The US Postal Service is one of the primary suppliers for many of us. Many of the supplies we use come to us in those red, white and blue boxes that our vendors depend on. We use them to ship to each other; we ship our finished products in them. I've never seen myself as a defender of USPS. On the contrary, I've spent 45 years working for companies who make catalogs, web sites, emails and other marketing materials. Over all these years, including a couple terms on a Postal Customers Council, I've been mostly critical of the partnership with USPS. Don't tell the PMG, but I feel a need to do some limited defense of the USPS.
Some direct marketers like PSI use a zone skipping technique to get packages to us. A private logistics company (sometimes UPS and FedEx) picks the packages up from the shipper and transports them to a central aggregating location. From there the private carriers transport them on a non-priority basis to a USPS facility; often to a local post office, sometimes to a postal facility one or two steps up the ladder. For this zone skipping service the shipper pays significantly less than they would pay for any other delivery service. You receive the package 3-14 days later, depending on volume. When overall volume is high they fill up trucks quickly and you get your package quicker. When volume is low they hang onto them for a few days to make it more economical to move them in a fuller load.
When the package does finally arrive at your local post office days later than you expected, it wasn't USPS who had it for several days in transit, they probably received the package the day before they delivered it to you. Despite the fact that online tracking info says it was introduced into the mail stream 10-14 days before it arrived, that does not mean that USPS had it for all that time.
Some direct marketers like PSI use a zone skipping technique to get packages to us. A private logistics company (sometimes UPS and FedEx) picks the packages up from the shipper and transports them to a central aggregating location. From there the private carriers transport them on a non-priority basis to a USPS facility; often to a local post office, sometimes to a postal facility one or two steps up the ladder. For this zone skipping service the shipper pays significantly less than they would pay for any other delivery service. You receive the package 3-14 days later, depending on volume. When overall volume is high they fill up trucks quickly and you get your package quicker. When volume is low they hang onto them for a few days to make it more economical to move them in a fuller load.
When the package does finally arrive at your local post office days later than you expected, it wasn't USPS who had it for several days in transit, they probably received the package the day before they delivered it to you. Despite the fact that online tracking info says it was introduced into the mail stream 10-14 days before it arrived, that does not mean that USPS had it for all that time.
