Yes, thank you, I understand this. Just looking at tea leaves. I apologize for not spelling it out better.
US retailers ordering less inventory from international suppliers does not equate to substituting inventory/quantities from US-based suppliers. So we can suspect that retailers and Sellers aren’t stocking up as much as usual for Q425 and Q126, based on the significantly reduced carrier shipping.
Fewer products available domestically during Q425 and Q126 (and probably longer) could mean fewer packages shipped internally in US. And shoppers can’t order from many countries (88?) at this time, while simultaneously are unlikely to order from overseas anyway due to exploding costs. So there won’t necessarily be other packages to cover the lost donestic traffic.
This, combined with US consumer uncertainty, could lead to fewer packages shipped internally during Q425 and Q126
Fewer packages shipped internally could mean (at a minimum) lost revenue and jobs for our internal packages carriers (because carriers will cut quality to cut their losses).
So while the industries are certainly different, they do have relevance to and reliance on each other.
These are just some guesses, and I will be happy and satisfied to be wrong. But as I said…
The way packages are handled at our post office means this package won’t leave it until tomorrow. Maybe New York (where it is headed) will be better before it leaves here tomorrow.
We’re in a small town (<10K), and post office is a single person operation, closed for an hour for the person to take lunch, so we have to plan around that. No biggie.
Went in after lunch on Monday (well after lunch, not just a few minutes), and the door was locked. We ended up taking stuff to the next town over.
Today I asked the person at the office what happened Monday. I was worried because with a 1 person operation, things can go bad, like the time the clerk had an allergic reaction to lunch and left in an ambulance. But thankfully it was nothing like that. Instead, I found that the person who had been full-time there got a new position at a regional facility (I assume a move up), and regional management scheduled someone to work the early part of the day, but not the rest due to overtime concerns; but forgot to schedule anyone to come in for the last part of the day!
Frankly, it lines up with some of the corporate run jobs I’ve had, where central management couldn’t understand that our store was not like most (such as pizza place next to government complex; we did 2-300 for $2-3 lunch special; almost no deliveries, management couldn’t understand higher labor).
I would call that understaffed by comparison to my island, which has a population of less than 6K, yet has 4 stations. The main station has 5 in the office and 4 carriers (2 regular, 2 rural contract)
We had a Minneapolis-bound package marked “Delay in delivery due to weather or unexpected circumstances” at 12:18 pm and again at 10 pm Wednesday in Sacramento. It was shipped from our Northern California location Monday afternoon. All of our mail first goes to Sacramento, where until the intentional slowing of the mail in recent months it would move along after just one day. Now it stays in Sacramento for a minimum two days.
Based on other recent backups (especially in Indianapolis and Memphis), I’m guessing they have just decided to try a little CYA from the get-go. (“It snows in Minneapolis! Probably going to be delayed!”)
Regional weather delay? What ever happened to “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds”?
Just as a PSA, we have been included in a program that is claimed to allow us to raise issues and get more pro-active attention from USPS.
The group is called “USPS Select Business Support”
The email is [email protected]
Worth a try if they start looking like a Three Stooges Film Festival.
Maybe this is invite-only for certain businesses, but when one makes sufficiently large donations to congresscritters, one tends to get invited to enjoy little “extra services” that exist, as it makes the staff of the congresscritter look “responsive”, and it costs the congresscritter nothing.
I was invited because I sent a check via mail to a drop-box at my own bank in my own city to pay a bill for a company that used the same bank branch, and it arrived a month and a half later, long after it had been written off as “lost in the mail”. The distance, if walked would have been a 15 minute stroll.
In a discussion of the weather delays on the Ebay forums, several of us who do not get a scan at drop off or pickup found that the delayed message occurred exactly 15 minutes after the bogus origin scan which is generated at the first routing center, This was the case in various areas of the country.
Not in our case. Our post office scanned it right in front of us and is the “USPS in possession of item” scan shown. The item had not even left our post office at that point.
The next day, when the package made it to the local distribution center on it’s way out, the delay warning disappeared with the distribution center’s scan being added.
I did not mean to imply your case was the same as this experience.
Many of us never see a USPS in possession scan because the origin scan is done at the first sorting center and lies about it being at our PO. It appears that the timing of the delayed message is common for those of us who do not make any special effort to get a scan.
Well, for us, on holiday weekends we tend to ship out stuff on Saturday (when we usually don’t), so that we’re not totally overwhelmed on Tuesday.
Of course, sometimes the idea of “overwhelmed” is a bit of a pipe dream…
Back when USPS was reliable, I used to do most of my shipping through them. And, invariably, I’d end up at their door with a Jeep-load of packages only to discover that it was one of the “minor” federal holidays. One time, I had my folding hand cart half loaded when the cleaning lady came out of the post office to inform me that they were closed. Ah, the good old days!
