Weather and shipping

[nancylebov]

Last Saturday, I sent a package by priority mail to be delivered to Ann Arbor. It was reasonable to expect it to get there by Wednesday. I sent it from Philadelphia.

It still isn't there. The post office says it was hung up by bad weather. For reasons which are unclear to me, it was sent by way of Washington. The state of Washington.

There've been bad storms in the US recently, but I'm unsure of the placement and timing, so I can't tell if the idea that the package was hung up by weather is reasonable.

A fast googling doesn't turn up any sites that track how weather would be likely to affect shipping times. It seems to me that such a site would be hard but possible, and conceivably profitable if it had ads on it.

Comments

[ladysmith.livejournal.com]

We just recently sent a certified letter to someone three towns over (Lake Mary to Casselberry is about a 20 minute drive). It went by way of Missouri, and took almost two weeks to get there.

I do NOT understand the US Postal service.

[captain-button.livejournal.com]

My main Anime pusher uses the USPS for free shipping cheapskates like me. The is a sorta-kinda tracking system. I don't know which kinds of mail it works for, but the link is:

http://trkcnfrm1.smi.usps.com/PTSInternetWeb/index.jsp

That said, it is not real reliable for interim steps. It will show delivery, but any steps between pickup and delivery may be shown or may not, with no obvious pattern.

Anyway, this mostly my excuse to talk about the time last year when a package took a week's vacation to New Jersey.

I live in Georgia, and my packages go through Atlanta on their way from Iowa, which makes sense. But one last year went from Iowa to Atlanta, then to New Jersey, then back to Atlanta and on to me. Dunno what dives it hung out in while it was in NJ.

[dcseain.livejournal.com]

I'm going to posit a theory. There is a United Airlines flight that goes from San Francisco to Denver to Chicago to Cleveland to Boston, or some similar routing, and back the other way. It is one of several commercial passenger flights that exists primarily to carry US mail, and has flown that route since at least 1940. I could look up the flight, but don't feel like it.

Anyway, what i'm getting at is your package had to fly. Humans and/or machines sort the mail when it gets somewhere. The humans in particular are prone to mistakes and to not caring. So package may have gone from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh to St Louis, then instead of changing to Chicago to get to Detroit, it stayed on its flight. Who knows. Postal services are rather black boxes.