Media Mail is still a good deal for me.
Unless you want to wait FOREVER it is worth it to pay a little more. At least FedEX or UPS care that your letter or package actually gets delivered!
Whenever I have to send packages anywhere, I always use FedEx ground. Always reliable, best tracking system, comparable prices. (After two seriously delayed UPS shipments, I switched to FedEx and haven’t used UPS since.)
If I were you, I would get my UPS and/or FEDEX systems in place 'cause it's only goin' to get worse (AND more expensive) with USPS.
Go with FedEx they are non union. Great service.
It depends on who is doing the shipping and what service they as for. I ordered a new book and another product on Amazon last Friday. The book arrived on Monday and the other product has not arrived yet.
Media mail can take forever, it seems.
However, I ship several hundred packages a year for my small business via the post office, about 25% international and the remainder domestic.
Small items via First Class mail usually in padded envelopes or small boxes and larger items Priority Mail.
I’ve been pleasantly surprised at the speed and reasonable price. Just sent a 12”x12”x10” box from VA to MI this morning by Priority Mail, Thursday delivery (two day service since today is Tuesday), with tracking for $12.70. That’s half the price of 2nd day UPS air.
A small padded envelope (000 size) with a small electronic printed circuit board inside is about $1.00 via first class mail and is 3 day service to most US locations, and around $2.00 to Europe.
Priority Mail is a joint venture with FedEx, by the way, where the post office handles pickup and local delivery with FedEx doing the long distance portion.
So far my loss rate has been reasonable, one domestic package out of 800 and a couple of international packages that left the US but went astray in the country of delivery.
wise up: dump usps!!!!!
I really have no complaints about the USPS. I do a fair amount, not an incredible amount of shipping with them. The “flat rate” boxes are a great deal if you are shipping some weight. They are NOT good for very lightweight items.
You have to be a lot more discriminating about shipping stuff these days, by that I mean, you have to really consider the options. (Unless you do it every day or quite often) Used to be UPS could ship a small box, say like a shoebox, 3-4-5 lbs, anywhere for $5-7. I can’t seem to ship anything via UPS for less than about $12 now, no matter how small nor how light. Shipping has also become VERY distance-sensitive. The same item shipped cross country can cost almost double the same item shipped just a few hundred miles.
Our modern world.
I have only had 1 Ebay order and it arrived rather fast (USPS).
Amazon.com — that is another story. I have placed 3-4 orders through them. Typically, the orders take 2-3 weeks to arrive. Orders that come from ‘individual companies’ within Amazon arrive faster than orders ‘fulfilled’ by Amazon.
Amazon is my LAST RESORT for online ordering because of their slooooooooooow shipping.
One Amazon order, per online tracking, sat in a shipping facility in NJ for 5 business days. Another order sat in a shipping facility in northern Mississippi for 4 business day.
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I recently ordered some vitamin supplements on a 3-business-day shipping through another company. They arrived in 2 days via UPS. That package travelled from South Dakota to Kentucky to Missouri to Oklahoma to Arkansas, and still arrived ahead of schedule.
I recently ordered a laptop computer through another company, and it arrived in 2 days via UPS.
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Amazon is my LAST RESORT for online ordering because of their slooooooooooow shipping. Maybe, they think that will encourage people to sign up for their Prime service. For me, I usually just do a google search, find another source, and order from them.
USPS sucks so bad where I live that I consider myself lucky if I actually get mail. My neighbors often get mine and I get theirs.
UPS and FedEx provide me with excellent service. I wish they would just privatize it already.
Unless you pay more for expedited shipment, Amazon has a bad habit of holding on the to the package for 3-4 days before putting it in the mail.
When checking, they will list the package as being sent but it won’t show up in the USPO system for a few days, then it makes its way to me in an orderly fashion. When I put a package in the mail, there is no such delay.
I think this is intentional on Amazon’s part to get you to pay for their annual membership.
After three years now of USPS putting mail in the wrong mail boxes, I finally went ‘postal’ on them. At first I would put the mail back in my mailbox with a nice note clipped to it that said “Wrong Mailbox”.
Until they put a $3,000 check of mine in the wrong mailbox and I discovered that they put any returned mail in a bag and ship it to Atlanta to a redistribution center instead of just taking it back to the local post office. It took almost a month to get it back.
Then I started writing in big letters on the envelope so people would know what happened to their mail. WRONG MAILBOX GET IT RIGHT AND PUT IT IN THE RIGHT MAILBOX AND DON’T RETURN IT TO ATLANTA!!! THEY DON’T NEED TO PAY A LATE FEE!!! (If it looked like a bill.) A couple of weeks ago I got what looked like somebody’s paycheck, so I just hunted up the the address and took them their mail. This sparked a Post Office war on the route. We’ll see if it gets better.
In the meantime, for my clients, I opened up a FedEx Account and now send a FedEx label with the invoices. Low cost two-day ground service, works like a charm.
If you don’t want to help the unions go with Fedp-Ex. UPS is uniionized.
I keep getting assorted mail belonging to others in my neighborhood.
Yesterday I got a piece of my neighbors mail that had a card in it.
Makes me wonder what of mine may have went elsewhere.
I remember a news story about 20 years ago about a US Congressman from PA. He dropped a letter to his office in DC in a mailbox and hoped on his horse. He beat the letter to DC.
Junk mail is the Postal Service’s cash cow. It’s the snail mail equivalent of spam, slowing down the system.
A friend of mine found out that the USPS does no forward junk mail. So he got a post office box and has his home mail forwarded there spam free.
They are cheaper and faster than UPS and FedEx. The packages I get from UPS are often in bad shape. I have been very satisfied with USPS.