does not care to go, and recalculate the cost to provide service to the areas and charge the recipients for those services. Price it with daily, weekly, and monthly deliveries. Enroll the donut eating cops to deliver the mail or the local government employees. Perhaps we could have SMALLER losses from an inefficient and bloated organization. Some have real problems to let go the Pony Express days.</p>
<p>By the way, what is the percent of old fashioned mail that we really NEED to receive? How much could and should be avoided? I would say that way over 90 percent of the mail in my mailbox is junk and tossed without hesitation.</p>
<p>xiggi, correct me if im wrong, but I recall reading aomewhere that the USPS loss comes from the idiotic requirement for them to fully fund pensions a gazillion years into the future.</p>
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<p>That is correct.</p>
<p>Nope, not correct. The pre-funding benefits contribute to the losses but do not account for all of them. Check below</p>
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<p>That net loss is real.</p>
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<p>We’ve been using Flat Rate boxes rather frequently for 3 years, and we only had one problem, where the box got routed to New York instead of Indianapolis, and took 4 days to get to D instead of the usual 2-3 days. It really is an inexpensive and reliable way to keep the care packages flowing. Reliable, not perfect – but then, what is?</p>
<p>That said, I always spring for the extra 65 cents tracking (I think it’s actually Delivery Confirmation, but you can follow it at every stop from acceptance to delivery). I like to know that if it did go astray, I could print out the tracking, march down to my local post office, and tell them exactly where to look for it.</p>
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<p>If you print out the postage online, you get a discount and get delivery confirmation for free.</p>
<p>I read somewhere that one of the largest accounts the USPS has is FedEx. They use the USPS to deliver to the more difficult locations. Items go FedEx to a certain point, then the USPS takes over, they are required to deliver everywhere.</p>
<p>Not sure if Fedex uses USPS, but they surely have a LOT of sub-contractors who deliver a good percentage of their packages. Even in the SF Bay Area.</p>
<p>We live outside of the US. Those Priority Mail boxes are the best. Whenever I’m stateside, I get a few boxes from the USPS and bring them back home. If I know someone traveling to the States, I’ll pack a priority mail box with goodies, pay for it online, print the postage, and just ask them to seal the box and drop in the mail box when they get over there. I’ve had very good experiences sending them this way.
Nothing but good things to say about USPS.</p>
<p>I agree with Xiggi about letters and the like…but it’s really hard to email Thin Mints abroad…just saying!</p>
<p>Husband post office seems to have a problem if theIr mail for flat rate takes weeks. I send flat rAte all the time and the longest it’s ever taken is three days, often weather related.</p>
<p>Only time there was an issue of a missing box was the schools postal system. They logged it into system incorrectly and no one was actually going thru the boxes themselves, just looking on line. After a week, I insisted on the phone that some one go through all the boxes, and voila it was there.</p>
<p>So politely insist they physically walk around the mail room. </p>
<p>I also make copies of anything i send to kids, like passports, insurance cards and licenses. This way, if it gets lost, they have a copy which will work in the meantime while waiting for replacement.</p>
<p>We send hundreds of flat rate boxes each year all over the country. It’s mostly books and documents so we never use tracking. As far as I can determine, the only problems we’ve ever had were with school mailrooms (who may or may not inform the recipient they have a pkg) and address errors (either our fault or someone gave us the wrong address to begin with–particularly for a school). Sent my S a pkg regular 1st class mail and someone else took it (AND signed for it) because when he was shown the log, it was not his signature.</p>
<p>Our annual postage budget for USPS along is about $60,000. We rarely have anything lost (a handful of times per year) and are very satisfied. We have, however, had several recent problems with FedEx not delivering on time.</p>
<p>I want to clarify an earlier post of mine. We DO used fix rate priority to mail abroad. Weight limit is 20 pounds, but the cost is much higher than for domestic fix rate boxes. We are sending to Africa and a large box is $60…often much more value than the contents. But in our case this is the most reliable way to get a package to the place in Africa where we are sending it.</p>
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<p>I always get a kick out of that. I had ordered two items from a company a few weeks ago. For some reason, they shipped separately from the same place. They both left the warehouse FedEx. One arrived via FedEx on my front porch. The second one arrive via USPS the next day.</p>
<p>I have 2 huge boxes of books and 1 even bigger box of clothes/shoes sitting on my front porch, 100+ pounds or so total. Just a week ago, I was hauling them to the post office on the East Coast - paid for the cheapest shipping option. I’m impressed that it took only a week for the boxes to cross the country. Cudos to the USPS.</p>
<p>When we shipped my DS’s bike, we also shipped 3 big, heavy media mail boxes full of books. They arrived no problem, though not all on the same day. Tracking was on line as well. The expensive, insured parcel post bike took a month, with no tracking. Go figure.</p>
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<p>Online, you can’t track an insured package. Just pay the extra 75 cents and you get delivery confirmation.</p>
<p>Another firm believer in the efficiency of the USPS. I ship items frequently. Packages arrive anywhere from a couple days to a week. I ship first class, flat rate boxes, and media mail - and I seldom insure. The couple problems I’ve encountered have stemmed from the college end (mailing to my own children) - boxes misplaced in the mail room and a desk clerk less than willing to look for them. And then once my daughter ordered from Amazon and a package was signed for by … someone unknown - obviously the package was never seen again.</p>
<p>My husband thinks FedEx is the answer to everything but I have a friend who uses it to ship for business - and I know, for a fact, she has occasional problems.</p>
<p>I’m always curious as to why the USPS gets a bad rap.</p>
<p>insomniatic-
As I posted upthread, we had several tracking services on the bicycle. We paid extra to be able to track it. It was useless.</p>