A few years back, Canada got a new Postmaster General. He was presumably a political appointee vs. someone who came up through the ranks, judging from what he said at his introductory press conference. He was asked how he could improve mail service for business mailers and he replied to the effect of, “quite frankly, I don’t think it’s a very good business model to count on the post office.” Informed that thousands of direct mail marketers and mail order companies did exactly that, he quickly modified his remark.
I thought of that anecdote this past week while trying to track a package that I’d misaddressed and sent through Priority Mail. This is a great and reliable service that brings many of us back to the post office once per year at Christmas time. For $16 bucks or so, we can send a box of a fixed size but any weight and it will arrive in 3 days or so.
It was when my recipient didn’t get the package that I looked at my receipt and discovered my error: I’d sent it to an old address which was on file with my USPS account. I then went online and input the tracking number (tracking is included with the Priority Mail service) and found that it had gone out for delivery, presumably was rejected, then was forwarded from San Francisco to City of Industry in Southern California, where it had at this point been sitting for several days.
I tried to find a way to contact the post office on the website and eventually found a form I could fill out. I had to choose a reason and said it was an address change. (There was no choice for “I made a mistake on the address and I want to correct it.”) I actually got a call, in fact two calls, from the post office in response to this effort. But when I returned the calls the phone numbers rang forever; nobody was picking up and the post office doesn’t have voicemail.
By now my package, moving from port to port like the Ancient Mariner, had made it back to the Bay Area, giving me hope it would be redirected to the correct destination. But after it sat in Richmond for several days it made its way back to the post office for ZIP code 94124—the same ZIP code from which it had been dispatched to my original bad address.
At this point I filed a Package Intercept Request. The USPS website explains that it is a “request” rather than an “order” because “With USPS Package Intercept® service, you can seek to redirect a domestic item you’ve sent. If your item has not been delivered or released for delivery, you can request to have it redirected back to the sender’s address, to a Post Office™ location as a Hold For Pickup, or to a different domestic address. This service is available for packages, letters, and flats with a tracking or extra services barcode and all mail classes except Standard Mail® or Periodicals (other restrictions may apply). The Postal Service™ will make every effort to locate your item prior to delivery however; there is no guarantee for the service. [italics added]”
Now think about that. The package has a barcode, it has a tracking number, the postal service knows where it is, the post office knows the corrected address, and yet it hasn’t been delivered. How can this be? What good is a tracking number if it can’t be used for tracking?
You wonder why the U.S. Postal Service is, year after year, billions of dollars in the red as business drains away to Fedex, UPS and other for-profit carriers. Think about how responsive UPS was to last holiday’s shipping fiascos to make sure they wouldn’t happen again, and they didn’t. When those companies offer tracking services, you better believe they’ll work.
Maybe the project to track packages at the Post Office ran out of budget so they’re able to track a truck full of packages from one central location to another (note the ZIP code is the lowest sort level on the report; there are no actual recipient addresses). Maybe the person who was in charge of the tracking package got promoted, or retired, and the replacement wasn’t interested in the project.
For me as the customer, knowing my package is within a few miles of its destination, and yet not delivered, is far worse than simply giving it up as “lost in the mail”. If somebody in the Post Office is reading this, would you please take the package off the shelf and deliver it before the cookies inside get any staler?