For the first time in 15 years, I have an account health warning for late delivery issues. I’m at 89%, just below the 90% threshold, but normally never go below 100-99%. In digging into each order, there is a mysterious “Package delayed in transit” somewhere mid-route (showing on the Amazon side). Interestingly most don’t show any info for the same date stamp on the USPS website side… just idling at a facility or bouncing between facilities.
Anyone seeing this more recently?
Have you sent orders to areas where the fires are burning on west coast or to any of the flooding areas on the east coast? Weather events like that will tend to make packages bounce between facilities.
We have had that happen in the past but not currently.
We track all of our packages with an excel spread sheet. Just this morning was impressed that USPS had all of our packages, which were sent out on Monday and Tuesday, are out for delivery today (Friday). It has been a while since we have seen that many packages being out for delivery in 3 days with USPS and to areas all across the US. (Hopefully, we didn’t just jink ourself.)
USPS has done some changes in pick ups and drop offs from some post offices. Last year, our post office changed from drop off in AM and pickup in PM to drop off in AM and pickup in AM. This change means that what we take to the post office today doesn’t leave our post office until tomorrow in the AM.
If your post office is going through that type of change, then this will be something you will just have to live with like we do.
However … knowing about the fires and disruption of mail delivery in Seattle area, this is probably do to the post office holding mail to accommodate the back log of deliveries to the burned out homes in the area. You will probably see this pattern for a few weeks as the post office regroups and is able to process the mail currently being held in places for those homes that got destroyed in the Seattle area.
Mine leave the island every day as long as I meet their cutoff time and the one I mentioned was heading to Chicago so just a random glitch I suppose since it took an extra 2 days to go 60 miles down the interstate.
May I ask if you mean the Spokane area, on the eastern side of Washington state?
I don’t doubt that the state’s major metropolitan area about 300 miles to west is adversely affected by the still-raging fires in Spokane & Stevens counties , but I’m not presently aware of any actual involvement in the counties surrounding Puget Sound, other than the smokier-than-usual conditions that’ve been reported.
Yes, misspoke on that. However, the routing of mail gets disrupted and will spill over in the largest distribution centers … which we see as Seattle and Tacoma as almost all of the packages that we send to Washington go through one of those two or both … even when going to the east side of Washington (sometimes east side might go through Boise ID).
USPS is sending mail via UPS planes again. This puts the hand off from the planes in UPS hub areas like Seattle and Tacoma. USPS will move the mail as close as they can to the effected area, but as those places back up, the entire area backs up which in turn creates local regional issues.
My own sales to Washington and Oregon are an unusually high percentage of my sales. California sales are also up. I might attribute this to my failure to increased all of my shipping charges.
Deliveries have been faster than usual. These shipments have not been shipping through the middle of the country distribution centers which are hubs of understaffing and incompetence during the summer season.
This has all been in the Southeast of the US. Distribution centers in GA, FL and Raleigh bouncing stuff in between for over a month it seems. As such, I literally have no idea how to resolve this. Items are shipped on time, using Amazon’s suggested shippers (USPS).
I guess my question at this point is, are other book sellers seeing this happen with BPM-shipped items? Like is this a new policy of super-delaying BPM/Media-rate items, unlike the usual slowness?
Recent federal audits highlight specific East Coast USPS processing delays and package scanning failures, notably in the Hampton Roads region of Virginia (affecting Norfolk, Suffolk, and Virginia Beach facilities), alongside localized temporary closures like the Cos Cob Post Office in Connecticut.
Specific Regional and Facility Issues
- Hampton Roads, VA: Inspector General audits show thousands of unscanned packages and tracking data errors at the Norfolk sorting center and nearby post offices.
- Cos Cob, CT: The local post office (06807) is temporarily closed, impacting neighborhood retail and counter operations.
- General Network Strain: Ongoing logistics adjustments under regional processing facility expansions are causing sporadic transit friction across mid-Atlantic and Northeast distribution hubs.
Checking and Reporting Delays
- Service Tracking: View active regional disruptions using the USPS Service Alerts page.
- Filing Claims: Submit formal inquiries or service complaints through USPS Postal Service Complaints or by calling customer support at 1-800-ASK-USPS.
Hampton roads hasn’t been related to my orders sadly… hmm
Though I guess this is broad enough:
General Network Strain: Ongoing logistics adjustments under regional processing facility expansions are causing sporadic transit friction across mid-Atlantic and Northeast distribution hubs.
I do not think so, My BPM shipments are taking the same time to deliver as GA to the same location. And that includes some 3 day coast-to-coast deliveries.
Here we go: NSFE Thread
I’ve had issues. Delivery on time rate has dropped to 85% due to USPS orders in Florida taking over 8 business days…
Even USPS deliveries that should take 2-3 days are taking 5+ to states bordering us
Yeah, mine keep dropping too. Down to 86% currently. All Southeast issues.
A majority are related to the Red Sparrow folks 
Doubly painful those hubs (or Pembroke, GA specifically) are the problem when such a percentage of orders last month went to the AI people. Damn, I knew there would be another shoe to drop.
For me, all of the ones I had (only one or two left to drop off) have been for Red Sparrow; all shipped over a period of 2-3 days, and all got hung up at the same hub for about a week.
Yeah, if you look on Google Maps, it’s a tiny Podunk town. I’m sure that post office has been absolutely swamped the last few months.
All to say Amazon will not give a single F and it may really hurt some of us.
The biggest problem is all the on-time shipping results are from orders weeks ago so any change you wanna make to anything takes weeks to be seen, which is nearly possible with a 30 day window to correct the issue. Not that there’s really any correction I can make.
It’s only 14 days for OTDR (at least for the metric that is visible to us).
So yeah, anything you do today will not show up until all of the problem orders have aged out anyway, so nothing at all that we can do about it.
If anyone is on the NSFE board, it may be worth a shot to give the mods a heads up this is an issue impacting on of the big AI buyer’s POs. I’m sure many other book sellers have seen the same thing.
I’ll buy anyone willing to raise it up to them a beer next time I see you 
