Oh, dear, my number came up at USPS...

Centralized distribution points are supposed to be more efficient but they just introduce more possibilities of mis-handling along the way. There used to be a local drop box for mail going to the same ZIP code that the Post Office was handling. You could mail a letter to the house across the street, the PO would take that letter from the local box, cancel it and sort it out for local delivery. One day handling. Now, you mail your letter and it goes from your PO to the regional sorting center where it's mixed in with everything else, then sorted to geographical area (first 3 digits of the ZIP), then further sorted to the last two digits. Finally it's cancelled, bagged and put on a truck to go back to the PO you mailed it from. Then the route man gets it the next day for delivery. Handling time - 4 to 7 days. That's efficiency. It reminds me of flying from Pittsburgh to Chicago. Instead of just going west to Chicago, the plane went south from Pittsburgh to Atlanta and then back north to Chicago. Or another time wanting to fly from Pittsburgh to Miami. It was $150 cheaper flying from Cleveland so I drove to Cleveland to catch the plane to Miami. The plane had one stop-over - in Pittsburgh.

 

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Some of these status messages you see in your USPS tracker are not "real" entries. They are added automatically by the system under the assumption that your mail is on time. These messages generally coincide with what your mail is actually doing, and are helpful in alleviating concerns for people tracking their mail when it isn't necessarily scanned. Having said that, when your mail isn't where it is anticipated to be when it is anticipated to be there, you will see status entries that are very confusing. For example it might show as arrived at destination for a local post office, followed by a scan several states away. It was never at your post office in this case, and that status entry was bogus. Just ignore it.

At one of my old addresses, it was even more obvious when a status message was fake. It would show an arrival at the post office in my town, but my town post office was a tiny one room building in a historic area, and they didn't ever deliver outgoing mail from there. The system adding the fake status didn't realize this though. Instead my mail came from a larger hub office the next town over. If it showed as arrived at that post office, I knew it was legit. Otherwise, fake. I had a good enough relationship with the Post Office staff at the time, that they explained all of this to me.

 

Greenville/Spartanburg, SC to Orange Co, CA: going, one stop, Chicago - made sense. Return: one stop, Newark.

 

Davidh brings up some good points. If you mail a letter to someone in Temecula, CA from Temecula it will arrive with a postal stamp from San Bernardino, which is 50 miles north. What sense does that make?

 

Well, it's direction of travel is somewhat Easterly, right?

 

The postal service's text function also is off. I got a coin by registered mail this morning. According to the "updated" text, it's still at the distribution center. In the past, I have found the texts most reliable.

 

Thanks for everyone's input to this thread! I always thought only my local post office was the total quagmire. At one point, we had eight postmasters in 11 months with each one coming up with customer-annoying efficiency ideas to prove their value to the USPS. So it isn't local. I stand corrected.

I gave up on the online mail hold request; that stopped working a few years ago. The last time I requested a mail hold. I handed the form to the assistant postmaster; it never got processed. Now I have a neighbor collect my mail.

The International Sorting Center here in Los Angeles actually works fairly efficiently but the domestic mail sorting facility seems overwhelmed by the volume. Their presorts delivered to the local post offices aren't really presorted (by the Intelligent Mail barcode) so the carriers have to sort the mail before they can deliver it. Better yet, the deliveries from the sorting center to the post offices sometimes go to the wrong post offices (e.g., Santa Monica delivered to Culver City and vice versa) which takes the better part of a day to correct.

 

I've heard that forwarding mail from a UPS or mailbox store box to another address is sometimes a hassle.

 

If you want to have your mail held, fill out two request forms. Leave one at the post office and put the other one in your mailbox for the mail carrier to see.

Each carrier has his own sorting area in the post office where his mail is sorted out for delivery on his route. The hold card you leave at the post office is supposed to be clipped to his routing station but can moved or lost for any number of reasons and he will not know to hold your mail. If you leave a card in your mailbox it's pretty hard for him to not notice it. If you have an opening lid on your box, tape the hold card to the inside of the lid so he'll see it each time the box is opened. You could even get creative and stuff something into the box making it impossible to put anything in, like blow up a balloon inside the box and use a sharpie to write a hold message on it. Or cover the opening with duck tape and write on that.