In the Trenches

By Allen McBroom

Herodotus (an old Greek fellow), described the horseman couriers used by the ancient Persian Empire as “… stayed neither by snow, nor rain, nor heat, not darkness from accomplishing their appointed course with all due speed.“ Skip forward about 2,000 years, and a paraphrasing of this line, “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds” has become the unofficial motto of the U.S. Postal Service, and as such, it is even inscribed on some post office facades.

In 2021, “…swift completion of their appointed rounds” sounds more like a fairy tale than a plan of action for the U.S. Postal Service. We’ve all been on either the receiving end or the sending end of unprecedented postal failings of late, and if you’re doing much shipping, you’ve probably gotten more than a few emails or messages demanding to know “Where’s my stuff?”

To be fair, the postal system has lost very few packages, but delivery has been delayed on a regular basis. In pre-COVID times, shipping another item would have been the best avenue for dealing with a delayed or missing package. Today, the second package could take just as long to arrive as the first one.

Starkville, my town, is in the north end of Mississippi. Jackson (120 miles away) is the state capital, and is sort of in the middle of the state. If we mail a package from Starkville to a town 30 miles away, the package first goes to Jackson, and then to the destination town (another 120 miles). In 2019, the post office pulled off this 240 miles circuitous delivery scheme pretty well. With the arrival of the pandemic, packages began being delayed. Our local post office even stopped picking up our packages for a couple of weeks during the Christmas season due to a high level of virus-related absenteeism in its office.

The worst part, for us, is the Jackson postal hub has become a black hole. Packages enter, and they usually emerge, though many of them enjoy a two- tofour-week layover in Jackson before they move again. If old Herodotus was around today (he died in the fourth century BC) he would probably shake his head and recommend our post office be turned over to the Persian Empire for a revamping.

We’ve all experienced what I just described in one way or another. But there are a few things we can do to ameliorate this situation.

First, be prepared for the mail delay complaints. Go to usps.com, look under “Help” in the top right corner, and become very familiar with the link called “Finding Missing Mail.” The site lays out three steps, and in brief, here they are: track the package, file a help request and submit a missing mail search request. These are some of the few tools the post office provides to resolve the issue of missing mail, but so far, at least for us, submitting a missing mail search request has shaken some delayed packages loose and gotten them moving again.

Next, write a personal-sounding template that you can use when replying to your customers’ messages about delayed packages. Save it as a text file. It will save you a lot of time when you have to answer a bunch of messages each week. You’ll need to tailor the template each time you use it to fit the specific situation and add the parts you need to personalize it (like the customer’s name and some details about their complaint). We’ve gotten really good responses to these template-based replies. Here is the basic template we are using right now:

Your package seems to be hung up in the Jackson, MS postal hub, which in pre-COVID times would have been unacceptable to some exponent. Your package shipped on time, went straight into the postal service, and then became delayed at the hub.

This is now the state of the postal service nationwide. A year ago, our postal system was the flagship of postal efficiency worldwide. Today? No so much. Packages that used to take two or three days now routinely take 10 days to three weeks to arrive.

It doesn’t seem to matter where the package originates, or what hubs it enters; the delays are the same everywhere in the country. Priority mail, which used to typically take two to three days, now takes seven to 10 days if it arrives early. I have had priority packages arrive two to three weeks after they were mailed.

I know having a package delayed is frustrating for the recipient, and it’s also frustrating for us, and every other shipper in America. I talk to other retailers every week, and we are all dealing with the same delays. Nobody has a better alternative right now.

As I mentioned earlier, one thing that has helped recently is to ask the post office where your missing package is. They usually respond to these requests pretty quickly. The link to ask them where your package is can be found here: usps.com/help/ missing-mail.htm

You’ll need to supply some information (I’ve provided the information for a missing package request filed from my store as an example):

Your package is a 6 x 9 manila padded envelope.

Your tracking number is 930012011140564XXXXXX.

The shipper is a business with this address: Backstage

Music, 115 Highway 12 West, Starkville, MS 39759

Filling out the form doesn’t take much time, and it usually results in jarring the package loose from whatever shelf it had been sitting on. You can also choose to get regular email updates on the progress of the package. If you’re having trouble with a delivery, file the missing mail report, since that has proven to be the best way to get the delayed mail moving. Again, there has been one bright spot in all of this: While the post office has been slower than slow in moving the mail, so far every package we’ve shipped has been delivered eventually, no matter how delayed it was.

If you do any degree of package mailing outside of eBay and Amazon, look closely (continued on page 45)