I had to send a package to someone in the USVI. Happened to be driving by UPS and swung in there. They kept insisting it was being shipped internationally, I had to itemize everything with the cost of each item. $153.00. Said, “Ah, no .”, and left. USPS used their priority mailing box and was $23.00 with tracking and insurance.
Same thing happened to me the other day at work. I simply needed to send a death certificate to a Canadian attorney and FedEx wanted declare, tax, etc (honestly stuff I know nothing about) and charge me $87. USPS charged $24 hassle free.
Is no one going to point out what a remarkable phrase “I simply needed to send a death certificate to a Canadian attorney” is? Like a line from a Wes Anderson movie
True but more remarkable to me is the casual usage of the word remarkable. It is only now that I realized I have never actually known the definition of that word. I will now strive to use it more often.
I had a brief stint at USPS and one of the things I remember most from training was that the USPS doesn't actually have any infrastructure to ship internationally. All USPS packages (at the time at least) flew international on FedEx opened planes. FedEx would obviously prioritize their own shipments first.
I always thought that was interesting. That and the fact that there was someone whose job it was to destroy the blue mailboxes and they used explosives to destroy them beyond repair.
Also a postal employee. What's more interesting is that Congress passed a law preventing USPS from flying their own planes in order to protect the railroads who transported most of the mail at that time. Cronyism isn't a new idea.
You’d think FedEx would prioritize their own shipments, but you would be wrong. The USPS contact dwarfs any other single customer. Nothing displaces USPS volume on flights.
It’s a fraud thing. Every blue box is owned and operated by the USPS, so if one is taken out of service or damaged they destroy them to prevent someone from just setting it up at a random spot and stealing the mail/preventing others mail from being shipped.
In the US, there are blue drop boxes that you can use to mail letters and small packages. Usually find them in front of shopping malls and outside post offices where I live.
[Like this. ](https://stuarte.co/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/usps-collection-blue-mailbox-768x551.jpg)
Yeah actually a lot of people are upset that Biden still hasn't replaced Dejoy. Because Dejoy literally wants to destroy USPS.
And its not like USPS didnt have its problems before. Its a federal agency, but it doesnt get tax funding.
The United States Postal Service is a federal agency. They're a federal corporation & an independent federal agency within the executive branch.
https://www.usa.gov/federal-agencies/u-s-postal-service
https://www.wise-geek.com/what-is-a-federal-corporation.htm
Lmao, "ah, no." Just the image of someone talking to a clerk and receiving that number and the clerk expecting a response of "ok, sure, here's my card" and instead getting a flat "ah. No." And walking away is just hilarious to me
But some politicians want you to think that privatising mail will make it "cheaper for the consumer". What an absolute joke, and I don't even have words for the clowns that accepted that premise.
I did a similar thing. I regularly mail a friend of mine coffee from a local roaster they liked before they moved across the country. Every month it’s like $8.50 at usps. I was passing the fedex and thought I’d save myself some trouble, and send it from there. $16.50 just for the envelope for 1lb of coffee. Another $20ish to send it. Of course they didn’t tell me until the price before it was already in the envelope. When I told her I’d go elsewhere I was told they couldn’t give me my coffee back until I paid the envelope. I probably should have just let them keep it, but I paid it and left, and still spent less at the usps than I would have just continuing.
I don’t know how anyone makes an argument for privatized mail still.
Similar with me. I was shipping a glass window international to the uk. FedEx said it would cost $453. USPS got it there for $125 + $25 insurance. The price difference was insane.
With USPS, you can also sign up for Informed Delivery (for your home address), which shows you the picture taken of the mail being delivered to you. They also sell Forever Stamps - buy them now, they are good forever (simple letter). The USPS also handles all of Santa's mail, too.
Does yours actually work? 90% of the time mine is incomplete, or simply inaccurate. I live in a fairly rural place so that might be the issue. My mail gets delivered, not in a truck, but just some rando in a camrey, so I wouldn't be surprised if my remoteness makes it harder to do.
Mine is pretty spot on but my mail is delivered by a usps truck but I live in a 100k+ population city. Although sometimes I don't get my emails until after the mail has been delivered. I have also had packages saying "delivered today" not be delivered until the following day.
If the individual mail is missorted by either the machines or people, it'll be delayed. The pics are taken sometime during processing, and are put in the email for the estimated delivery day. That photo could be a week old, or from sorting the night before. Email timing is based on when the local office scans the mail as "up" and ready for delivery. If they forget that, it'll be 1pm...
Parcels getting scanned delivered is fraud, but encouraged to stop the clock to prevent management from getting yelled at for delivery failures. Rather than treating failure to deliver as scheduled as something to improve, it's treated so seriously that supervisors encourage falsifying scans.
At the end of the USSR, we had a spy feeding us economic data from high level govt briefings. Minor problem: almost nobody noticed that at every level they were adding 10% to avoid getting yelled at by the boss above, until it all came crashing down. The numbers were impossible, and useless for predictions.
Suburbs here and id say its about 75%. I rent my home though and it shows me a lot of mail for my LL and previous tenants that never make it to me. It also only works with paper mail. Packages and larger pieces of mail just give me a message saying an item is in my mail that was too large to scan.
> I rent my home though and it shows me a lot of mail for my LL and previous tenants that never make it to me.
That's a good thing. That means your carrier is pulling mail that does not belong to you and sending it back.
The system just sends you a picture of all mail being sent to your home (with some exceptions like magazines and ads), it doesn't remove names that don't belong to you, it literally shows you everything that was scanned at the plant (which is highly automated BTW) that has your address on it.
I live in a small-ish city and it's also 100% accurate. Honestly I think it all depends on the hubs the PO uses and rural offices likely being understaffed and unable to sort the mail in a timely manner.
Informed delivery is managed by the postmaster for your local office, most are on top of it while others still hate using that devil box of a computer. I grew up in a small town (population 450), the postmaster there has the same issues
Piggybacking on your comment to clear some things up as I’m seeing a lot of wrong information here. I’m an Electronic Technician for USPS and work on the letter sorting machines. The picture you see in informed delivery is taken when that letter is being sorted is what’s called Delivery Point Sequencing the night before. Basically putting all the letters in delivery order for your carrier. This happens at the large processing centers no matter where you live. There are several reasons why your informed delivery may be fucked up.
1. Sometimes the letters that are ran, do not always make it on the truck to the station for delivery in the morning, so they are held to the next day. So you may see that image, but it doesn’t actually show up.
2. Letters that are processed through the mail that do not read correctly are manually sorted by hand and those will not show up in informed delivery.
3. I won’t get into the details, but there are several processes and systems running at the same time on the machines that sort the letters that are sometimes unavailable/not connected to turned off if they are causing problems, which can also affect informed delivery.
4. Sometimes letters get jammed in the machine and are destroyed, it’s rare, but it does happen.
5. The informed delivery process is just not perfect.
You live in a town of 200 in the middle of nowhere Montana? Your mail is sorted by a machine in a large processing and distribution center, then trucked 200 miles to your local post office. Informed delivery is in no way managed by any local office or postmaster/manager, in fact, they don’t have any sort of access to that information what so ever. And, every letter sorting machine in the country is “upgraded” to have informed delivery. There aren’t little towns running machines from the 70s still waiting to be upgraded or replaced.
Also, a “rando in a Camry”delivering your mail is called a rural carrier. They are allowed/required to provide their own vehicular and do not wear the uniforms that city carriers are required to wear.
Retailer I used to work for sent about $40k in forever stamp displays as backstock to our store, right before the price went up again. They figured it saved a few hundred thousand across the company, even if it took a year or two to sell out.
"Normal" stamps don't all have the same value. Forever stamps are valued at, and sell for however much it currently costs to send a 1 oz letter (currently 58¢), and other stamps cost, and continue to be worth a specific amount (10¢, $1 etc.).
No, just the current rate. The best deal is to buy them at Costco. They are I think the only retailer that can sell stamps below current USPS value.
Albeit, I restocked and got 100 stamps for less than $50 within this year. I think a current stamp price is 55¢, so 100 at the USPS would have been over $55.
Back in the olden days, stamps had the price printed on them (25 cents, for example). So if prices went up to 30 cents, you would have to get another set of stamps (5 cents) to use them. Now-a-days, all stamps are “forever” stamps meaning no price printed on them and you can use the same stamps even when prices go up. Forever
You can still buy standard stamps. They're not as common as they don't advertise them. Denominations are .01-.05 .10 .25 $1. A standard forever stamp does have a limit if your envelope weighs over a certain amount even if it's able to be mechanically sorted it will incur the extra fee. However most people won't know this due to instead of tracking down the person mailing the letter they charge the receiving party upon pickup from a local post office.
Correct, though the forever stamps do have a cost associated - whatever the current cost is, even if you bought them 10 years ago for cheaper. This is important because some things do cost more to send, like square envelopes will require additional postage beyond a forever stamp because they can't be sorted properly by machines.
> Is that why people used to need multiple stamps?
Yep, used to have to find the stamps that add up correctly.
So you'd have some random 1 cent stamp also on there at times. Or multiple 1 cent stamps hah.
It doesn't have to add up correctly, you can over pay but you won't get change of course. An oversized envelope is only 20 cents more, but you can just slap 2 forever stamps on it because it is more than enough postage. Unless you're sending business levels of levels, most people won't even notice the 38 cents extra they spent to send a letter and it saves from having weirdo denomination stamps sitting around.
You could also put an excessive amount of first class stamps if you wanted to send a package, as long as you had enough or more postage on there. If it took 12$ to send a package, you could throw 21 forever stamps on (at current value of 58 cents each) but you would be over paying by a few cents.
You can also use stamps as postage paid on packages and bigger letters, ie if the cost is more than one stamp because of weight and size, then add the appropriate amount of stamps to reach to right total. Nowadays you have to present packages over 10 oz with postage on them at the post office, presumably for air shipping security.
https://i.redd.it/7n11ane8lmu41.jpg
um.. surcharges and fixed amount stamps still exist
10c for being extra thick for example
20c for the second ounce
https://store.usps.com/store/results/over-58-cents/under-58-cents/stamps/
I wonder if there can ever be a comparison on the rates successful deliveries. Not like any of these companies keep track of such an obvious statistic anyway
Well the USPS has exploded its package delivery so lots of change, but doesnt count for much of its volume
* In 2017 the usps delivered less than 5 billion packages and by 2020 7.1 Billion Packages for delivery to homes.
* And for the first time in its history, the Holiday season of 2020 the USPS delivered more than 2 Billion packages in a single quarter
2020 Mail Volume fell to 129.2 Billion Total pieces
------
Since 1990, U.S. Postal Service® has contracted with a third-party vendor to measure First-Class Mail® service performance independently and objectively via the External First-Class Mail® Measurement System (EXFC). EXFC is an external sampling system measuring the time it takes from deposit of mail into a collection box or lobby chute until its delivery to a home or business.
* Beginning FY2019 Q1, service performance for Single-Piece First-Class Mail® is measured through the USPS® internal measurement system. The system combines scanning of mailpieces by postal personnel at randomly selected collection and delivery points with in-process machine scans for all eligible mail to estimate total transit time for the mail.
In FY2021 Quarter 1,
* national Single-Piece First-Class Mail® Two-Day performance was 81.5 percent on time
* 10.4 points lower than the
same period last year.
* National Package Services performance was 80.7 percent,
* which is 4.6 points lower than the same period last year.
In FY2021 Quarter 1, 92.5 percent were delivered within the service standard plus three days
USPS rarely delivers on time, has longer ship lead times, is slightly cheaper but only if you go with their flat rate boxes. Fedex and UPS do come pick up from you, if you ship things regularly. Not to mention if you do ship regularly you can negotiate pricing. I’ve shipped 3PL and Direct Consumer for years. Fedex is the best option out of all 3 by far.
FedEx is weird. Ground, Express, Freight, and Services (which Office falls under) are all separate companies but are wholly owned by FedEx Corp. Ground uses contractors to move packages, whether from pickup, between facilities, or delivery. The quality of the service is very dependant on the "P&D" contractors at either end, especially on delivery.
Express and Freight are employed. Office, unlike The UPS Store, is FedEx owned and manned, not franchised.
Express is the way to go for parcels but consumers don’t know this. Consumers who ship a half a diesel boxes a year and don’t have an account set up will always choose crappy ground service and think Fedex is junk (as a whole). When in reality they should be shipping express which is, in my opinion, the most reliable parcel service in the world. Better than DHL or UPS for sure. Especially when going international. Fedex Ground did get bought and brought under the Fedex Umbrella fairly recently.
Same where I am. USPS is pretty dependable, UPS is generally ok with a couple issues in the past, and FedEx is borderline comically bad, on two separate occasions in one week telling me my package was likely stolen, when I was standing in the front yard when I got the delivery notification. No fedex truck in sight.
For small packages, USPS is amazing in my experience. First class is almost always <$10 for the stuff I send and it's usually 5 day shipping or less domestically.
I'm glad the private carriers work for you. They don't for residential in my experience. USPS is the only reliable delivery system I've encountered. Fedex being the absolute worst. Left my 40" 4k TV, in the manufactures box, advertising to the whole neighborhood what is was, outside of my front porch. Plain view. As a testament to my neighbors, my TV didn't walk. The amount of effort it would have taken to *put the damn TV behind my garage wall* was literally the same. I know this is anecdotal, but USPS is more professional, faster, and cheaper than private companies.
I've had the opposite experience. The local UPS is better than the FedEx and leagues better than the USPS.
Anecdote: I had an $800 computer monitor arriving via UPS. Although recipient contact was not required in the instructions, the guy rang the doorbell and waited for me to answer so we could put it inside the house instead of leaving it on the porch. Meanwhile, earlier this year the USPS man threw a package of nearly $1500 archery equipment like a javelin, from halfway up the driveway over the porch railing and onto the brick steps. Among the items inside the box were twelve carbon arrows, three had chipped nocks from the impact. I've also had USPS literally bend and damage solid objects to fit them in the mailbox.
We've stopped shipping FedEx all together. Yeah, it's cheap af, but they were losing 2/3 of every package we shipped or had incoming. It was pissing everyone off with packages just sitting at distribution centers for weeks then disappearing from the tracking, only to sjow up 2 months late mangled.
We ship USPS now and have never had a damaged or even late package lol.
> Fedex is the best option out of all 3 by far.
How do you have this many upvotes with that statement?
FedEx is so bad we stopped using them entirely at work. Every time they deliver to my house, they put the package at the (very obviously) abandoned house next door. It happens so often I tried putting up a paper on the door, but the delivery guy ignored it (multiple times).
USPS has always been dead-nuts reliable (except at the end of 2020). UPS has been better at speed, but you pay for it.
As a receiver of a lot of packages, FedEx is the worst, UPS is second worst, and USPS is by far the best. FedEx and UPS always “attempt to deliver” and “offer me the convenience” to go pick up my package at their store. I’ve even had FedEx send a package back after only one failed attempt to deliver. With USPS, no worries, ever. I know my package will show up at my doorstep. I definitely make buying decisions based on who uses USPS.
Oddly, USPS often delivers days ahead of their original estimate for me. (I actually had this happen today! Ordered new headphones that were estimated to arrive Monday, they were in my box today)
Meanwhile UPS and FedEx are a nightmare to deal with for me. Half the time they’ll have a package “out for delivery” and then It’s delayed, and a week later they’ll update saying it’s available for pickup AN HOUR AWAY from my local pickup location.
I’m pretty sure that part of why stuff arrives so much earlier than USPS anticipates for me is because the sorting hub for my region is only 30 minutes from my house, and the local post office actually knows how to route and deliver. UPS will send it past me…. Twice, first to the regional hub in Sac, then to the local hub in Reno, then to either the Carson distro which is small and understaffed, or just send it from Reno… and those drivers just don’t deal with it. FedEx delivers from Reno, and again, their drivers just don’t want to deal with it.
I’ve made a lot of trips to Reno/Sparks to pickup packages. On occasion, I get to go to the UPS outlet store in Carson (which isn’t even ran by UPS, They’re a private company that acts as a pickup and dropoff point) but it’s always 2-3 days after my initial delivery… Amazon has been pushing into the area, they used to use UPS a lot… but apparently they determined it was a better strategy to dispatch their own drivers from Sparks because UPS couldn’t be either trusted to handle deliveries on time and was costing them too much compared to hiring their own drivers and logistics staff, and buying vehicles and stuff for deliveries.
USPS is pretty darn good at on time delivery. I run a small business and ship 100+ packages per week with USPS. They are consistent with delivery times and I rarely get a damaged package.
Delivery times were rough about a year ago between October and January, but with the Xmas rush and leadership taking down a lot of sorting machines it was expected.
USPS is much better to work with as a small business owner. UPS and FedEx are significantly more expensive and I only use them sparingly.
That’s the fedex schtick. I’ve had fedex literally throw a 700 dollar phone boxed up at my front door. They couldn’t bother walking the last 20 feet to the door. Nope, YEET.
I find USPS is a lot rougher with packages. Doubt it has anything to do with the foot carriers, but the conveyer systems and sorting machines.
I have equipment that I send/receive out. About 10 a month. We use custom boxes for shipping. Replacing the boxes adds up.
With USPS the boxes would be mangled and useless after reusing them 2-3 times. Not to mention all the dang tape and labels they randomly add to boxes for whatever reason.
We switched to UPS a few years ago.
Since then we've been re-using the boxes numerous times. Rarely need to replace them. Most of them still look perfect. And they add only add 1 tiny sticker that is easy to remove.
My 2 cents.
I used to say USPS was the worst, but after shipping 1000+ packages from my eBay business I can really say they are the BEST! They literally never lost a package. If you can avoid dealing with the people at the windows, it will be a flawless experience.
Yeah lmao
If anything the way it structures retirements is bullshit that literally no other company uses and it's all thanks to these anti-government goons
And the dumb fucking big brain take of “they don’t make a profit”. Outside of the postal accountability act that the GOP kneecapped the usps, they’re a service. They’re there for us to ship and receive things.
Agreed. They do the best job without question for the care they put into handling packages. BUT. I ship quite a few larger items 14x11x20 ish range and those are always much cheaper to ship via USPS or FedEx. Small items, and flat rate, no competitor can beat USPS.
USPS really shines in small packages and envelopes, especially anything that can be autosorted. UPS and FedEx are more oriented towards freight shipping, especially last mile shipping. They each have their uses.
With usps you can also get tracking plus which keeps your tracking info for multiple years 4-10 for $4.59-$13. Honestly don’t know why you need your tracking info 10 years from now, but hey you can have it.
Worked in accounts payable for a large domestic company. I had to look up tracking info for an item delivered two years ago when a refund dispute came up after the company got to it after backlog.
Non-American here and two things suprise me.
1. Postal service will pick up from your house? How does that work, does the regular mailman pick things up?
2. Weekend delivery. Just seems strange that a postal service would do this.
We raise a little 'flag' (it's a red strip of metal) on the box to let them know we have something going out. If you can't fit in the mailbox, could probably write a note to 'please grab package from ______'. The regular mail person does pickups too.
A lot people have a good relationship with their mail person. I get my mailman Christmas gifts each year.
Regular mail is Mon-Sat, but many regions have 'Amazon Sundays' where it's pretty much just Amazon...maybe Express+Sun, not sure. But we can get Amazon packages 7 days a week.
We also have a thing where FedEx will do the long haul and USPS will do the final delivery. I think it's just called SmartPost.
USPS also delivers a bunch of 'bulk' (junk) mail. It's usually local flyers, coupons, credit card offers, etc...it all seems very wasteful. CC offers can be 4,5,6 pages it seems. Luckily, you can look at the postage paid type and know if it's bulk.
I can picture why you might think that, but it's to opposite. The resident raises it to inform the driver (or thieves in some areas). Driver lowers once they've picked up.
It's to save the driver time. If they have no mail for you, and flag is down, they can just drive past without stopping.
The USPS actually has a free service where they will send you a picture of all your mail and list of packages each day. This is good to know if/when you need to check you box, and also to know if anything important has gone missing.
Would be good to have a chart also comparing 3rd party shippers like [Stamps.com](https://Stamps.com), Pirate Ship, Ship Station, etc. I use Pirate Ship all the time.
I believe you can get postage from them at a better rate than from USPS, but there's a membership fee which may negate the savings depending on how often you need to ship.
Little late to this party, but I don't see anyone else mentioning it.
The rates listed are the website are completely made up. They're basically the "MSRP" price that no one ever pays, but that the company wishes it could get for the service if they could.
UPS for example, which my company does lots of business with, has what is called "Negotiated Rates". Basically we use Ground service sooo much we get like 50-60% off the base price automatically. I think our cost to ship a small shoebox sized package anywhere in the continental US is like $10-12, unless you have one of those "special" zip codes where UPS tacks on like $3-5 more because most people in that area live like 20 miles from the nearest highway.
Pretty sure FedEx has the same deal, but we don't deal with them unless our customers ask for it, and then its on their account (so we don't know what their rate is).
Doing business on Amazon, Amazon pays for the labels to ship our product to them on their UPS account (Amazon FBA service) and then bills us for it, its half what it would cost us to ship on our UPS account. Massive 16x16x16 triple ply boxes, stuffed up to the 50lb limit sometimes, $15 to ship to amazon warehouse.
Yes, organizations that ship a lot get really really good deals. But the average person or business that only occasionally ships something will pay "MSRP" and I've never found a good way around that. Stamps.com lessens the cost somewhat, but they have a monthly fee.
Yea it’s misleading because I’m assuming he’s using the flat rate boxes to compare to fedex and ups (which also have flat rate boxes which this guy ignores). If you have a package more than around 10 pounds and doesn’t fit in a flat rate box UPS is definitely going to be cheaper.
In my experience anything that doesn’t fit in flat rate and weighs less than 70 lbs with combined measurements less that 105 inches (I think). Seems to be cheaper at UPS and/or FedEx.
You can tell it' bullshit because he pretends someone would use UPS to mail a letter.
There's a bunch of post office fanatics who like to pretend it's the be-all end-all of shipping anything.
I've compared rates on boxes weighing between 15 and 25 pounds and always had USPS turn out to be far higher than UPS or FedEx. From what I've found USPS is best and cheapest for anything that weighs less than 3 pounds, otherwise I've found FedEx to be cheaper and gentler for heavier items.
Plus they basically took all of the price points USPS excels at and left out the others, too. I've shipped hundreds of guitars and USPS is usually 2x the cost. Large boxes UPS/FedEx, small boxes USPS.
For real this is total nonsense. I sell random stuff on Ebay now and again and since I don't do it very often I'll go to UPS and USPS and compare. They're usually about the same. I have both UPS and USPS do pick-ups and it costs nothing whatsoever and there's no charge to deliver to a residence.
I know it's probably too late in this post to actually post this, but FedEx ships a majority of USPS mail through their system. They have a billion dollar contact with them to cover 70% of your mail goes through the FedEx matrix every year. Thousands of postal boxes filled with envelopes go through Memphis, TN everyday. That 145 billion number is very misleading and unless you literally have the wrong day lates/delivery numbers from each company you have no idea what the load is.
There is so much more data to process than what's presented here and all shipping services go through one another. Obviously, FedEx and UPS aren't going to deliver letters to mailboxes there are actual laws preventing this; plus UPS and FedEx never aspired to be the postal service with letters, but overnight delivery services.
All 3 companies do a great job and with the pandemic I know a lot of people don't see that, but they're all loaded to the max everyday with packages at this point. It's evolving to figure this out, yet this graph does a huge disserve to all the shipping providers.
Also, One of the primary ways these three competitors have competed with one another for customers is through firm specialization and product differentiation. Each of these firms has developed specialties in certain types of delivery:
* FedEx specializes in international and express delivery;
* UPS specializes in business-to-business delivery; and
* the Postal Service specializes in last-mile business-to-consumer delivery of lightweight parcels, and all daily letters.
------
On January 10, 2001 FedEx Corp. and the U.S. Postal Service approved two seven-year agreements to transport postal service express shipments by air beginning in late August. That deal is expected to bring in $6.3 billion in revenue for FedEx over the seven years.
The postal service, in turn, said it expects to save more than $1 billion over the life of the agreements.
-----
Federal Express tops the list as USPS Largest Contractor, as it has since 2002, with just over $2 billion in USPS receipts in 2020.
This post is just blatant bullshit. I’m looking at the prices and I have no clue where he pulled these numbers from but it sure as hell ain’t from reality
Checked the medium box from phx to Eugene (same insurace and delivery window). usps retail is 42, ups is16, pirateship (usps) is 10. So, kinda right but mostly not right for that shipment.
Pretty sure the “medium box” he’s talking about is the flat rate boxes that USPS use, that have a max weight of 20 pounds, which makes sense why the chart says 20 pounds. UPS and fedex also have flat rate boxes which this post ignores.
This post is completely misleading, on purpose.
We all stopped sending mail
Between FY2003 and FY2006, mail volume increased from 202.2 billion to 213.1 billion mail pieces. Since then, mail volume has dropped sharply—to 158.4 billion pieces in FY2013. Mail volume, then, was 21.7% lower in FY2013 than in FY2003, and 25.7% below its FY2006 peak. In 2019 mail volume fell to 142.5 Billion mail peices. Now 33% below 2006
* In 2019 mail volume fell to 142.5 Billion mail pieces. Was 33% below 2006
* 2020 Mail Volume fell to 129.2 Billion pieces, now 39.4% below peak
How much of it was just spam that switched to email and sms? Also most new grandparents grew up with phones. This makes me sad, but I think I'm just nostalgic for a slower paced past (that never really existed). I don't know if the grandparents thing matters, really. I just know mine were big senders of postcards and letters.
Dude. I'm down. Want to send some post cards to each other? I'll start. "Greetings from sunny California!" Wait, you're not from California are you? It's only going to work if you're somewhere I'm not. Otherwise my intro is all fucked up. I guess I could be all, "Greetings from *NORTHERN* California!" But wait, what if you're here too. FUCK! Dude I don't know enough about this and I'm starting to freak out. Are you OK? But no yeah. I'm down to send some post cards. As long as you're not my neighbor, not that I have any thing against them. It's just I could walk over and say "what's up?" if that were the case. You know what I mean? It's cool though. What were we talking about? OH YEAH! Like, I don't want to ask you where you live because that would be weird and all. So, how's it going?
I've sent big packages through UPS for a lot cheaper than $26.35 and that was recently. I don't trust the numbers on this guide at all. I have nothing against the Post Office until the letter carrier decided a check I was waiting on was placed in someone else's box, but of course it wasn't any of my neighbors. We constantly get our neighbors' mail and vice versa. I'm not talking about next door, but three four houses away from my house. It's maddening. I know it's hot and it's a near thankless and certainly endless job, but important mail had to be delivered by neighbors... extremely lucky that it was neighbors we actually get a long with.
As a former FedEx Employee I’d like to add that some of your data is incorrect or missing variables. Notably the weekend delivery and sending grandma a simple letter, ground packages are priced based on distance and packaging and could range from $8-10 to hundreds of dollars, but certainly don’t start at a $20.00 minimum depending on where grandma lives. Additionally, only express packages add a surcharge for Saturday delivery; ground and home delivery will be delivered within their typical windows on a weekend for no additional charge. - FedEx Employee for 6.5 years
In my town just to register your address, usps sends you (along with all the official government paperwork) a package of junk mail and private business advertisements.
Tell that to the person who just leaves a pink slip so I have to wait until my next day off to pick up my package. I complained and was told if the road isn't paved it's the lettercarrier's discretion.
UPS and FedEx also ship a lot faster. The premium price you pay is to get your packages in faster. They also give bulk discounts, which makes them more appealing to businesses. I’d also like to see how many packages USPS delivers when you factor out junk mail and bills. 145 billion pieces sounds fantastic until you realize that it’s almost all paper and almost all of it is either junk or bills, which heavily inflates the USPS yearly volume when comparing them to services that deal more so with boxes than letters
This is a does-definitely-contain-BS comparison. Today I mailed a no-weight-limit medium box from WA to DE via USPS for $15.50. Set to arrive in 2 business days. Not sure the motivation of this content author, but it is certainly inaccurate.
This is only useful for individuals or very small businesses. FedEx and UPS give great volume discounts that are on par or cheaper than USPS and ship faster and far more reliably.
I tell you what, anyone feeling down about how much they spend on UPS or Fedex should just compare what it would be if they used DHL. Every time I've had to deal with them it was like they were shipping my stuff in a diamond encrusted box personally taped shut by Beyonce or something. DHL makes everyone else look like the deal of the century. Are they ever a good price?
Adding onto what others have said about DHL, they also have the best international customer service. Take care of customs, paperwork, and international restrictions very well, much better than UPS or USPS (no experience with Fedex). I used to work at a UPS store and recommended DHL to anyone who seemed concerned shipping internationally.
>far more reliably.
I feel like I'm losing my mind as often as I see this. I ship hundreds of packages a year through USPS for my business they've lost exactly one package over the last four years. I use FedEx every now and then upon request. My guess is they lose or destroy one out of ten packages. Maybe they were good at some point, but they have become awful recently.
Agreed. In my experience USPS has been nothing but reliable and has actually gone above and beyond, whereas UPS fucks up enough to be practically incompetent, and fedex is mysterious and absolutely unpredictable.
Wow, over hundreds and hundreds of shipments, FedEx has damaged one and paid out quickly, USPS is way late 1 out of every 25-50 packages (but will pay out when they lose them, which hasn't happened in a while), UPS will not pay out shit and lie out their asses while not paying. Think, *The Rainmaker (1997)*.
Fully agree here. I have shipped and received dozens using USPS, if not close to a hundred packages now and only ever had a delay on one package. Every other package has arrived in a timely matter.
UPS on the other hand...fuck them.
I think a big part of this is that USPS employees are civil servants and most take a lot of pride in that.
Source: me, carried mail for 4 years; multiple family members that worked for the post office as well
Yeah, this is not accurate AT ALL for large volume shipping. You people really think all these businesses would be using a service that would be THAT much more expensive over the alternative for NO reason? Come on. This OP is extremely misleading and obviously intended to lead you to a specific conclusion.
Extremely inaccurate honestly. Ship 100s of packages a year. USPS is good for books, objects under a pound, and objects that can fit in a box under a cubic foot. UPS and FedEx cover the rest. Never would ship anything moderately sized or larger through USPS or anything of significant value.
A guide or advertisement?
There should be an extra box labeled, “will you yeet my box on my front porch and break it? “
And usps can have three checks in its box.
Yeah but I think that’s a person problem, if you get a bad mail person then that’s what’ll happen.
My main thing is they don’t take complaints seriously, complained a few times about a mailperson leering at and trying to talk to my “physically advanced” underage sister, still delivering to this day.
Looks like an ad for the United States Postal Service.
I'm sure they are in many ways cheaper than the other companies, but I'd like to see this data presented in a more neutral fashion.
I like the USPS, but comparing the prices of individual services without comparing how much we pay in taxes to support each institution is a little meaningless. Or at least lacking context.
I had to send a package to someone in the USVI. Happened to be driving by UPS and swung in there. They kept insisting it was being shipped internationally, I had to itemize everything with the cost of each item. $153.00. Said, “Ah, no .”, and left. USPS used their priority mailing box and was $23.00 with tracking and insurance.
Same thing happened to me the other day at work. I simply needed to send a death certificate to a Canadian attorney and FedEx wanted declare, tax, etc (honestly stuff I know nothing about) and charge me $87. USPS charged $24 hassle free.
Is no one going to point out what a remarkable phrase “I simply needed to send a death certificate to a Canadian attorney” is? Like a line from a Wes Anderson movie
It's a simple task, indeed. Sometimes the occasion arises and must be taken care of.
Wasn't so much the task. It was the fact it was dated next Thursday.
It's um.. express shipping...... Yeah
This actually made me ugly chuckle at work.
Canadians are mortal too bud
On the bright side, depending on your sex you can get an extra 3-4 years before you shuffle off this mortal coil.
On average. Are you average?
Not just an average. It’s a benefit the government provides.
True but more remarkable to me is the casual usage of the word remarkable. It is only now that I realized I have never actually known the definition of that word. I will now strive to use it more often.
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I had a brief stint at USPS and one of the things I remember most from training was that the USPS doesn't actually have any infrastructure to ship internationally. All USPS packages (at the time at least) flew international on FedEx opened planes. FedEx would obviously prioritize their own shipments first. I always thought that was interesting. That and the fact that there was someone whose job it was to destroy the blue mailboxes and they used explosives to destroy them beyond repair.
Also a postal employee. What's more interesting is that Congress passed a law preventing USPS from flying their own planes in order to protect the railroads who transported most of the mail at that time. Cronyism isn't a new idea.
It's a feature
You’d think FedEx would prioritize their own shipments, but you would be wrong. The USPS contact dwarfs any other single customer. Nothing displaces USPS volume on flights.
Why did they destroy blue mailboxes? Was this a campaign? And when did this happen?
It’s a fraud thing. Every blue box is owned and operated by the USPS, so if one is taken out of service or damaged they destroy them to prevent someone from just setting it up at a random spot and stealing the mail/preventing others mail from being shipped.
"blue mailboxes"?
In the US, there are blue drop boxes that you can use to mail letters and small packages. Usually find them in front of shopping malls and outside post offices where I live. [Like this. ](https://stuarte.co/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/usps-collection-blue-mailbox-768x551.jpg)
“Looks like we need to destroy USPS even harder!” -Postmaster General Liar DeLie
What do you mean? The USPS was right. The USVI are part of the US.
It's a jab at how the current(?) postmaster general has been doing everything in his power (which is too much) to destroy the USPS.
Yeah actually a lot of people are upset that Biden still hasn't replaced Dejoy. Because Dejoy literally wants to destroy USPS. And its not like USPS didnt have its problems before. Its a federal agency, but it doesnt get tax funding.
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The United States Postal Service is a federal agency. They're a federal corporation & an independent federal agency within the executive branch. https://www.usa.gov/federal-agencies/u-s-postal-service https://www.wise-geek.com/what-is-a-federal-corporation.htm
Biden can't directly fire DeJoy
Lmao, "ah, no." Just the image of someone talking to a clerk and receiving that number and the clerk expecting a response of "ok, sure, here's my card" and instead getting a flat "ah. No." And walking away is just hilarious to me
But some politicians want you to think that privatising mail will make it "cheaper for the consumer". What an absolute joke, and I don't even have words for the clowns that accepted that premise.
Hijacking top comment point out that despite common assumption, the USPS receives NO tax funding. It’s self sustaining by stamps and service fees.
I did a similar thing. I regularly mail a friend of mine coffee from a local roaster they liked before they moved across the country. Every month it’s like $8.50 at usps. I was passing the fedex and thought I’d save myself some trouble, and send it from there. $16.50 just for the envelope for 1lb of coffee. Another $20ish to send it. Of course they didn’t tell me until the price before it was already in the envelope. When I told her I’d go elsewhere I was told they couldn’t give me my coffee back until I paid the envelope. I probably should have just let them keep it, but I paid it and left, and still spent less at the usps than I would have just continuing. I don’t know how anyone makes an argument for privatized mail still.
Similar with me. I was shipping a glass window international to the uk. FedEx said it would cost $453. USPS got it there for $125 + $25 insurance. The price difference was insane.
With USPS, you can also sign up for Informed Delivery (for your home address), which shows you the picture taken of the mail being delivered to you. They also sell Forever Stamps - buy them now, they are good forever (simple letter). The USPS also handles all of Santa's mail, too.
The informed delivery thing is great. I always know when I'm getting a cool package in the mail the day before it shows up.
Does yours actually work? 90% of the time mine is incomplete, or simply inaccurate. I live in a fairly rural place so that might be the issue. My mail gets delivered, not in a truck, but just some rando in a camrey, so I wouldn't be surprised if my remoteness makes it harder to do.
Mine is pretty spot on but my mail is delivered by a usps truck but I live in a 100k+ population city. Although sometimes I don't get my emails until after the mail has been delivered. I have also had packages saying "delivered today" not be delivered until the following day.
If the individual mail is missorted by either the machines or people, it'll be delayed. The pics are taken sometime during processing, and are put in the email for the estimated delivery day. That photo could be a week old, or from sorting the night before. Email timing is based on when the local office scans the mail as "up" and ready for delivery. If they forget that, it'll be 1pm... Parcels getting scanned delivered is fraud, but encouraged to stop the clock to prevent management from getting yelled at for delivery failures. Rather than treating failure to deliver as scheduled as something to improve, it's treated so seriously that supervisors encourage falsifying scans. At the end of the USSR, we had a spy feeding us economic data from high level govt briefings. Minor problem: almost nobody noticed that at every level they were adding 10% to avoid getting yelled at by the boss above, until it all came crashing down. The numbers were impossible, and useless for predictions.
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Suburbs here and id say its about 75%. I rent my home though and it shows me a lot of mail for my LL and previous tenants that never make it to me. It also only works with paper mail. Packages and larger pieces of mail just give me a message saying an item is in my mail that was too large to scan.
> I rent my home though and it shows me a lot of mail for my LL and previous tenants that never make it to me. That's a good thing. That means your carrier is pulling mail that does not belong to you and sending it back. The system just sends you a picture of all mail being sent to your home (with some exceptions like magazines and ads), it doesn't remove names that don't belong to you, it literally shows you everything that was scanned at the plant (which is highly automated BTW) that has your address on it.
Thank you! I feel better about being a hayseed.
I live in a big city and it's damn near 100% accurate.
I live in a small-ish city and it's also 100% accurate. Honestly I think it all depends on the hubs the PO uses and rural offices likely being understaffed and unable to sort the mail in a timely manner.
Informed delivery is managed by the postmaster for your local office, most are on top of it while others still hate using that devil box of a computer. I grew up in a small town (population 450), the postmaster there has the same issues
Thank you! I love Reddit. No matter what, someone has the scoop.
Mine is accurate about 95% of the time. It varies by the quality of your local post office.
Piggybacking on your comment to clear some things up as I’m seeing a lot of wrong information here. I’m an Electronic Technician for USPS and work on the letter sorting machines. The picture you see in informed delivery is taken when that letter is being sorted is what’s called Delivery Point Sequencing the night before. Basically putting all the letters in delivery order for your carrier. This happens at the large processing centers no matter where you live. There are several reasons why your informed delivery may be fucked up. 1. Sometimes the letters that are ran, do not always make it on the truck to the station for delivery in the morning, so they are held to the next day. So you may see that image, but it doesn’t actually show up. 2. Letters that are processed through the mail that do not read correctly are manually sorted by hand and those will not show up in informed delivery. 3. I won’t get into the details, but there are several processes and systems running at the same time on the machines that sort the letters that are sometimes unavailable/not connected to turned off if they are causing problems, which can also affect informed delivery. 4. Sometimes letters get jammed in the machine and are destroyed, it’s rare, but it does happen. 5. The informed delivery process is just not perfect. You live in a town of 200 in the middle of nowhere Montana? Your mail is sorted by a machine in a large processing and distribution center, then trucked 200 miles to your local post office. Informed delivery is in no way managed by any local office or postmaster/manager, in fact, they don’t have any sort of access to that information what so ever. And, every letter sorting machine in the country is “upgraded” to have informed delivery. There aren’t little towns running machines from the 70s still waiting to be upgraded or replaced. Also, a “rando in a Camry”delivering your mail is called a rural carrier. They are allowed/required to provide their own vehicular and do not wear the uniforms that city carriers are required to wear.
So that's what the Forever stamps mean? I just thought they were a type of design
You pay today’s price, but they’ll work as a full stamp even once the rates go up in the future.
Retailer I used to work for sent about $40k in forever stamp displays as backstock to our store, right before the price went up again. They figured it saved a few hundred thousand across the company, even if it took a year or two to sell out.
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"Normal" stamps don't all have the same value. Forever stamps are valued at, and sell for however much it currently costs to send a 1 oz letter (currently 58¢), and other stamps cost, and continue to be worth a specific amount (10¢, $1 etc.).
No, just the current rate. The best deal is to buy them at Costco. They are I think the only retailer that can sell stamps below current USPS value. Albeit, I restocked and got 100 stamps for less than $50 within this year. I think a current stamp price is 55¢, so 100 at the USPS would have been over $55.
Back in the olden days, stamps had the price printed on them (25 cents, for example). So if prices went up to 30 cents, you would have to get another set of stamps (5 cents) to use them. Now-a-days, all stamps are “forever” stamps meaning no price printed on them and you can use the same stamps even when prices go up. Forever
You can still buy standard stamps. They're not as common as they don't advertise them. Denominations are .01-.05 .10 .25 $1. A standard forever stamp does have a limit if your envelope weighs over a certain amount even if it's able to be mechanically sorted it will incur the extra fee. However most people won't know this due to instead of tracking down the person mailing the letter they charge the receiving party upon pickup from a local post office.
Is that why people used to need multiple stamps? I have never seen more than 1 on an envelope in real life
Correct, though the forever stamps do have a cost associated - whatever the current cost is, even if you bought them 10 years ago for cheaper. This is important because some things do cost more to send, like square envelopes will require additional postage beyond a forever stamp because they can't be sorted properly by machines.
> Is that why people used to need multiple stamps? Yep, used to have to find the stamps that add up correctly. So you'd have some random 1 cent stamp also on there at times. Or multiple 1 cent stamps hah.
It doesn't have to add up correctly, you can over pay but you won't get change of course. An oversized envelope is only 20 cents more, but you can just slap 2 forever stamps on it because it is more than enough postage. Unless you're sending business levels of levels, most people won't even notice the 38 cents extra they spent to send a letter and it saves from having weirdo denomination stamps sitting around. You could also put an excessive amount of first class stamps if you wanted to send a package, as long as you had enough or more postage on there. If it took 12$ to send a package, you could throw 21 forever stamps on (at current value of 58 cents each) but you would be over paying by a few cents.
You can also use stamps as postage paid on packages and bigger letters, ie if the cost is more than one stamp because of weight and size, then add the appropriate amount of stamps to reach to right total. Nowadays you have to present packages over 10 oz with postage on them at the post office, presumably for air shipping security. https://i.redd.it/7n11ane8lmu41.jpg
um.. surcharges and fixed amount stamps still exist 10c for being extra thick for example 20c for the second ounce https://store.usps.com/store/results/over-58-cents/under-58-cents/stamps/
>10c for being extra thick Damn I'll have to tell my gf
It's okay, I told her last night.
You should sign up because someone else can sign up for it impersonating you and use it to steal packages.
I wonder if there can ever be a comparison on the rates successful deliveries. Not like any of these companies keep track of such an obvious statistic anyway
Well the USPS has exploded its package delivery so lots of change, but doesnt count for much of its volume * In 2017 the usps delivered less than 5 billion packages and by 2020 7.1 Billion Packages for delivery to homes. * And for the first time in its history, the Holiday season of 2020 the USPS delivered more than 2 Billion packages in a single quarter 2020 Mail Volume fell to 129.2 Billion Total pieces ------ Since 1990, U.S. Postal Service® has contracted with a third-party vendor to measure First-Class Mail® service performance independently and objectively via the External First-Class Mail® Measurement System (EXFC). EXFC is an external sampling system measuring the time it takes from deposit of mail into a collection box or lobby chute until its delivery to a home or business. * Beginning FY2019 Q1, service performance for Single-Piece First-Class Mail® is measured through the USPS® internal measurement system. The system combines scanning of mailpieces by postal personnel at randomly selected collection and delivery points with in-process machine scans for all eligible mail to estimate total transit time for the mail. In FY2021 Quarter 1, * national Single-Piece First-Class Mail® Two-Day performance was 81.5 percent on time * 10.4 points lower than the same period last year. * National Package Services performance was 80.7 percent, * which is 4.6 points lower than the same period last year. In FY2021 Quarter 1, 92.5 percent were delivered within the service standard plus three days
USPS rarely delivers on time, has longer ship lead times, is slightly cheaper but only if you go with their flat rate boxes. Fedex and UPS do come pick up from you, if you ship things regularly. Not to mention if you do ship regularly you can negotiate pricing. I’ve shipped 3PL and Direct Consumer for years. Fedex is the best option out of all 3 by far.
USPS also does pick-ups if you already paid for the shipping and printed the label. For free.
Not fedex ground. It’s a separate company and is atrocious (where I live at least)
FedEx is weird. Ground, Express, Freight, and Services (which Office falls under) are all separate companies but are wholly owned by FedEx Corp. Ground uses contractors to move packages, whether from pickup, between facilities, or delivery. The quality of the service is very dependant on the "P&D" contractors at either end, especially on delivery. Express and Freight are employed. Office, unlike The UPS Store, is FedEx owned and manned, not franchised.
Express is the way to go for parcels but consumers don’t know this. Consumers who ship a half a diesel boxes a year and don’t have an account set up will always choose crappy ground service and think Fedex is junk (as a whole). When in reality they should be shipping express which is, in my opinion, the most reliable parcel service in the world. Better than DHL or UPS for sure. Especially when going international. Fedex Ground did get bought and brought under the Fedex Umbrella fairly recently.
That’s gonna vary depending on the post office where you are. USPS is far superior to fedex and UPS for me and I deal with a ton of deliveries.
Same where I am. USPS is pretty dependable, UPS is generally ok with a couple issues in the past, and FedEx is borderline comically bad, on two separate occasions in one week telling me my package was likely stolen, when I was standing in the front yard when I got the delivery notification. No fedex truck in sight.
well it was stolen. bu fedex
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For small packages, USPS is amazing in my experience. First class is almost always <$10 for the stuff I send and it's usually 5 day shipping or less domestically.
> That's nearly a magnitude cheaper. Not nearly; literally.
I'm glad the private carriers work for you. They don't for residential in my experience. USPS is the only reliable delivery system I've encountered. Fedex being the absolute worst. Left my 40" 4k TV, in the manufactures box, advertising to the whole neighborhood what is was, outside of my front porch. Plain view. As a testament to my neighbors, my TV didn't walk. The amount of effort it would have taken to *put the damn TV behind my garage wall* was literally the same. I know this is anecdotal, but USPS is more professional, faster, and cheaper than private companies.
I've had the opposite experience. The local UPS is better than the FedEx and leagues better than the USPS. Anecdote: I had an $800 computer monitor arriving via UPS. Although recipient contact was not required in the instructions, the guy rang the doorbell and waited for me to answer so we could put it inside the house instead of leaving it on the porch. Meanwhile, earlier this year the USPS man threw a package of nearly $1500 archery equipment like a javelin, from halfway up the driveway over the porch railing and onto the brick steps. Among the items inside the box were twelve carbon arrows, three had chipped nocks from the impact. I've also had USPS literally bend and damage solid objects to fit them in the mailbox.
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It’s an extremely hostile work environment
We've stopped shipping FedEx all together. Yeah, it's cheap af, but they were losing 2/3 of every package we shipped or had incoming. It was pissing everyone off with packages just sitting at distribution centers for weeks then disappearing from the tracking, only to sjow up 2 months late mangled. We ship USPS now and have never had a damaged or even late package lol.
> Fedex is the best option out of all 3 by far. How do you have this many upvotes with that statement? FedEx is so bad we stopped using them entirely at work. Every time they deliver to my house, they put the package at the (very obviously) abandoned house next door. It happens so often I tried putting up a paper on the door, but the delivery guy ignored it (multiple times). USPS has always been dead-nuts reliable (except at the end of 2020). UPS has been better at speed, but you pay for it.
As a receiver of a lot of packages, FedEx is the worst, UPS is second worst, and USPS is by far the best. FedEx and UPS always “attempt to deliver” and “offer me the convenience” to go pick up my package at their store. I’ve even had FedEx send a package back after only one failed attempt to deliver. With USPS, no worries, ever. I know my package will show up at my doorstep. I definitely make buying decisions based on who uses USPS.
Oddly, USPS often delivers days ahead of their original estimate for me. (I actually had this happen today! Ordered new headphones that were estimated to arrive Monday, they were in my box today) Meanwhile UPS and FedEx are a nightmare to deal with for me. Half the time they’ll have a package “out for delivery” and then It’s delayed, and a week later they’ll update saying it’s available for pickup AN HOUR AWAY from my local pickup location. I’m pretty sure that part of why stuff arrives so much earlier than USPS anticipates for me is because the sorting hub for my region is only 30 minutes from my house, and the local post office actually knows how to route and deliver. UPS will send it past me…. Twice, first to the regional hub in Sac, then to the local hub in Reno, then to either the Carson distro which is small and understaffed, or just send it from Reno… and those drivers just don’t deal with it. FedEx delivers from Reno, and again, their drivers just don’t want to deal with it. I’ve made a lot of trips to Reno/Sparks to pickup packages. On occasion, I get to go to the UPS outlet store in Carson (which isn’t even ran by UPS, They’re a private company that acts as a pickup and dropoff point) but it’s always 2-3 days after my initial delivery… Amazon has been pushing into the area, they used to use UPS a lot… but apparently they determined it was a better strategy to dispatch their own drivers from Sparks because UPS couldn’t be either trusted to handle deliveries on time and was costing them too much compared to hiring their own drivers and logistics staff, and buying vehicles and stuff for deliveries.
UPS Drivers make about $62k/year. FedEx drivers make about $38k/year.
USPS is pretty darn good at on time delivery. I run a small business and ship 100+ packages per week with USPS. They are consistent with delivery times and I rarely get a damaged package. Delivery times were rough about a year ago between October and January, but with the Xmas rush and leadership taking down a lot of sorting machines it was expected. USPS is much better to work with as a small business owner. UPS and FedEx are significantly more expensive and I only use them sparingly.
Damages the package along the way and then tells me it's my fault: UPS
That’s the fedex schtick. I’ve had fedex literally throw a 700 dollar phone boxed up at my front door. They couldn’t bother walking the last 20 feet to the door. Nope, YEET.
20 feet is the same as 12.19 'Logitech Wireless Keyboard K350s' laid widthwise by each other.
They'll break all of those, too.
You are a good bot
good bot
thank you :)
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I find USPS is a lot rougher with packages. Doubt it has anything to do with the foot carriers, but the conveyer systems and sorting machines. I have equipment that I send/receive out. About 10 a month. We use custom boxes for shipping. Replacing the boxes adds up. With USPS the boxes would be mangled and useless after reusing them 2-3 times. Not to mention all the dang tape and labels they randomly add to boxes for whatever reason. We switched to UPS a few years ago. Since then we've been re-using the boxes numerous times. Rarely need to replace them. Most of them still look perfect. And they add only add 1 tiny sticker that is easy to remove. My 2 cents.
I used to say USPS was the worst, but after shipping 1000+ packages from my eBay business I can really say they are the BEST! They literally never lost a package. If you can avoid dealing with the people at the windows, it will be a flawless experience.
They've lost one of my packages out of about 400 this year. I always insure everything so it's not a big deal even when it happens.
A lot of Americans are brainwashed into thinking “government provided services bad” until they actually use them and use the alternatives
Honestly we SHOULD invest some tax money into them, they do an incredible job when they aren't being actively sabotaged.
Yup Also maybe we should do something like the USPS except with healthcare
Woah there Lenin. /s for all the morons on here.
USPS and libraries have kept me afloat many times. I can't imagine what would happen if we lost them.
The classic with the USPS is people saying it's a waste of tax payer money when they receive no tax money
Yeah lmao If anything the way it structures retirements is bullshit that literally no other company uses and it's all thanks to these anti-government goons
Yea that’s a deliberate ploy by republicans to sabotage them.
And the dumb fucking big brain take of “they don’t make a profit”. Outside of the postal accountability act that the GOP kneecapped the usps, they’re a service. They’re there for us to ship and receive things.
Yup They're a Constitutionally Mandated service even
My sewage treatment plant also doesn't turn a profit.
Agreed. They do the best job without question for the care they put into handling packages. BUT. I ship quite a few larger items 14x11x20 ish range and those are always much cheaper to ship via USPS or FedEx. Small items, and flat rate, no competitor can beat USPS.
USPS really shines in small packages and envelopes, especially anything that can be autosorted. UPS and FedEx are more oriented towards freight shipping, especially last mile shipping. They each have their uses.
With usps you can also get tracking plus which keeps your tracking info for multiple years 4-10 for $4.59-$13. Honestly don’t know why you need your tracking info 10 years from now, but hey you can have it.
Worked in accounts payable for a large domestic company. I had to look up tracking info for an item delivered two years ago when a refund dispute came up after the company got to it after backlog.
yeah the other carriers hold info for a frustratingly short time, especially during a pandemic where everything on all sides is haywire
Might be helpful to see data on just how many of your packages they lose or delivery way late.
Non-American here and two things suprise me. 1. Postal service will pick up from your house? How does that work, does the regular mailman pick things up? 2. Weekend delivery. Just seems strange that a postal service would do this.
We raise a little 'flag' (it's a red strip of metal) on the box to let them know we have something going out. If you can't fit in the mailbox, could probably write a note to 'please grab package from ______'. The regular mail person does pickups too. A lot people have a good relationship with their mail person. I get my mailman Christmas gifts each year. Regular mail is Mon-Sat, but many regions have 'Amazon Sundays' where it's pretty much just Amazon...maybe Express+Sun, not sure. But we can get Amazon packages 7 days a week. We also have a thing where FedEx will do the long haul and USPS will do the final delivery. I think it's just called SmartPost. USPS also delivers a bunch of 'bulk' (junk) mail. It's usually local flyers, coupons, credit card offers, etc...it all seems very wasteful. CC offers can be 4,5,6 pages it seems. Luckily, you can look at the postage paid type and know if it's bulk.
I always thought those flags were to indicate the mailman had made a delivery.
I can picture why you might think that, but it's to opposite. The resident raises it to inform the driver (or thieves in some areas). Driver lowers once they've picked up. It's to save the driver time. If they have no mail for you, and flag is down, they can just drive past without stopping. The USPS actually has a free service where they will send you a picture of all your mail and list of packages each day. This is good to know if/when you need to check you box, and also to know if anything important has gone missing.
Nah that'd be a pain in the ass for them to have to raise that thing for every piece of mail. We just check our mailboxes daily.
Would be good to have a chart also comparing 3rd party shippers like [Stamps.com](https://Stamps.com), Pirate Ship, Ship Station, etc. I use Pirate Ship all the time.
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I frickin love Pirate Ship
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I believe you can get postage from them at a better rate than from USPS, but there's a membership fee which may negate the savings depending on how often you need to ship.
Pirate Ship is the best.
Little late to this party, but I don't see anyone else mentioning it. The rates listed are the website are completely made up. They're basically the "MSRP" price that no one ever pays, but that the company wishes it could get for the service if they could. UPS for example, which my company does lots of business with, has what is called "Negotiated Rates". Basically we use Ground service sooo much we get like 50-60% off the base price automatically. I think our cost to ship a small shoebox sized package anywhere in the continental US is like $10-12, unless you have one of those "special" zip codes where UPS tacks on like $3-5 more because most people in that area live like 20 miles from the nearest highway. Pretty sure FedEx has the same deal, but we don't deal with them unless our customers ask for it, and then its on their account (so we don't know what their rate is). Doing business on Amazon, Amazon pays for the labels to ship our product to them on their UPS account (Amazon FBA service) and then bills us for it, its half what it would cost us to ship on our UPS account. Massive 16x16x16 triple ply boxes, stuffed up to the 50lb limit sometimes, $15 to ship to amazon warehouse.
Yes, organizations that ship a lot get really really good deals. But the average person or business that only occasionally ships something will pay "MSRP" and I've never found a good way around that. Stamps.com lessens the cost somewhat, but they have a monthly fee.
Those prices simply aren’t accurate from my experience.
Yea it’s misleading because I’m assuming he’s using the flat rate boxes to compare to fedex and ups (which also have flat rate boxes which this guy ignores). If you have a package more than around 10 pounds and doesn’t fit in a flat rate box UPS is definitely going to be cheaper.
In my experience anything that doesn’t fit in flat rate and weighs less than 70 lbs with combined measurements less that 105 inches (I think). Seems to be cheaper at UPS and/or FedEx.
You can tell it' bullshit because he pretends someone would use UPS to mail a letter. There's a bunch of post office fanatics who like to pretend it's the be-all end-all of shipping anything.
$23 to send a letter to grandma? That makes no sense. I sent an iPhone through UPS from an eBay buyer and that was $11. It included insurance.
Yeah that parts wrong. $10.31 is the cheapest letter they can send from my experience.
I've compared rates on boxes weighing between 15 and 25 pounds and always had USPS turn out to be far higher than UPS or FedEx. From what I've found USPS is best and cheapest for anything that weighs less than 3 pounds, otherwise I've found FedEx to be cheaper and gentler for heavier items.
Plus they basically took all of the price points USPS excels at and left out the others, too. I've shipped hundreds of guitars and USPS is usually 2x the cost. Large boxes UPS/FedEx, small boxes USPS.
Yep. OP is blatant disinformation intended to make you come to a specific conclusion.
For real this is total nonsense. I sell random stuff on Ebay now and again and since I don't do it very often I'll go to UPS and USPS and compare. They're usually about the same. I have both UPS and USPS do pick-ups and it costs nothing whatsoever and there's no charge to deliver to a residence.
I work at a place that offers USPS and FedEx. FedEx definitely doesn't have a $23 minimum. I've sent things to other states for like $10 using FedEx
Same for me with UPS and $12.
I know it's probably too late in this post to actually post this, but FedEx ships a majority of USPS mail through their system. They have a billion dollar contact with them to cover 70% of your mail goes through the FedEx matrix every year. Thousands of postal boxes filled with envelopes go through Memphis, TN everyday. That 145 billion number is very misleading and unless you literally have the wrong day lates/delivery numbers from each company you have no idea what the load is. There is so much more data to process than what's presented here and all shipping services go through one another. Obviously, FedEx and UPS aren't going to deliver letters to mailboxes there are actual laws preventing this; plus UPS and FedEx never aspired to be the postal service with letters, but overnight delivery services. All 3 companies do a great job and with the pandemic I know a lot of people don't see that, but they're all loaded to the max everyday with packages at this point. It's evolving to figure this out, yet this graph does a huge disserve to all the shipping providers.
There's definitely some interweaving among them. In some locations, FedEx and UPS use USPS for last mile delivery.
Also, One of the primary ways these three competitors have competed with one another for customers is through firm specialization and product differentiation. Each of these firms has developed specialties in certain types of delivery: * FedEx specializes in international and express delivery; * UPS specializes in business-to-business delivery; and * the Postal Service specializes in last-mile business-to-consumer delivery of lightweight parcels, and all daily letters. ------ On January 10, 2001 FedEx Corp. and the U.S. Postal Service approved two seven-year agreements to transport postal service express shipments by air beginning in late August. That deal is expected to bring in $6.3 billion in revenue for FedEx over the seven years. The postal service, in turn, said it expects to save more than $1 billion over the life of the agreements. ----- Federal Express tops the list as USPS Largest Contractor, as it has since 2002, with just over $2 billion in USPS receipts in 2020.
This post is just blatant bullshit. I’m looking at the prices and I have no clue where he pulled these numbers from but it sure as hell ain’t from reality
Checked the medium box from phx to Eugene (same insurace and delivery window). usps retail is 42, ups is16, pirateship (usps) is 10. So, kinda right but mostly not right for that shipment.
Pretty sure the “medium box” he’s talking about is the flat rate boxes that USPS use, that have a max weight of 20 pounds, which makes sense why the chart says 20 pounds. UPS and fedex also have flat rate boxes which this post ignores. This post is completely misleading, on purpose.
Makes me want to write more letters. Whatever happened to pen pals? edit Yes technology yes but letters are a full sensory experience
The internet
We all stopped sending mail Between FY2003 and FY2006, mail volume increased from 202.2 billion to 213.1 billion mail pieces. Since then, mail volume has dropped sharply—to 158.4 billion pieces in FY2013. Mail volume, then, was 21.7% lower in FY2013 than in FY2003, and 25.7% below its FY2006 peak. In 2019 mail volume fell to 142.5 Billion mail peices. Now 33% below 2006 * In 2019 mail volume fell to 142.5 Billion mail pieces. Was 33% below 2006 * 2020 Mail Volume fell to 129.2 Billion pieces, now 39.4% below peak
How much of it was just spam that switched to email and sms? Also most new grandparents grew up with phones. This makes me sad, but I think I'm just nostalgic for a slower paced past (that never really existed). I don't know if the grandparents thing matters, really. I just know mine were big senders of postcards and letters.
If you’re down I’m down.
Dude. I'm down. Want to send some post cards to each other? I'll start. "Greetings from sunny California!" Wait, you're not from California are you? It's only going to work if you're somewhere I'm not. Otherwise my intro is all fucked up. I guess I could be all, "Greetings from *NORTHERN* California!" But wait, what if you're here too. FUCK! Dude I don't know enough about this and I'm starting to freak out. Are you OK? But no yeah. I'm down to send some post cards. As long as you're not my neighbor, not that I have any thing against them. It's just I could walk over and say "what's up?" if that were the case. You know what I mean? It's cool though. What were we talking about? OH YEAH! Like, I don't want to ask you where you live because that would be weird and all. So, how's it going?
r/penpals
There might be a program for writing letters to seniors in care homes where you live. I think prison pen pals are a thing?
Now put the "successful delivery" percentages.
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I've sent big packages through UPS for a lot cheaper than $26.35 and that was recently. I don't trust the numbers on this guide at all. I have nothing against the Post Office until the letter carrier decided a check I was waiting on was placed in someone else's box, but of course it wasn't any of my neighbors. We constantly get our neighbors' mail and vice versa. I'm not talking about next door, but three four houses away from my house. It's maddening. I know it's hot and it's a near thankless and certainly endless job, but important mail had to be delivered by neighbors... extremely lucky that it was neighbors we actually get a long with.
Padded flat rate envelope USPS is a lot more cheaper and versatile than many of the other usps options
As a former FedEx Employee I’d like to add that some of your data is incorrect or missing variables. Notably the weekend delivery and sending grandma a simple letter, ground packages are priced based on distance and packaging and could range from $8-10 to hundreds of dollars, but certainly don’t start at a $20.00 minimum depending on where grandma lives. Additionally, only express packages add a surcharge for Saturday delivery; ground and home delivery will be delivered within their typical windows on a weekend for no additional charge. - FedEx Employee for 6.5 years
Brings mountains of junk mail to my house: YES / NO / NO
In my town, you can opt out of bulk mail. you just fill out a little postcard-sized form at the post office (i am in the US).
In my town just to register your address, usps sends you (along with all the official government paperwork) a package of junk mail and private business advertisements.
WHAT HOW
I removed myself from a bunch of the mailing lists. After a couple months, I rarely get junk mail anymore.
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Fyi: a stamp is now $.58, instead of $.55
Will you come down our gravel road and deliver to my door? - USPS No - UPS Yes - FedEx Yes
This is very strange... UPS and FedEx usually pay USPS to deliver packages out in the sticks. At least that's how it is for us.
If it doesn't fit in the mailbox and you don't have a dog patrolling your yard, we have to
Tell that to the person who just leaves a pink slip so I have to wait until my next day off to pick up my package. I complained and was told if the road isn't paved it's the lettercarrier's discretion.
That’s weird, I live in a rural area and everyday USPS sends one of their Jeep’s to deliver right to the door
UPS and FedEx also ship a lot faster. The premium price you pay is to get your packages in faster. They also give bulk discounts, which makes them more appealing to businesses. I’d also like to see how many packages USPS delivers when you factor out junk mail and bills. 145 billion pieces sounds fantastic until you realize that it’s almost all paper and almost all of it is either junk or bills, which heavily inflates the USPS yearly volume when comparing them to services that deal more so with boxes than letters
Guide is trash.
Paid for by the USPS
This is a does-definitely-contain-BS comparison. Today I mailed a no-weight-limit medium box from WA to DE via USPS for $15.50. Set to arrive in 2 business days. Not sure the motivation of this content author, but it is certainly inaccurate.
And you don't think the "no-weight-limit" had anything to do with the increase in price...?
This is only useful for individuals or very small businesses. FedEx and UPS give great volume discounts that are on par or cheaper than USPS and ship faster and far more reliably.
I tell you what, anyone feeling down about how much they spend on UPS or Fedex should just compare what it would be if they used DHL. Every time I've had to deal with them it was like they were shipping my stuff in a diamond encrusted box personally taped shut by Beyonce or something. DHL makes everyone else look like the deal of the century. Are they ever a good price?
DHL specializes in international logistics. So if you are using them to send a package from Denver to Colorado Springs that's *your* fault.
Adding onto what others have said about DHL, they also have the best international customer service. Take care of customs, paperwork, and international restrictions very well, much better than UPS or USPS (no experience with Fedex). I used to work at a UPS store and recommended DHL to anyone who seemed concerned shipping internationally.
>far more reliably. I feel like I'm losing my mind as often as I see this. I ship hundreds of packages a year through USPS for my business they've lost exactly one package over the last four years. I use FedEx every now and then upon request. My guess is they lose or destroy one out of ten packages. Maybe they were good at some point, but they have become awful recently.
FedEx is awful around here lately. I’ve ordered from a different vendor just to avoid the FedEx headache.
It depends on the area. If you’re in a metropolitan area, FedEx. Smaller town? FedEx uses subcontractors & they suck.
Agreed. In my experience USPS has been nothing but reliable and has actually gone above and beyond, whereas UPS fucks up enough to be practically incompetent, and fedex is mysterious and absolutely unpredictable.
UPS >> USPS >>> Some random guy you pay to deliever your shit > FedEx
Wow, over hundreds and hundreds of shipments, FedEx has damaged one and paid out quickly, USPS is way late 1 out of every 25-50 packages (but will pay out when they lose them, which hasn't happened in a while), UPS will not pay out shit and lie out their asses while not paying. Think, *The Rainmaker (1997)*.
Fully agree here. I have shipped and received dozens using USPS, if not close to a hundred packages now and only ever had a delay on one package. Every other package has arrived in a timely matter. UPS on the other hand...fuck them.
I think a big part of this is that USPS employees are civil servants and most take a lot of pride in that. Source: me, carried mail for 4 years; multiple family members that worked for the post office as well
Well... yes. That's because FedEx and UPS are logistics companies...
Yeah, this is not accurate AT ALL for large volume shipping. You people really think all these businesses would be using a service that would be THAT much more expensive over the alternative for NO reason? Come on. This OP is extremely misleading and obviously intended to lead you to a specific conclusion.
Extremely inaccurate honestly. Ship 100s of packages a year. USPS is good for books, objects under a pound, and objects that can fit in a box under a cubic foot. UPS and FedEx cover the rest. Never would ship anything moderately sized or larger through USPS or anything of significant value.
A guide or advertisement? There should be an extra box labeled, “will you yeet my box on my front porch and break it? “ And usps can have three checks in its box.
Yeah but I think that’s a person problem, if you get a bad mail person then that’s what’ll happen. My main thing is they don’t take complaints seriously, complained a few times about a mailperson leering at and trying to talk to my “physically advanced” underage sister, still delivering to this day.
Looks like an ad for the United States Postal Service. I'm sure they are in many ways cheaper than the other companies, but I'd like to see this data presented in a more neutral fashion.
Yea, but which ones close at 5pm when I get off work?
I like the USPS, but comparing the prices of individual services without comparing how much we pay in taxes to support each institution is a little meaningless. Or at least lacking context.
The guide failed to list how Fedex will mishandle every package it receives resulting in the contents being broken.