I must respond to the U.S. Postal Service and its self-congratulatory posturing about its efforts in handling heavy parcel volume during the UPS strike.
Our company requested Priority Mail (with a delivery time of one to three days, depending on distance) for all packages shipped during the strike. We found packages took up to 10 days to go a few hundred miles. We paid for prompt delivery (instead of parcel post rates), and no warning was given that service could be three times the normal delivery time.
(Of course, we expected a day or two delay, but some packages would not have been shipped through the Postal Service if we hadn’t been fed media reports of Postal Service spokesmen crowing about the great service readily available at the post office. It’s one thing to say you deliver; it’s an entirely different thing to actually do it.)
UPS really screwed up our delivery system by going on strike, but they do a great job of timely delivery–at a fraction of the cost at the post office–on packages weighing more than one pound. As I am writing this, the mailman has delivered a Priority parcel. It took nine days to go from Evanston to Skokie.
