USPS got kneecapped in preperation for the Election with the loss of both manpower and machienry. There have been reports of truck drivers waiting hours and sometime days to deliver their trailers to the 'security' of a US Mail facility.
UPS, FedEx and DHL all got swampped with the online shopping binge for Christmas.
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
BackshopWhat were you doing rummaging around in a trailer on Fedex property?
Overmod I recently found several parcels derelict in the back of a U-Haul rental truck parked at the back of the FedEx Ground employee parking facility. About the only explanation is that they rented the vehicle for 'Christmas rush' capacity, the driver ran out of time or hours, and just drove back and parked it with a couple of packages still lying there undelivered.
I recently found several parcels derelict in the back of a U-Haul rental truck parked at the back of the FedEx Ground employee parking facility. About the only explanation is that they rented the vehicle for 'Christmas rush' capacity, the driver ran out of time or hours, and just drove back and parked it with a couple of packages still lying there undelivered.
Been told that UPS hired over 100k employees for the rush. Most recent deliveries have been in personal cars.
The USPS and UPS were running UHAUL Vans and Trucks as well.
A USPS person mentioned that they had not had a day off in weeks and they were 2 weeks behind.
I have had a similar positive experience as CharlieH.
That may be your experience. I've never encountered anything like that from various vendors using a UPS, FedEx, USPS. DLH etc.
USPS, perhaps purposely, says it only tracks packages by the last scanned location. To me that is far better than an 'estimated' location that may or may not be physically accurate. Sometimes that location can be a pretty ungodly whopper, however. I had a package that for weeks showed it had been delivered ... to a PO box in North Carolina. That is likely getting some tracking metadata confused. A couple of other packages went through a couple of known 'trouble spot' hubs and simply dropped off the radar for a few days; a couple of them were actually received and picked up before the 'next' tracking entry showed them as delivered. I don't attribute much of this to incompetence, just volume with a limited number of actual people in the facilities.
Makes it difficult to trust the information sometimes. At least it't not as bad as at Brown's Ferry ... at least, not yet!
When traveling by rail, the item is in a container and not out where the package label can be scanned to know where it is. They are not going to open the container every few cities just to scan all the packages to report the progress.
However, I have noted of late that sometimes it seems the tracking information is a bold face lie. I have watched the tracking info show the movement by truck from city to city all the way to "Out for Delivery" and then when it doesn't get delivered, the tracking info changes to an apology and a statement that it will be delivered the next day. Of course, when it doesn't show up then, it changes to claim it will be delivered soon. The next day, all the tracking info I have been reading is gone! Replaced with the package at the origin again, or maybe at some intermediate point again. Then it repeats the city by city track, but with different dates and times than before.
I think the tracking info, when it does not get a scan confirmation, reports where the package is assumed to be, based on known routes and times. If the package actually is on the floor under some conveyor belt back at the origin, that is just too bad... the package is supposed to be at XXX city, so that is what is reported. It is not until it is noticed that it didn't get deliverd, that someone goes looking for it. When it is found, the original tracking LIE is deleted, and it starts all over again as a new shipment to be tracked.
I have also watched packages travel all over the U.S., from origin to several towns/burgs/wide-spots-in-the-road in random states (not even near a direct route between origin and the proper destination) where only the General Store/Gas Station/Cafe happens to also be the area's shipping company representitive. The clerk/mechanic/waitress there scans the package, discovers it was on the wrong truck, and ships it out on the next truck that happens to stop there, sending it to a major hub for re-sorting... one time I watched the tracking info bypass my city 3 times, bouncing between shipping hubs on both sides... not sure if it just didn't get off loaded at the local/LARGER hub here, only being found at the next one and sent back, but again left on the truck and so found at the hub on the other side of the route, or if those two hubs just didn't know there was a major one in the city where it should have been sent in the first place.
Semper Vaporo
Pkgs.
I suppose it is an indication of how backward the rails remain, at least in this aspect of logistics, compared to other transportation modes.
I ordered an item from Amazon. It's coming from Spokane, WA via UPS. Here's the tracking, so far:
In Transit
Hodgkins is UPS CACH. So, the item went by rail from Spokane to Chicago - almost certainly. Zero intermediate location reports. We know that UPS gets a whole boatload of real time reporting from the RRs. We also know that when it moves by truck, every UPS terminal it moves thru, whether sorted or not, there is a report and you see it on the tracking.
Why doesn't UPS provide similar for stuff moving by rail?
(FWIW, I'm guessing this will move from CACH to Atlanta by truck. Not much UPS moves in this lane on NS or CSX. They are too slow.)
-Don (Random stuff, mostly about trains - what else? http://blerfblog.blogspot.com/)
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