I generally don’t have any problems with the USPS, but I had a weird experience about a month ago when I ordered something from amazon, to be shipped via USPS. I live near Seattle, and the item I ordered was shipped from a town near Denver, Colorado. It then went EAST, first to a place called Oxford, Mississippi, and then further EAST to Birmingham, Alabama. From there, it came all the way back across the country to Seattle. I have no idea why the package first travelled a thousand miles in the wrong direction.
I live in Rome, New York, an hour east of Syracuse. My oldest son lives in Troy, an hour-and-a-half east of me. If I send him a card, it first goes two-and-a-half hours west of me, to Rochester, then heads back east until it arrives at his place. In the past two months, I've had packages I mailed to my youngest son in Carmel, Indiana, take 10 days just to get from my Rome post office to the distribution center in Rochester. My youngest son also sells on Ebay, and at the end of December, he still had packages that he'd shipped the first week of December, that hadn't been received by the buyers.
When I called my local post office to complain about the 10 day lag on a package I had sent, the person I spoke to said they are being swamped with packages from Amazon. When he said that, I told him that it wasn't fair that Amazon shipping was getting prioritized over regular priority mail. He didn't say anything to correct me, so I'm assuming that I was right about the postal service giving priority to Amazon packages.
mail, not all mail, is sorted by hand.
As Forest Gump coined the phrase “Sh*t happens”