So, 10 days ago I ordered a Global Specialties PB-204 powered breadboard from a US vendor. They shipped via USPS. It spent 2 days in Missouri, then 3 days in Chicago. At this point it was at least moving more or less the right direction. Next thing I see on the tracking is that it had been sent to Poland, where it spent 2 days, then to Germany for a day. Now it is listed as having been cleared by customs. It does not tell me where it cleared customs. I can only hope it was in Canada.

This thing is doing more travel than I did in a year. And I thought Canada Post sucked (and they do, they really, really do).

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Bill

Well, sounds about right these days... USPS is horrible in general. It's the people... I've seen US Postal workers drive up to the mailbox, and are too lazy to get out of their vehicle to deliver the package. They just fill out the card that nobody was home, leave it in the mailbox and drive off. It's very frequent, which means I have to get in the car drive 10+ miles, spend 30+ minutes in line and when I tell them what happened, they could care less. In short, I've grown to despise the US postal service. Incompetence, negligence, laziness and stupidity is what defines them.

Worse still, they are suffering due to their own negligence and incompetence, so they now have UPS transporting packages "almost" to your home... only to send it to USPS at the last minute so they can delay your package another 2 to 3 days and either lose it or damage it before you get it. How does this help anyone??

So yea, I feel your pain... and sympathize with your dilemma. If only you could get the frequent flyer miles...

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Regards, KM
https://github.com/floobydust

It's not great when a delivery doesn't work well, but I'm not sure this is a productive thread. How casually we can insult tens of thousands of people.

BillO, I'm sorry you've had such a bad experience. I wonder what happened. I've been using the USPS to send packages for our company since 1992 and they have never lost or damaged a package for us. The appearing of FedEx and other competition seems to have forced them to improve.

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http://WilsonMinesCo.com/ lots of 6502 resources
The "second front page" is http://wilsonminesco.com/links.html .
What's an additional VIA among friends, anyhow?

I ship via USPS and UPS many times a week, in the USA and internationally. I rarely have had issues in the USA and when something has gone wrong both organizations stink. I spent six months last year harassing UPS to get them to pay out the insurance claim on a box they damaged and then lost. Internationally USPS does great until it leaves the USA, when the parcel is reaches the destination country's postal system more issues crop up, mostly with customs red tape.

I think it's fair to say that the quality of postal services everywhere has generally declined in the past couple of decades. I suspect that fewer letters (which are very easy, and thus profitable, to handle in bulk) are being sent due to the ubiquity of other, cost-free methods of communication these days, and thus costs have had to be cut to make ends meet while still providing a service at all.

But when someone sends a parcel to my address, I expect it to get to my address, not to the post office eight miles away. I'm at home all day most days, and my landlord or someone in his family tends to be available across the street, for those rare occasions when I'm not. I know it can be done, because it has been done before - so anything less is arguably a breach of contract.

Granted, there was one case where the sender completely botched the address by attempting to translate it. In that case, even getting it to the post office and my somehow finding out that it had arrived there was going above and beyond.

One thing you have to consider, especially when you buy stuff from China (and you're not in China) or some other foreign land to you...is that, originally, it was assumed that if I mailed a letter from the US to China and I paid the postage, that postage only covered the cost from my house to the US border.

Then, when the letter arrived in mainland China, *CHINA* would pay the expense of delivering that letter to the recipient.

It was also assumed that the recipient would mail a return letter and the process would be reversed (China gets money to Chinese border and US pays the fee from US border to my house).

In the end, it was assumed everyone got their fair share.

However, it didn't work out that way. Now, more people order stuff from China and they don't mail anything BACK to China. That's how you can get items from eBay for literally $0.88 (I've done this) and it has free shipping from China. So these companies are paying a ridiculously small amount of shipping to China and then the US (or your country) picks up the difference.

Meaning, the USPS now has this HUGE expense they have to cover and they're not getting anything in return. This has really hurt their bottom line.

I'm not defending them, but that's a reality.

However, in my experiences, the USPS has been super friendly and my packages have never been lost.

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Cat; the other white meat.

The above is not correct. Do some online searcing for the 'international postal union'. First world countires, like the US UK, etc. agreed to subsidize the cost of developing countires sending mail to the first world countries. In short you are paying higher postal rates and taxes to subsidize China mailing you that $5 item for 'free'. If I mailed the same item across my state it woudl cost more than for it to be mailed form China to my door. It is quit a scam that we are all paying for.

When you pay postage to ship something via USPS to say, the UK, you are paying the full fair. It might be delivered by the destination countires postal system (they are not doing it for free) or it might be delivered by a third party company that the USPS contacts with in that country, again they are not doing it for free. International rates from US to the rest of the world have risen about 30% in the last 4-5 years to pay for the 'free' stuff from China.

As far as quality of service. In general it has gotten better. Tracking is much better through USPS today than 5 years ago even once it hits other countries postal systems. Shipping to most countries can be done online, etc.

Well, I was going by a recent story I heard on NPR. I think we're basically saying the same thing. However, I didn't realize it was to third world countries more.

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Cat; the other white meat.

I appreciate your sentiment Ed, but I did not directly insult USPS, just stated some facts. My guess it just got put in the wrong bin, but I have had this happen before. Case in point was in shipping a trombone from Hawaii to my home. It made 3 trips to Orlando as it circled the US for 12 days. When it finally arrived it was damaged.

I did however insult Canada Post, but I did not do it casually. I have real experience with them, not much of it good. For instance they will charge me $10 to ship a small package to say, Winnipeg, yet they will deliver a package from a competitor in China to the same customer for mere cents. How do I compete? They also loose stuff more frequently than is desirable. Mostly stuff from across an ocean, but sometimes stuff from the US.

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Bill

I'm not seeing where Bill insulted "tens of thousands of people." He only highlighted a situation that I have encountered a number of times with the US Postal Service (USPS) mis-routing domestic mail and it taking days to travel a few hundred miles.

Ironically, I've had very little trouble mailing things to Canadian addresses, at least when using Priority Mail. I've heard all the horror stories about Canada Post, but have not had anything go astray north of the border. Similarly, I've mailed stuff to European and Australian addresses, again using Priority Mail, and haven't had any problems to date.


E-mail and texting are convenient, but hardly cost-free. Someone has to pay for the service, and that someone is you. Even VOIP is not as economical as it is purported to be. Yes, the telephone service itself may be cheap, but what about the cost of the Internet service needed to carry VOIP?

About 14 years ago, I did a cost/benefit analysis for my business when considering a switch from POTS to VOIP. The numbers failed to justify the change. While the actual VOIP service was less expensive than POTS, by the time I factored in the Internet service costs (business VOIP demands a high level of QOS in order to assure clarity of connections) and expected down-time, an unavoidable aspect of VOIP, it was more expensive than the substantially more reliable POTS.

I conducted the same C/B analysis on my phone service in 2016 and again was not able to financially justify a switch, even though POTS is costing more than it was in 2005. So, no, communication via the Internet is hardly free, and at least for a business, not necessarily more economical than POTS, at least in the USA, where POTS failures are extremely rare.


I agree up to a point. While international Priority Mail has significantly improved in recent years, domestic mail continues to be a problem with the USPS. Mail piece sorting is largely automated, but pickup and delivery is dependent on mail carriers, not all of whom are diligent about the job. This is especially a problem in large cities.

Although USPS is a quasi-private sector operation, the reality is USPS gets a large federal subsidy to plug perpetual budget holes, which makes them subject to the whims of the politicians who make budget decisions. The inevitable result of such an arrangement is that a certain percentage of USPS employees are affirmative action hires—some being unqualified, with a not-insignificant number of them working as mail carriers. It's not politically correct to bring up such a thing, but it is the reality of the situation.

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x86?  We ain't got no x86.  We don't NEED no stinking x86!

Indeed, BillO didn't insult anyone, but invited the sort of response that indeed we got, where we did see that, which was pretty predictable.

It's worth bearing in mind, when tempted to rant, however lightly you feel about the subject, you are inviting others to come in and pile on.

It's also worth bearing in mind that anecdotes are not data - it's easy to have a bad experience or see one bad example, and most of us, in real life, have the awareness to know that we shouldn't generalise to a whole class. It's easy, I know, to get carried away when typing at a keyboard in the safety of your own home, and it can feel good to put together an eloquent rant - but it may have consequences, because others may not have the same sensibilities or the same restraint.

Hope your package arrives quickly BillO.

On the Chinese shipping issue. I saw an interesting discussion from someone who does advertising mass mailings and he defended the Chinese shipping prices. The Chinese pay for the shipping to the US on the proverbial slow boat. If the Chinese want to subsidize shipping for their businesses then good luck to them. When it arrives in the US it gets a bulk pre-sorted for local delivery rate which is substantially lower than anything a regular person would pay. The guy wouldn't say how much his company pays for shipping but he indicated it wasn't much per item. Personally I would prefer gizmos from China any day compared to locally produced junk mail.

Today I received a CH375B USB-HOST mode parallel interface board in the mail from ... CHINA! Time to wire it up to the W65C816SXB.

I don't think it will be here anytime soon. The last update (Friday) was:

"International item has been forwarded onwards to destination.
CHZRHC"

CHZRHC is an International Mail Processing Center code for Zurich, Switzerland. This will likely be the most well traveled breadboard in history. Now on the European leg of it's world tour.

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Bill

No matter how you slice it, to me, it seems weird that I have literally bought items from China that cost $0.88 with free shipping...a single item and it arrived in less than a month. Some times as fast as 2 weeks.

Yet I buy something from the UK and pay $25 or so just for shipping. Even if the weight and size are roughly the same. And it still takes nearly a month.

Something, somewhere, is odd about that whole situation.

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Cat; the other white meat.