Postal Time...opinion

[savageamusement]

A trader contacted me today.
I sent their items last Wedneday form work- so it got picked up Wedneday the 19th.
And they were concerned, and kinda hinted they mgiht want me to remkae them.
The item was tracked, and hasn't arrived yet.

Am i wrong in thinking 8 days, 8 postal days isn't that long a time?
Today is Friday if you count the day over to getting them out, it was received wedneday- so assuming it got sorted and toss on a truck thursday morning.
Thursday.Friday.Satruday.mon-friday.
8 days.

From Indiana to California I believe.

TO me, it seemed postal service was slwoer due to heat, and gas- and the attempt to put more on trucks to be more efficient lately- at least that was in the last thread I read..

How long do you all wait to redo a package- I haven't had one lost in a long time. But 8 days doens't seem that long
Meanwhile, their items so far haven't been shipped or if were, were not till yesterday or today. So it isn't liek I am sitting here watchign their stuff, while they wait. I sent out far before them

[Dragonbear]

Post office doesn't classify anything lost for over 31 days. They
won't even allow the paperwork to be filed til then.

Delivery confirmation is one of the strangest things when it comes to the
Post office. The way it works now is that the package is delivered to
the door and the Post person scans it with a wand. Then when they get
back the information is downloaded into the database. Hence they say
it won't be updated til midnight. Unfortunately when it's scanned it only
guarantees that it was at the door at somepoint. Doesn't mean it stayed
there.

Plus I'm assuming that the Delivery confirmation didn't have anything on it
yet. Still 8 days is a little impatient to start to say that they didn't get it.
especially if it was shipped media mail.

that seems kinda strange that your items weren't shipped. Was this part
of the agreement that you would send first and they would wait til they
received it? If that's the way the agreement was stated then they really
haven't lost anything. But if it wasn't, then that's something a little strange
and seems to be contridictory to the spirit of the trading agreement.

[debwalsh]

Media mail can easily take weeks. I've seen priority mail take up to a week or more. It all depends on how the post offices in between interact. When I lived in Boston, the main postal facility for New England was next to my building. I'd mail stuff from there, and if it was going anywhere in New England, it would take twice as long to get there because of how the local POs interacted - everything came back to that PO to be sorted.

If something hasn't arrived in a month, when you can show you mailed it, then I'd be concerned. But 8 calendar days ... nah. That's just impatient.

[Lamont]

i agree
stuff gets lost sometimes or is delayed
give it anohter week or 2 and see

[three 14]

i always send mine priorty mail i do not trust media mail it's to slow and can take 2 or 3 weeks to get to sombody

[TVFactFan]

Originally Posted by savageamusement

A trader contacted me today.
I sent their items last Wedneday form work- so it got picked up Wedneday the 19th.
And they were concerned, and kinda hinted they mgiht want me to remkae them.
The item was tracked, and hasn't arrived yet.

Am i wrong in thinking 8 days, 8 postal days isn't that long a time?
Today is Friday if you count the day over to getting them out, it was received wedneday- so assuming it got sorted and toss on a truck thursday morning.
Thursday.Friday.Satruday.mon-friday.
8 days.

From Indiana to California I believe.

TO me, it seemed postal service was slwoer due to heat, and gas- and the attempt to put more on trucks to be more efficient lately- at least that was in the last thread I read..

How long do you all wait to redo a package- I haven't had one lost in a long time. But 8 days doens't seem that long
Meanwhile, their items so far haven't been shipped or if were, were not till yesterday or today. So it isn't liek I am sitting here watchign their stuff, while they wait. I sent out far before them

2 weeks from the day you shipped i would start remaking them if she hasn't gotten them.

[BeefyBoyGod]

Recently it took 7 weeks for a Priority package to get to me. One time it took a media shipment only a day to delivered to washington from here in texas.

USPS is an odd bunch.

[debwalsh]

A lot depends on where you are and where the person is and what's in between. For example, here in Pennsylvania, there have been a lot of power outages recently as a result of storms moving through the area. Whole towns shut down - including postal facilities. If anyone's mail had to move through any of the affected areas, there would be days, possibly weeks, added to the transit time. I don't get concerned until it's been a month since the package mailed.

[gilligan fanatic]

What I find odd is something from a different country arrives faster than a border state. Now that is just weird to me.

[TVFactFan]

Originally Posted by gilligan fanatic

What I find odd is something from a different country arrives faster than a border state. Now that is just weird to me.

I usually only like trading with people on the Eastcoast but have been open to trading to the Midwest and Westcoast. Overseas Trades are defintely a NO-NO

[gilligan fanatic]

Originally Posted by TVResearcher

I usually only like trading with people on the Eastcoast but have been open to trading to the Midwest and Westcoast. Overseas Trades are defintely a NO-NO

I have never had a problem over seas. I have done about 6 total to there and never had one problem. Even sent one to a military base in England and it was just fine. I don't mind taking the chance. A lot of the stuff I want not everyone has and if someone overseas has it and nobody does here I take the risk.

[TVFactFan]

Originally Posted by gilligan fanatic

I have never had a problem over seas. I have done about 6 total to there and never had one problem. Even sent one to a military base in England and it was just fine. I don't mind taking the chance. A lot of the stuff I want not everyone has and if someone overseas has it and nobody does here I take the risk.

I'm too impatient to trade with someone overseas-lol

[debwalsh]

I will trade overseas traders. Sending to Canada is always the most problematic, but I know that Canada Post has issues, so I allow a lot of time before becoming concerned - for Canada, I'll allow 6 weeks before I become worried. I've rarely had problems. Now, back in the '80s, Customs charged such a premium on videotapes coming into Canada, it was prohibitively expensive to trade, so a couple of traders I worked with had drop points in the US, someone I'd mail to in like Buffalo. Problem with that was the person in Buffalo was going through the parcels and picking out the stuff she wanted and basically stealing it, so stuff I sent often didn't make it to the person I was trading with. Which bit, becuase it was off-air and I didn't have copies. She finally realized what was going on, and dropped that person and I started mailing direct to Canada and she ate the Customs fees.

I don't like to trade with overseas traders for material I can get on the US trading circuit. It's a waste of time and the extra money to mail packages overseas, as far as I'm concerned. If I'm trading with someone outside the US, I normally want something I can't get here easily. I've traded to Japan, Canada, UK, Germany, France, and Italy. I tend to group together out of US trades, though, since I have to go to the PO to mail the packages - within the US, I can use my Stamps.com account to prepare the package, and just drop it in the box. But with packages going out of the US, gotta fill out the Customs declaration and take it to the window to mail ... which means waiting in line, etc. Gotta plan for it.

[loren]

theres one simple key to the postal system

the faster you get the package in the mail, the quicker it will get to whomever

another thing that helps, is to make the label easy to read

in my case almost all are printed from the postal website, its only going to slow it down, or get mis delivered to someone else

if you write like a pre schooler on the package


other than that, the mail will take as long as it needs to,

[lazygrae]

for Canada, I'll allow 6 weeks before I become worried

Yup. A few times I've had to wait 6 weeks, exactly, for air mail packages to arrive. I've never ever had a package arrive even so much as one day later, i.e. if it's not here after 6 weeks it is officially missing in action. Accordingly, that is how long I wait till I will re-send, or ask someone else to re-send, any package.

I've also had packages get here as fast as 3 days so that's a pretty wide margin. Certainly, on the whole, packages I send out get to the recipient faster than I get mine, by about a week.

Who knows what the post office does and why to cause those discrepancies, it's just the way it is. I figure there's no sense worrying about it.

Re: customs.
I always have people declare a value of "N.C.V.", meaning No Commercial Value and have never had a problem with that. A value of $0 leaves it open to the guy looking at it and he may very well decide it's worth more than that (I've had that happen before). Not only is "N.C.V." a truthful declaration (let's face it, homemade videos are not a commercially available product and therefore do not carry any real, tangible value), it's one that's hard, if not impossible, to argue with as well. Put yourself in the shoes of the customs guy examining the package, does he think his homemade videos have commercial value? Or course not. So why would the ones coming to me?