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Post by eh49 on Aug 17, 2015 15:35:46 GMT -8
I ordered a pair of FL9's from Kliens last week. While they shipped promptly, they got to the Baltimore Post Office Saturday evening with expected delivery to my home today. Well, check the tracking the package still shows its in Baltimore. I'm getting a little concerned. Does this seem strange?
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Post by bnsf971 on Aug 17, 2015 15:38:50 GMT -8
It's happened to me before with Klein's.
Once, my stuff went from Baltimore to Cleveland to Memphis to New Orleans to Atlanta to my house in the Carolinas.
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Post by eh49 on Aug 17, 2015 16:03:14 GMT -8
Well, mine seems to be stuck in Baltimore for some reason. I'm in Pittsburgh, a 6 hour drive.
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Post by powerglide on Aug 17, 2015 16:13:16 GMT -8
I have one stuck in indiana since 8/13.So you are not alone.
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Post by gtws00 on Aug 17, 2015 16:14:59 GMT -8
I have had the same tracking problems lately using USPS Priority. It seems that the tracking is not updated as it should be and the package will show up and tracking still may show elsewhere.
George
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Post by riogrande on Aug 17, 2015 16:37:31 GMT -8
I used to get things faster with Kleins via USPS, but last few times they were later by a few days than what I was used to before. Not a big deal as Klein's USPS shipping has been cheaper to my location and I'm not fussed if it's a few days later as long as I get the parcel and it's in good order. Give it an extra few days.
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Post by MONSTERRAILROAD on Aug 17, 2015 17:11:10 GMT -8
That is exactly why I do not Sip from MB Kleins, I simply Drink it! The Post office has been sipping my stuff for a long time so by the time I get it, the cup is empty!
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Post by mlehman on Aug 17, 2015 17:18:45 GMT -8
I'm fairly certain sipping on the job at the PO will get you fired...don't know if that's the trouble here.  My experience is that the PO tracking lags. I usually only worry about using it for delivery confirmation. A blurb on the USPS website insists it's been improved...maybe. I've had packages delivered that still said they were somewhere else. On the other hand, estimated delivery dates have been pretty accurate recently...all except that package I sent to Dallas when they had those flooding rains down there around the first of June. They never did find that one. Probably some missing PO employee drowned in a ditch somewhere I suppose. When the water gets low enough for the buzzards to start circling, they'll find them. The $50 free insurance did pay off my shipping fee. Nothing of value in the package except a document that could have arrived in more timely fashion. |
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Post by eh49 on Aug 17, 2015 17:21:04 GMT -8
Sorry about the mis spelled shipping guy's I fixed it.
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Post by Great-Northern-Willmar Div on Aug 17, 2015 17:26:27 GMT -8
I ordered a pair of FL9's from Kliens last week. While they shipped promptly, they got to the Baltimore Post Office Saturday evening with expected delivery to my home today. Well, check the tracking the package still shows its in Baltimore. I'm getting a little concerned. Does this seem strange? Oh heck no!. The USPS for at least lately has been a complete nightmare and I'm in Wisconsin. An example of a few of my packages over the last couple of months. 1. I shipped some dog stuff to my dog breeder in West Virginia in a USPS Priority Mail Box. It was supposed to take two days....When I checked the tracking on the day two the box was listed as being in some WV town about an hours drive from my breeders house. It stayed at that Post Office for OVER A WEEK! I then contacted the Postmaster at my local Post Office who checked on the package and started making phone calls. That must have gotten that other WV town's Post Office off its behind so it was on the move.....To Washington D.C!!!!!! So, it sat in D.C. for a day before FINALLY getting to Charleston, WV and the next day it arrived at its final destination. Only took two weeks plus! 2. Ordered some parts from the guy with all the Atlas parts on e-Bay. He's in the Seattle, Washington area. My package left Seattle and ended up in Honolulu, Hawaii!!!! It sat in Hawaii for over a week. I guess my little package needed to see the sights??? Over a week later it was on the move and no tracking was registered. A week after it left the Aloha State it arrived in Wisconsin. Two days took three weeks. In fact the metric screws I ordered from China the same day I bought the parts in Seattle beat the Seattle package! 3. I sold some stuff on e-Bay it was destined for Tacoma, Washington. My package went from Milwaukee to........Jacksonville, Florida. Mind you this was just before Christmas. The package sat in Jacksonville until December 31, when it finally departed. It arrived in Tacoma on January 2. Nearly two weeks in transit. So keep checking on your package. If it sits or is not scanned for a number of days, contact your local Postmaster. What we see on the computer is a fraction of a package's scans. The Post Office computers have much more information and it seems only they can light a fire under their fellow employees.....or so it seems. |
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Post by peoriaman on Aug 17, 2015 17:32:05 GMT -8
USPS's tracking is often nothing more than an optimistic guess. Like the others, I have had items delivered long before the tracking ever updated.
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Post by emd16645 on Aug 17, 2015 17:50:39 GMT -8
I've had few if any issues lately with USPS, none since I moved a few months back at least. At the old house we had a lazy carrier who refused to deliver packages to our house because we were a tenth of a mile further off the main road in a development than they were required to deliver by the union contract leaving us to have to take nearly an hour to make the round trip to the post office in town.
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Post by WP 257 on Aug 17, 2015 18:37:18 GMT -8
eh49--
NO, I'm sorry to say this is absolutely normal for packages in recent months from M.B. Klein!! I live near Harrisburg, PA, a two hour drive, or slightly longer, away.
I've already complained to them about this and kindly suggested they have a word with the USPS, but I doubt there's much Klein can do about it.
My packages show up via the USPS tracking as basically stuck inside the Baltimore Post Office for multiple days, and then suddenly appear on my doorstep. I have personally never experienced this with any other post office other than Baltimore, and I buy/sell all the time on Ebay--several hundred items over the last decade.
It is so bad that I have begun purchasing trains elsewhere (that I would normally buy from M.B. Klein) even though they have always treated me very well. I have over 90 separate orders shipped from them in recent years (most small as I don't spend much at a time--just an item or two).
Respectfully submitted--
John Mock
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Post by llxlocomotives on Aug 17, 2015 18:52:06 GMT -8
The PO is not the same everywhere. I ship and receive a lot of packages. Here USPS is the best. There are a lot of things that can go wrong. Most of it has to do with lack of experienced people. The PO has been experiencing some serious dollar losses. Because of this, they are cutting corners. They are out sourcing a lot of the activity from one center to another, depending on the class of mail. It may also have to do with day of the week as well. I know salaries are determined by the amount of mail carried.
Priority no longer is a 2 day guarantee. The another issue is that anything that gets misdirected will flounder. Back to the cuts. There really is not many behind the scenes to take care of that problem, which happens more & more frequently.
The tracking issue has to do with lack of portable scanners. I have most of my shipments picked up at my front door. Part of the time the person scans on my porch, part of the time they wait until they get back to the PO. If that person is not the regular, it may not be scanned until the next point.
My regular person is great. But I really can tell a difference when she is off for some reason.
I suspect that the service varies by location. However, when the mail is in the hands of the non PO people interesting things seem to happen no matter the location.
90 percent of the time, everything goes as it should. But out of the clear blue you have a package go to Hawaii instead of NJ.
I find the alternatives to be much more expensive and they have their own quirks. I'm also finding them handing things off. We get UPS and FedEx packages delivered by USPS and vice versa. I don't know if that is local or typical. What ever it certainly stirs the pot. You can easily see how individual workers might not take to it well.
Recently Klein is my main source of supplies. I order every two to three weeks. I get an e-mail saying the order has shipped. It arrives in two to three days. It comes to Indy right away, so far no apparent delays.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 17, 2015 19:07:44 GMT -8
I wrote about this a couple years ago, so I will forgo the details...
I shipped a Genesis F unit shell to an eBay buyer in a 12" x 12" x 12" box, with tracking. He received a big envelope containing 10 new Doc Savage paperback books. The envelope had my return address and tracking label on it. We (and the PO) never figured out what happened.
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Post by Great-Northern-Willmar Div on Aug 17, 2015 20:05:10 GMT -8
I worked for USPS for two years as a rural carrier sub. I still keep in contact especially with the carrier on my route. Things in 2015 are different than even five years ago when I was a carrier. My carrier said to me "I am ashamed to admit at times that I work for the Postal Service". One, wages for new hires has been slashed. Two, USPS has been on a mission to consolidate sorting centers and then un-consolidating centers, depending on how much heat they take from the union. They route packages differently now than they did five years ago too.
Even five years ago USPS had already teamed up FedEx and UPS. Neither FedEx or UPS really want to deliver to residences. Their business preference is picking up at a business and delivering to a business. That is why when you ship an item via either you pay considerably more to a residential address. Well USPS in effort to keep its mail volume numbers up, partnered with both FedEx and UPS to do the final delivery of packages to residential addresses. UPS drops its packages directly at the delivering Post Office. FedEx is a little different in where they drop the packages at specific USPS locations and USPS then routes the packages to the specific Post Office.
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Post by WP 257 on Aug 17, 2015 20:33:42 GMT -8
Jim--
Thank you for the explanation...it helps a little.
John
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Post by madlatvian on Aug 18, 2015 6:23:58 GMT -8
I too have experienced the dis-jointedness of the USPS- two examples: I ordered some special cookies from Pennsylvania on the 12th of August- tracking info showed a label had been created and delivery to western Washington was expected to be between August 19th and 25th. Trying to track the tracking number- it constantly showed as waiting for pick up in Pennsylvania- no movement at all; well lo and behold it arrived on Monday the 17th and tracking still did not show it in transit. This is a case of multiple people not bothering to scan the package as policy dictates and no follow up on the management side. Example two; this happened several years ago- the company I work for shipped a small parcel to Russia and we could not trace it due to the lack of scanning by USPS- so we got in a bit of a panic- you don't want to willingly tell a customer that you have no clue where his package is- in this case luckily the customer sent an email inquiring about some of the literature that was in the package so we were able to confirm that he had received the parcel. Calling USPS was of no help because they kept denying hat they had every picked up the parcel from us. We now have a new policy that any packages being picked up by the carrier will be scanned before they leave the building- we have had to call and report carriers that would not pick up packages because they did not want to scan them. You see- once they scan them there is a time record of when they were at a certain place so it makes it more difficult to pad one's hours.
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Post by stevewagner on Aug 18, 2015 6:35:54 GMT -8
For what it's worth, I sent my most recent order to Klein's on a Thursday afternoon and received it the following Monday afternoon, by the USPS's Priority Mail, and similar delivery times have been typical. I strongly suspect the packages have gone by direct flights from BWI airport south of Baltimore to Logan Airport in Boston. Each must have traveled by truck at least once in Maryland and three times in Massachusetts (from the airport to the postal sorting center, from there to the local post office, and from there to my workplace).
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Post by dti406 on Aug 18, 2015 7:13:17 GMT -8
My experience with several different Klein's type purchases, is the vendor prepares a shipping label, and the item may not be packed and shipped for a few days especially when the purchase comes through E-Bay. But the tracking shows the vendor has prepared a shipping label, but it is not picked up or sits. Also the truck may be full and they can't take all the vendor has ready to ship, so it sits.
Rick J
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Post by nightmare0331 on Aug 18, 2015 9:01:11 GMT -8
Eh...they all misdirect, break and lose stuff. I had Fedex recently destroy an arcade cabinet back door to me. They destroyed what is essentially a piece of plywood/particle board that was pretty well packed. So badly they took it upon themselves to discard what was left without even contacting me. Let that sink in. Most of the time, USPS guesstimated delivery date is pretty spot on, although I have one package that was supposed to show up yesterday that will probably be here today. Shaking a fist at MB Klein doesn't do much since the issue isn't with them...it's with the PO. At work we deal with occasional issues with USPS and apathy seems to be a large part of the issue. Yay shipping! Enjoy! Kelley. www.dufordmodelworks.com |
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Post by bnsf971 on Aug 18, 2015 9:22:12 GMT -8
Eh...they all misdirect, break and lose stuff. I had Fedex recently destroy an arcade cabinet back door to me. They destroyed what is essentially a piece of plywood/particle board that was pretty well packed. So badly they took it upon themselves to discard what was left without even contacting me. Let that sink in. Most of the time, USPS guesstimated delivery date is pretty spot on, although I have one package that was supposed to show up yesterday that will probably be here today. Shaking a fist at MB Klein doesn't do much since the issue isn't with them...it's with the PO. At work we deal with occasional issues with USPS and apathy seems to be a large part of the issue. Yay shipping! Enjoy! Kelley. www.dufordmodelworks.comI had a large package arrive at my place of work with what was obviously a forklift blade run completely through the container, destroying the contents. When we filed an insurance claim, it was denied, due to "Improper packing". |
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Post by nightmare0331 on Aug 18, 2015 9:34:40 GMT -8
Eh...they all misdirect, break and lose stuff. I had Fedex recently destroy an arcade cabinet back door to me. They destroyed what is essentially a piece of plywood/particle board that was pretty well packed. So badly they took it upon themselves to discard what was left without even contacting me. Let that sink in. Most of the time, USPS guesstimated delivery date is pretty spot on, although I have one package that was supposed to show up yesterday that will probably be here today. Shaking a fist at MB Klein doesn't do much since the issue isn't with them...it's with the PO. At work we deal with occasional issues with USPS and apathy seems to be a large part of the issue. Yay shipping! Enjoy! Kelley. www.dufordmodelworks.comI had a large package arrive at my place of work with what was obviously a forklift blade run completely through the container, destroying the contents. When we filed an insurance claim, it was denied, due to "Improper packing". Yup...we've dealt with that also at work. Clearly, the skid that I stacked and wrapped...I personally stuck a forklift through it before shipping....or, the layers of shrink wrap weren't adequate to prevent a forklift operator from exercising due diligence. The more fun one was UPS reweighing all outgoing freight shipments for double their weight and then refusing to do anything about it except after a couple of years of arm twisting, reducing our rates until the difference was made up. (after a while, we caught on and had stuff properly weighed on both ends...sure, I can figure 5% difference either way for scale calibrations, etc, but 100% over repeatedly?) Or the UPS trailer that caught on fire one time that they wanted to give us pennies on the dollar for our pallet of merchandise they destroyed... Enjoy! Kelley. |
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Post by Paul Cutler III on Aug 18, 2015 10:29:21 GMT -8
Just remember folks that when you see that the USPS is in the red at $500 million a year, they are being forced, by Congress, to forward-fund the next 75 years of retiree benefits in just 15 years (something no one else is has to do). Oddly enough, the annual payment into the future retiree benefit package is $500 million. Hmm... So if you want to know why the USPS is messed up and getting worse, call your Congressman. They broke it.
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Post by calzephyr on Aug 18, 2015 10:37:27 GMT -8
One of my shipments by the USPS many years ago got broken and the box had a large gouge in one side. They denied payment since they would not honor the insurance amount I had paid to ship it. UPS normally will not pay the insurance value in most cases. I have found it is a waste of money to use their insurance premiums.
Larry
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Post by Great-Northern-Willmar Div on Aug 18, 2015 10:53:09 GMT -8
You see- once they scan them there is a time record of when they were at a certain place so it makes it more difficult to pad one's hours. That statement is totally incorrect. The USPS times its routes. It estimates the time to deliver, sort the mail in the morning and drop off undelivered mail and incoming mail in the afternoon. USPS sets a time as the standard. Example. USPS estimates a route should take seven hours from start to finish. If you finish the route in six hours, you still get paid for seven hours. If you finish the route in eight hours, you still only get paid for seven hours. Also, if you keep coming in late in the afternoon over the allowed time for the route you risk the very real chance you will be fired. There is no such thing as padding hours. For city route carriers, aka the ones that walk miles a day, they must scan selected mailboxes through out the route. These serve as time checks on their route. If the Post Office rates the scan box as being serviced between the hours of 1 to 3 p.m., you better hit that mark on a regular basis, or look for a new job, for you will be fired. Rarely does the Post Office pay overtime. Overtime for a carrier would be forced to partially cover another route besides your own. This is what is happening to my carrier for my home. My Post Office USED to have three city carriers. One retired, but the Post Office will not allow the Postmaster of my town to hire a replacement!!!! They say this office does not have the money in its budget to hire a replacement. It must wait for months for a new budget from the local Postmaster to be approved by HQ in Milwaukee. Tim, my letter carrier, now walks nearly nine miles everyday, six days a week. Tim looks more like he just completed the Bataan death march than a letter carrier and he eats more than a horse! People think that working for the USPS is a lay back and get rich job. It isn't. You are under constant supervision, secret surveillance and volumes of rules. You are constantly being threatened to be fired or disciplined for the smallest of infractions. Example. I had an aggressive dachshund on my route. I was delivering a package to the customer's porch when tearing from the backyard came Brutis the dachshund. This dog had some SERIOUS attitude. He used to chase my car down the street after I serviced his family's box! I was pulled aside by the regular on my route, I was the sub, and said that if I had been bitten, the fact that one, I wasn't carrying the Postal Service supplied mace, and two did not mace the dog if had bitten me would have gotten me fired IMMEDIATELY. Yes, USPS is one screwed up organization, but its also no walk in the park for the employees, which makes you think that a happier employee might be a more attentive and productive employee. P.S. Under Postal rules you ARE NOT REQUIRED to scan a box immediately before leaving a business or porch. Most do if they can and will try to make their customers happy. A little more..... When I was trained by the regular on my route, I was taught to scan EVERYTHING. If it had a bar code, both the regular and I scanned it. Sometimes it was not a tracking code, other times it was and not identified as such. Yes, both she and I got numerous talking to by the supervisor and Postmaster about being too anal with bar codes. Ya see, you try to good job and still get in trouble! |
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Post by rockfan on Aug 18, 2015 12:01:30 GMT -8
The last few years my postman was terrible.I would get my neighbors mail all the time. I like them so I gave them their mail but it made me think, he can't read the address on the mailbox?
Recently things are better, I just got a package from Amazon a few minutes ago and when I tracked it, it said it was delivered.
I guess it depends on where you live and how your post office does it's job
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Post by valenciajim on Aug 18, 2015 15:12:07 GMT -8
USPS is an endangered species. Ten years from now, it won't be around in its current form.
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Post by bnsf971 on Aug 18, 2015 15:26:58 GMT -8
By a strange coincidence, I just got my mail. In the box were the regular circulars, such as local grocery store ads.
Unfortunately, all the ads expired last Sunday... The ads should have been delivered no later than last Thursday.
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Post by onequiknova on Aug 19, 2015 16:00:07 GMT -8
I shipped two packages Monday, USPS. I'm in Illinois. One was to go one state over to MO, and the other was going two towns over. Both were to be delivered today, Wed. The one going to MO is currently in PA and the one going two towns over is now in AZ. It' s like they're just tossing packages willy nilly into bins. No wonder they're broke.
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