Hi!
One sure way to beat that long wait for delivery is to order the item earlier. Waiting until you need/want something will always yield anxious time awaiting its arrival. But if you order earlier, it will arrive closer to the time you really need it.
OK, I'm being a bit sarcastic.......... I've endured some extra long waits myself. But there have been times when I put off ordering something (for whatever reasons) and when I finally did, my anxiousness for its arrival rose significantly.
Got to say...... the OP has contributed a complaint as one of his first posts.
ENJOY !
Mobilman44
Living in southeast Texas, formerly modeling the "postwar" Santa Fe and Illinois Central
Lake Brakie, since I have to go to the post office to pick up my mail I also ship from there. Remember the rural county part.
Brakie, since I have to go to the post office to pick up my mail I also ship from there. Remember the rural county part.
Been many years since I lived in the boonies..I recall the trips to the post office just to check my p.o.box.I lived in a small village and the only carriers was the rural route carries..
Larry
Conductor.
Summerset Ry.
"Stay Alert, Don't get hurt Safety First!"
I take all my packages into town to our PO too, which is about 5 miles away. Nice thing about living in a remote township that covers roughly 50 square miles (and in all of that there are just 822 people) is that there are never any lines at the PO. I also do it out of consideration for our carrier. The carriers here are contract carriers & they get the same pay no matter how many hours they put in. While you can arrange for package pick-up here, they discourage it & I can understand why. Our carrier has a brutal enough job as it is. She has to be in the main regional PO, which is almost 20 miles from here, at 6AM every morning to sort the mail. She then delivers mail & packages to three different townships that are widely scattered, making back & forth trips between 4 different branch PO's, all the while driving on often treacherous mountain roads (especially in winter). She starts at 6AM & often does not finish up until 7 or 8PM at night by the time she gets home, driving 100-125 miles every day, 6 days a week. NOT an easy job! I don't want to complicate it any further for her by making her day any longer, having to constantly stop & pick up packages.
Carl
"I could never belong to any club that would have me as a member."
Brakie, since I have to go to the post office to pick up my mail I also ship from there. Remember the rual county part.
Ken G Price My N-Scale Layout
Digitrax Super Empire Builder Radio System. South Valley Texas Railroad. SVTRR
N-Scale out west. 1996-1998 or so! UP, SP, Missouri Pacific, C&NW.
LakeBut on the other hand I have never been any where where you can ship a package without taking it to a postal facility.
Ken,You arrange a pickup with the post office and your carrier will pick it up at your door.
USPS will even send you free shipping boxes..You can pay the postage on line.
You must be using a different USPS then I use. Three to four days max from the east coast. And I live in a rural N. Califirnia county.
In over 20 years I have had nothing lost. But on the other hand I have never been any where where you can ship a package without taking it to a postal facility.
sandusky Paypal is helping fuel hate and discontent generally, in my opinion.
Paypal is helping fuel hate and discontent generally, in my opinion.
I am still at a loss at how many vendors do not realize that the Global Shiping Option that PayPal promotes actually costs the purchasers significantly more money than the amount paid plus postage, the additional fee is based on a percentage scale. Higher priced items cost a ridiculous additional cost.
Who would want to bet that PayPal also collects an additional amount from the Global Shipping shipper Pitney Bowes.
When most vendors I have contacted are astounded at this, they did not know that they had put themselves in a postion where to shop with them is more expensive for the buyer than shopping with a vendor not using the Global Shipping option.
Had they had known exactly what Global Shipping really meant to the purchaser they would have not used the option. PayPal of course makes the Global Shipping option the first in line, hence the easiest to use.
I'm only 32 and I still clearly remember the days when six to eight weeks was standard turnaround for ordering and receiving mail order. When did people get so impatient about shipping?
richhotrain BRAKIE richhotrain Honestly, I swear that USPS ships quickly to its major sorting centers, and then the package sits there until they have enough other packages to fill a truck going to the same destination. Rich Other shippers do the same. I had a USPS and a UPS order and the USPS get here a day sooner then UPS.The USPS was from MBK while the UPS was from Trainworld. So, then, why do they call it 2nd Day Priority shipping? Rich
BRAKIE richhotrain Honestly, I swear that USPS ships quickly to its major sorting centers, and then the package sits there until they have enough other packages to fill a truck going to the same destination. Rich Other shippers do the same. I had a USPS and a UPS order and the USPS get here a day sooner then UPS.The USPS was from MBK while the UPS was from Trainworld.
richhotrain Honestly, I swear that USPS ships quickly to its major sorting centers, and then the package sits there until they have enough other packages to fill a truck going to the same destination. Rich
Honestly, I swear that USPS ships quickly to its major sorting centers, and then the package sits there until they have enough other packages to fill a truck going to the same destination.
Rich
Other shippers do the same.
I had a USPS and a UPS order and the USPS get here a day sooner then UPS.The USPS was from MBK while the UPS was from Trainworld.
So, then, why do they call it 2nd Day Priority shipping?
The USP was regular Priority Mail..
I never use the two day Priority since I'm not in that big of a hurry.
All I care about shipping is I get it, if I need it fast I shop in person. Most things arrive before I even look for them but I had a package take two weeks recently, don't know why but it came!
I, personally, have never had an issue with two day, overnight, or even same day shipping.
You want to know why stuff from Florida to Maine goes to Nebraska? Unless you want to pay for a huge amount of jet fuel yourself and someone to personally handle the package to the, I assume, one flight a day from Portland to Miami, the only way to make such things cost effective is to route it through a bigger center. There's tons of, say, Miami to Seattle traffic. The one bound for Maine gets lumped in with everything bound for somewhere outside the southeast, flown to Nebraska, where its now lumped in with the huge amount of California to the Northeast traffic. You ever notice how Memphis and Louisville end up on a lot of tracking lists? Look where the median population center is. Unless you're on a huge main trunk that huge amounts of traffic run through every day, that package has to take a weird route at the mercy of those trunk lines. Regular first class mail is practically overnight between DC and NYC because there's almost an unfathomable amount of mail moving between the two in an endless parade of trucks and airliners.
As for UPS, FedEx, and USPS making mistakes or a two day taking three days, really, those are the outliers and mistakes. UPS alone handles 5.7 billion packages. A failure rate of half a percent is 28 million errors. So, despite a very low error rate, it's still very common to encounter one. It's like when there was a bad batch of ipods years back and people were like "how can they make these so bad" until people started pointing out that if you sell 500 million of something, even a 1% defect rate is still so many that you'd almost inevitably know someone with a bad one.
When we order things, they first send them to North Carolina. Someone there crosses out "Carolina" and writes "Dakota" in its place. So of course it then goes to South Dakota,
Oh well, English as a second life is catching on.
ROAR
The Route of the Broadway Lion The Largest Subway Layout in North Dakota.
Here there be cats. LIONS with CAMERAS
Alton Junction
One of the odd things is that I've found that if you're shipping coast to coast, the USPS is VERY fast. There's a seller on Ebay that has a hobby shop out in Washington state that I've purchased quite a few train items & supplies from. If I buy from him on Monday morning, he ships it same day, all the way to Maine & I usually have it Wednesday noon!
If I ship things from Maine to a west coast buyer, it gets there in 2 days, 3 days tops. There ARE some glitch areas that I've noticed over the years. Stuff going to & from Florida & Maine is slow. Stuff going to & from Ohio and Maine is slow, as is New Jersey. No rhyme nor reason to it, but think coast to coast is so fast because most of the packages get put on direct, non-stop flights. To & from other places, it zig-zags all over the place.
Carl, your example is better than mine, but here goes anyhow.
I shipped a package USPS 2nd Day Priority Mail from Chicago to Daytona Beach Florida.
The package reached Orlando in just under 48 hours. So far, so good.
But, then in sat in the Orlando sorting facility for 3 days before continuing its journey to Daytona Beach, a mere 55 miles away. Go figure.
gmpullman richhotrain Drew4950 My peeve is when it says out for delivery and it takes 2 days more at that point. This only happens with the FEDEX Ground guys. I think they are independant contractors. Now that is interesting. I have never had that happen. If it's out for delivery, it is out for delivery. Rich I'll get packages that say "FedEx Smart Post" so the US Post Office handles the package part of the way and FedEx handles it in the middle of the trip, then back to the Post Office for final delivery. Streamlined logistic integration across multi-lateral platforms is what the Madison Avenue PHDs call it. I live near Cleveland, OH. I can get a DCC decoder from Litchfield Station in Flagstaff in 48 hours. It has taken Amazon six days to get a package from Pittsburgh to me. Anytime I order from Walthers the package goes from Milwaukee to Leetsdale, PA then to Columbus, OH and finally to Cleveland... every time. Always five days from the email notification that the order has shipped (or seven if a weekend is involved) to get a Walthers package to me. The Harvard Business School calls it Logistics but I fail to see the Logic! Ed
richhotrain Drew4950 My peeve is when it says out for delivery and it takes 2 days more at that point. This only happens with the FEDEX Ground guys. I think they are independant contractors. Now that is interesting. I have never had that happen. If it's out for delivery, it is out for delivery. Rich
Drew4950 My peeve is when it says out for delivery and it takes 2 days more at that point. This only happens with the FEDEX Ground guys. I think they are independant contractors.
My peeve is when it says out for delivery and it takes 2 days more at that point. This only happens with the FEDEX Ground guys. I think they are independant contractors.
Now that is interesting. I have never had that happen.
If it's out for delivery, it is out for delivery.
I'll get packages that say "FedEx Smart Post" so the US Post Office handles the package part of the way and FedEx handles it in the middle of the trip, then back to the Post Office for final delivery. Streamlined logistic integration across multi-lateral platforms is what the Madison Avenue PHDs call it.
I live near Cleveland, OH. I can get a DCC decoder from Litchfield Station in Flagstaff in 48 hours. It has taken Amazon six days to get a package from Pittsburgh to me. Anytime I order from Walthers the package goes from Milwaukee to Leetsdale, PA then to Columbus, OH and finally to Cleveland... every time. Always five days from the email notification that the order has shipped (or seven if a weekend is involved) to get a Walthers package to me.
The Harvard Business School calls it Logistics but I fail to see the Logic!
Ed
Here's another great example of USPS logistics. Last week I shipped out a package via USPS Priority. I'm in Maine. The package was going to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. Pretty straight shot, right? Well, I tracked it's "progress" online. It left hereMonday morning & the next morning it departed the USPS sort facility in Scarborough, Maine. Then, nothing for 2 days. Thursday morning it arrived at the sort facility................in OMAHA, NEBRASKA!!! It sat there for 2 more days. Finally it departed Nebraska on Saturday morning. It finally arrived in the sort facility in Florida the following Tuesday. It was finally delivered to the customer on Wednesday. Nine days to go from Maine to Florida & who knows why it went to Nebraska in the process?
I had this trouble just a few days ago attempting to get some Dapper Dan...
Pomade Vendor: I can get the part from Bristol. It'll take two weeks, here's your pomade.
Ulysses Everett McGill: Two weeks? That don't do me no good.
Pomade Vendor: Nearest Ford auto man's Bristol.
Ulysses Everett McGill: Hold on, I don't want this pomade. I want Dapper Dan.
Pomade Vendor: I don't carry Dapper Dan, I carry Fop.
Ulysses Everett McGill: Well, I don't want Fop, damn it! I'm a Dapper Dan man!
Pomade Vendor: Watch your language, young feller, this is a public market. Now if you want Dapper Dan, I can order it for you, have it in a couple of weeks.
Ulysses Everett McGill: Well, ain't this place a geographical oddity. Two weeks from everywhere!
What I usually do now is order parts a few weeks before I'll need them.
Nope, I also have had "out for shipping" not come to my house as they later claim "We couldn't find you"?
Really? The road has a regular street sign on it, the trailer park has a BIG sign {well made, I might add} alerting you to its presence, MY google earth SHOWS it { a flat view, no street view, except the more main street where said green street sign is}, and this trailer, at least, has not moved since 1983, and the park has not moved since the 50s!
THEN they "turn it over to the USPS"..I hope they share the fee I PAID to them to SHip it to MY DOOR with the USPS!
Meanwhile I get it 2 or 3 days later, than the "delivered" date.
-G .
Just my thoughts, ideas, opinions and experiences. Others may vary.
HO and N Scale.
After long and careful thought, they have convinced me. I have come to the conclusion that they are right. The aliens did it.
I've brought this subject up myself a few weeks ago and it also strikes a nerve with me... When I order something I want it within a few days - no excuses... In fact, I've become very soured by sellers on ebay who have claimed everything from a sick child to car problems for not shipping my items out on time. I write sellers now and make sure I know how long it will be before I get my stuff, but I don't want to be told that it'll just be a week and then it turns out to be two or three weeks. Anyone that does me that way will never get my business again...
Tracklayer
mbinsewi I have also noticed that when the shipping label is printed, it might show up as shipped, but it might not even be in the "system" until it is actually picked up and scanned by the shipping agent. Mike.
I have also noticed that when the shipping label is printed, it might show up as shipped, but it might not even be in the "system" until it is actually picked up and scanned by the shipping agent.
Mike.
What MIke says above is the case, the minute you purchase the shiping label, the email goes out, regardless if it has actually been accepted by the carrier.
"The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination."-Albert Einstein
http://gearedsteam.blogspot.com/
sanduskyPaypal is helping fuel hate and discontent generally, in my opinion.
I would disagree wth this. The problems with Paypal arise when people try to make it work differently than it's designed to.
I use Paypal for all my on-line transactions, and not just eBay. In fact, I'm more likely to head to the checkout of an on-line store if I see that they accept it. My bank account and credit card are linked into it. I even use it as money transfer, for my US friend I call my 'Yankee Mole', who gets my eBay interests from those xenophobes who only sell in the lower 48 states...
I have NEVER (knocks head) had any problem with Paypal, either as a buyer or as a seller. The two times there was a discrepancy a quick call to their VERY friendly Customer Service & all was made right to my benefit.
Modeling a railroad hypothetically set in time.
I had a pet peeve once, but my cat ate him.
Has Shipped = "The seller has printed a shipping label"
I get these all the time when ordering computer stuff. I get an ACK almost immediately, and later I get the "Has Shipped" The disclaimer states tthat it may take a day or so before the shipment shows up on the shippers website. Well, the shipper may have issued a lable, but the vendor must still put the label on a box, and put the box in the shipping department. At the end of the day the shipper comes to collect the boxes. He scans them in at the pickup point and NOW the package is in the custody of the shipper.
Oh Well, you cannot blame the "Internet" on the way things work. Either you are doing business with reputable people or you are not.
I still miss my pet peeve.
Having had experience at work with our "illustrious" postal service; if you use USPS the carrier is supposed to scan each package they pick up but most don't as it takes "too much" time- this is why the tracking info is sporadic at best. Also by not scanning it makes it easier for the carrier to 'acquire" (steal) parcels as there is no record that they were picked up- this happen to us also. Usually if you take a package to the facility for counter service- it does usually get scanned right away. And previous comments are correct- the "shipped" notices are generated when the labels are printed. If you track you get the old "electronic package information has been transmitted" notice- which would (might) get updated once the package is actually picked up/scanned. I hope this helps.