Irma, eBay and the USPS

Discussion in 'Coin Chat' started by LA_Geezer, Sep 11, 2017.

  1. LA_Geezer

    LA_Geezer Well-Known Member

    I have cut and pasted a portion of a USPS email sent to me over the past weekend. I signed up for the automatic emails from the USPS whenever some activity took place. I started tracking the tracking number on September 1 when I had not received a small purchase I had made on August 24. When I discovered on 9/1 that there was no activity at all on the shipment, I contacted the seller to ask what was the status of my purchase. He replied that he had already taken it to the post office. The next day I checked the USPS tracking to find only a notation that pre-shipment information had been sent to them.

    Four days passed and on 9/5 I contacted the seller again referring to the news reports of impending disaster from Hurricane Irma. I noted that I saw he/she was in Florida so I asked politely that the seller mail my parcel. The claim was that it had been mailed on 9/1. I don't think computers can lie, but the information below would have me thinking that the seller finally did send my parcel on 9/7, a full two weeks after payment was made.

    I then checked my other purchases to see if there were any others from Florida. There were two, and both were over a week old. I contacted each of the sellers to remind them that it would benefit them to get the parcels out several days before Irma arrived. I went back to USPS and signed up for both of these, and over the weekend I got a report on one of the other two, showing that the parcel had arrived in Jacksonville on 9/9. There have been no updates since. Two things I've learned, and the first is to check feedback to see if the seller ships promptly; the second is to avoid doing business with Floridians during the hurricane months. I don't expect to receive any of these shipments soon if at all.
     
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  3. Collecting Nut

    Collecting Nut Borderline Hoarder

    PM me with your tracking number please.
     
  4. Cascade

    Cascade CAC Variety Nerd

    Dude. Just wait. EBay will make you whole if they don't come and you're way overreacting while giving grief to people in the way of a major hurricane. Bad form imo. Why are people always so "I gotta have it yesterday".. even in times of a major disaster. Smf. If a seller had something I wanted an a hurricane was berring down on them I would still buy it. Why shouldn't people do business with people facing a hurricane? Heck, they can use the money from the sale more than anyone.
     
  5. SuperDave

    SuperDave Free the Cartwheels!

    "Gotta have it yesterday?" If you wait a solid week before mailing a purchase to me, you're getting a Negative. And this guy waited longer.
     
    Rick Stachowski likes this.
  6. Cascade

    Cascade CAC Variety Nerd

    Sure. That's a bit over standard but this wasn't an ordinary standard situation. Preparing for a hurricane is an emense task. The OP even goes as far to tell people not to buy from areas where hurricanes are forecast, actually for the entire hurricane season lol, because you won't get your items quickly. Sounds like a bunch of "gotta have it now" whining to me.
     
  7. coleguy

    coleguy Coin Collector

    He could have very well mailed it when he stated and it wasn't processed for a week. The PO isn't going to operate right through a hurricane, and its employees were probably making preparations, if not flat out evacuating, and most don't wait around until the storm hits to leave. I imagine most PO's were closed a week before Irma hit.
     
    baseball21 likes this.
  8. LA_Geezer

    LA_Geezer Well-Known Member

    Dude, do you think it is OK for a seller to wait two weeks to send your purchase to you? How would you like it if your employer paid you when he felt like it instead of on a timely basis? Do you mind waiting in restaurants after you've given your order to the wait staff? How long should you wait before you ask the person to check on where your food is?

    In all three cases I mentioned, the purchases had been made WELL before the end of August, and those that had been made after 8/28 were just FRIENDLY REMINDERS that Irma was headed their way. I think I had been more than fair. I should point out, too, that a FOURTH seller in Florida contacted me to verify my address on 9/6 saying that the USPS claimed my mailing address was invalid. I told him that I had heard this before then found that by simply spelling out the "General" in my street address instead of "Gen" would solve the problem. At any rate, his (first class) envelope arrived today postmarked 9/6, and I see by his return address that this seller is in Oldsmar, a Tampa suburb.

    All of this reminds me of buying a rare CD used from an individual in Brooklyn about 12 years ago; I paid about $75 for it. When it hadn't arrived within two weeks, I contacted the seller who sent me a full refund. About FOUR YEARS LATER I find this badly tattered, scuffed, really dirty, white plasticized bubble envelope in my mailbox — you know the one I mean — and it had one of those typical USPS postage stickers scuffed up to beat all on it and a barely legible return address. Before I even opened the envelope I knew what was inside. I had his name and return address there, so I mailed the guy a note saying his package finally arrived along with a check for $75 to reimburse him for the money he had returned to me. About 10 days later I had an envelope back from the guy with my voided check inside and no comments.

    That's about the size of it, Dude, nobody was hassling anybody.
     
  9. LA_Geezer

    LA_Geezer Well-Known Member

    OH, and BTW, I rarely give negatives unless blatant dishonesty is involved.
     
  10. LA_Geezer

    LA_Geezer Well-Known Member

    Sheesh! We are talking AN ENTIRE WEEK BEFORE Irma was to make landfall.

    We have our share of hurricanes here in southern Louisiana, and I can assure you that our post offices work just as inefficiently when there are and when there are not any imminent hurricanes. No unusual closures 8 to 10 days before the eye is to come on shore, either.
     
  11. Rick Stachowski

    Rick Stachowski Motor City Car Capital

    I'm with you OP .
    I expect any order I paid for, to start the delivery process within 24 hours .
     
  12. baseball21

    baseball21 Well-Known Member

    Which is no time. If you aren't fully prepped and gone at least 2-3 days before it gets close it's already to late.

    And yes it is very possible to drop something off at the post office and have it sit for days and days and days without tracking appearing if you didn't get a scan at the counter especially when the offices are preparing for disaster.
     
    LA_Geezer likes this.
  13. LA_Geezer

    LA_Geezer Well-Known Member

    And if the sellers involved here had done this, their envelopes would have arrived here BEFORE NOAH EVEN KNEW IRMA WAS GOING TO HIT FLORIDA.

    We are talking long lengths of time, here, @baseball21, not the day before yesterday.
     
    Beefer518 likes this.
  14. Rick Stachowski

    Rick Stachowski Motor City Car Capital

    I'd be mad to if I paid for those coins at the end of August too .....
     
  15. baseball21

    baseball21 Well-Known Member

    I get that, but all we know is he claims he mailed it and some are a lot better than others at doing the scans if you don't make the counter do an acceptance scan. Either way after what just happened to FL I would give them the benefit of the doubt.
     
  16. Stork

    Stork I deliver Supporter

    Just a side note, the online tracking may very well not be accurate. A few times I've had to go into my post office (populated by friendly and helpful people!!) and they have a 'super secret' tracking that shows where things REALLY are. Your seller may have indeed dropped it off earlier and tracking just not shown it, with a USPS not concerned about moving things during disaster preps.

    That said, it does sound like the seller could have done better (ie mailed the durn thing) before 1 September. As for 1 vs. 7 Sept, it will be interesting to see the postmark time stamp when you get it.
     
  17. baseball21

    baseball21 Well-Known Member

    Also very true. Sometimes tracking doesn't appear until it's almost out for delivery. Sometimes it's scans getting skipped for whatever reason and other times I do think it is part of their security that they only want you to have a general idea at best
     
  18. LA_Geezer

    LA_Geezer Well-Known Member

    I get it that if I lived in Florida and were to sell a fairly rare coin to @baseball21 and the Weather Channel just upgraded a disturbance in the middle of the Atlantic that might make it here in a couple of weeks, that I could just take my good old time to sending it out to him.

    But @Stork I realize that nothing is impossible but do you really believe that an envelope I drop off at the post office — you know, in that place for people to pull down a door and drop their envelope(s) in on, say, a Monday morning — could sit there for a whole week? The post office nearest my house has so much mail in its boxes that if you go up there to mail something on a Sunday afternoon, the box is so overstuffed that you can't even get the door to open. What are the chances that this could happen THREE times to a single recipient, and each one of those times was from a sender in Florida (assuming, of course, that the sender posted his mail before everyone in the post office lost it and the local postmaster told them to close up shop)? We need someone deep into probability theory, but maybe it's close to winning the $700Million Powerball jackpot.

    As for the postmark stamp, I hope they are visible, but as I mentioned in #6 above, a seller in Oldsmar FL contacted me on the 5th and presumably mailed his envelope to me that same day or the very next and it arrived today; that's five days with a weekend from Southern Florida. The postmark on his envelope is illegible, though.
     
  19. Stork

    Stork I deliver Supporter

    I put nothing past the post office in terms of delaying things. I once watched a check I mailed from Virginia to New York take a 17 day vacation in Denver shortly after marijuana was legalized---must have been some party. That one was at least tracked.

    There is a whirling vortex somewhere in North Carolina that affects my mail going up and down the East Coast. Greensboro or Green something. My state taxes suffered an interesting trip as well. It involved West Virginia and Virginia Beach (twice) on the way to Richmond.

    Besides that, things do get stuck in machinery, fall on the floor etc.

    Seriously though, within the realm of possibility is that it could have been dropped on the 1st and the online tracking was not picking it up. I've had plenty of gaps in mail tracking happen. My local folks have, on more than one occasion, been able to see where something was (and print it up for me) even though online isn't showing it.

    All that said, most likely you have a lazy seller and I'd be annoyed too.
     
    LA_Geezer likes this.
  20. LA_Geezer

    LA_Geezer Well-Known Member

    I suspect that the seller is one of those brokers who'll advertise anything for anybody for a price. There used to be one of those in the building right next to my bank.

    I grew up in northern Virginia. Left for good a year after serving my two years in the Army. If you are familiar with the Springfield area, Franconia Road was a rural two-lane with one stop sign from Springfield to downtown Alexandria. Today it's a bizarre eight-lane super route with thousands of houses on either side where farmhouses once sat. My little sister still lives there.
     
    Stork likes this.
  21. sakata

    sakata Devil's Advocate

    The Roanoke sorting office was closed two or three years ago. All mail is sent to Greensboro for sorting. If you live in one of the small towns around there it used to be mail was sorted locally, then they sent it to Roanoke, now they send it to NC. If you mail something to your neighbor it will still go through NC. I also know that they messed up in their planning and instead of saving money it actually cost more than it use to. At least that is as it was told to me by an acquaintance who works there.
     
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