Irma, eBay and the USPS

I have a lifelong friend living just down the road from you, @sakata , in Abingdon. Mail I send him generally arrives in three days, but I suppose that it is out of the region you and Stork are mentioning.

I once wrote to my congressman in Washington about the dreadfully slow waiting lines in my local post office. A few months later I get this large legal sized folder from his honor that was chocked full of information showing that postal inspectors visited the very location I had written about. Their conclusion was that after sending several undercover agents into this office, they were never forced to wait for more than three minutes. The cover letter asked me to contact my representative any time I needed his help.

 

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Yes, Abingdon is almost certainly too far from Roanoke to be processed through there. Over 120 miles. I suspect it goes through Bristol, but I don't know. I am not quite that far southwest and mine goes through Roanoke. It still can get here in 3 days from the west coast. It is the fact that even a mail a short distance away goes through NC which I find stupid.

 

Coast to coast mail is the fastest. They just put those on a plane. Its the intermediate routes that take the longest.

 

Hurricane Irma didn't even form until a week after the sale. It didn't exist.

 

My local, highly-trusted weatherman mentioned the formation of a tropical depression just west of the African coast about two weeks before everything happened on September 9th; he's good about that. Even as late as eight or nine days before Irma slammed into the Florida Keys he would not make any commitments as to which way things would go. All of us along the Gulf Coast fear one of these entering the Gulf, and besides, we had just had to deal with Harvey. At one point before Harvey took his final course up the Sabine River and then skirted across northwestern Louisiana there was a chance that He could have moved a bit more eastward and clipped my part of the state. At any rate, the weather cannot be to blame; it is what it is. Mark Twain is reported to have said, "Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it."

My initial points were that I should have been more careful than I was at checking out the seller. Even if I had, nearly all of his comments were favorable, so I probably would have bid anyway. There is a lot of talk about the USPS being at fault, and I know that there are times when they are; but I find their service over the past five years to be far better than previous to that where I live, and the online tracking system may not be perfect but it, too, has improved greatly as time has gone on. So it has to be the eBay seller that should receive most of the focus. In the two unaccounted for items I bought in the latter part of August it is obvious to me now that if I had not rushed into buying so quickly, things would have been better for me. I have learned something from this.

BTW, since eBay is good about sending emails on the status of auctions, on one I received overnight I noticed that the seller was in Miami. I do hope that the winner of that auction doesn't encounter any problem with this.

 

The seller waited 6 days to mail this item. If it was mailed on time it would not have been delayed in shipment to the buyer.

 

Two questions:
1. did you get what you ordered and paid for?
2. are you satisfied with what you got?

If you answered Yes to both of those questions then the world didn't end. Just relax and go on with your life (which, admittedly can be frustrating at times, but not fatal.)

 

Living in Florida, I was very attentive to all things Irma. I can tell you with a high level of confidence, the seller did not ship it on 9/1. Had he, as mentioned earlier, it would have gone through the system without a hitch. The USPS suspended all operations in South Florida on either Wed 9/6 or Thurs 9/7. From the tracking info, it looks like it was dropped in a mailbox or picked up by a carrier on the afternoon/evening of 9/6. Yes, the USPS tracking isn't always fully up to date, but during normal operations (which is what was going on from the date the seller printed the label, and when it first entered the system), there is almost never a 1 week delay in information updates.

I'm on @LA_Geezer 's side on this. If it had shown in the system on the 2nd thru 6th, I'd say it was the post office, but in this case, I say it was the seller.

 

Roanoke/Salem is where I live!

 

On a semi-related note. You can't put anything past the USPS. I recently sold a high value coin (to me) and the guy paid full BIN didn't even make an offer. I went straight to the Post Office with it wanting to thank him by getting it to him asap. Paid $24 to get it there in 2 days. Was going from Chicago area to East Coast. I check in 2 days later and it's in California. He finally got it after 8 or so days.

 

The world wouldn't end in any case, @davidh but the answers follow directly:

1 Not yet.
2 How should I know, based on my answer to #1?

 

I did not mention yet another auction that sailed through with no problems whatsoever. It was a purchase made on 9/3/17 that was shipped from Sarasota and arrived here on 9/7/17. Since 9/3 was a Sunday, I think it is safe to assume that this seller waited until Monday to send me the coin. As things involving Irma were still a little tentative, I would guess that it was business as usual at the post office this seller used.

Thanks for your other words of support. I learned many years ago not to be a whiner, and for the past forty some of them my wife would have yanked me by the ear if I had.

I am getting old, though, so I may not be around to enjoy my purchases much longer. I need, therefore, to deal with sellers who are prompt and who are not subject to the vagaries of hurricanes or earthquakes.

 

This just in...

Without any contact with the tardy seller who was the subject of this thread, I received a complete refund with a credit to my charge account.

 

Probably a good thing. It's still at the Florida Post Office as per my PM to you yesterday. Weather delay.

 

Thanks are due to @Collecting Nut for his help at the USPS. There were six parcels in all arriving today, the two from Florida, and one that came from New York via media mail postmarked 9/5. (I was unaware that coins were media.) The other three were purchases made within the past week, one from Nebraska arriving in just two days!

 

They aren't but some people roll the dice hoping it doesn't get searched.

 

I bought something on EBay recently which I was pretty sure was fake and I paid accordingly. I just wanted it for comparison. It was supposed to be shipped from Maryland (at least that is what it said) but it was shipped media mail from China!

 

See, it's not all the Postal Service. Glad you received them.