I made what I hope is my last trip to the post office for the rest of my natural life.  I can buy stamps at the grocery store, gas station, or Target.  I can ship packages via the local UPS store.

I try to be patient, but on a Saturday, really the only day of the week when I have time to run errands, I do not want to spend nearly an hour trying to ship off a simple package.  I had a bag full of stuff to send to my mother, and a bag of stuff to mail to a friend back in St. Louis.  The package to my mother was slightly larger in size, but weighed less, and was going to Florida.  The package going to St. Louis was heavier, but smaller.  I picked through the boxes they had available, and packed both packages into “flat rate boxes.”  The last time I did this, only a couple months ago, these same boxes were marked “priority” on one side and “flat rate” on the other, so they could be used either way.  I assumed these were the same way.

I assumed wrong.  I got the boxes packed, addressed (they had NO labels, I had to write on the box with a ball-point pen), and stood in line behind 10 people.  Eventually, twenty minutes later, I got to the counter.  The clerk said I’d have to pack the items in priority boxes, not flat rate boxes, and the clerk pointed to where the boxes should have been.  I pointed out to her that there was nothing there but the boxes I used.  So she gives me two boxes from under the counter, which are smaller than the boxes I’d already packed.

So I go back over to the little table in the corner, spend ten minutes packing the electronics in a new box and re-addressing (still no labels, still me with a ball-point pen).  The other box?  No way was all that stuff going to fit into the smaller box she’d given me.  So I get back in line behind 8 people and wait another twenty minutes.

I showed the clerk the box that was too small, so she weighed the bigger box and said, well, this one will be cheaper sending by flat rate anyway.  What??  You told me ten minutes ago that it was more expensive.  And, the box is LIGHTER than the one with the electronics, which is going to cost almost $10 to send as it was.

At this point I’m livid.  I’ve now wasted almost an hour of my time, to find out I STILL HAVE THE WRONG KIND OF BOX.  Turns out that they now ship based on distance, AND weight, and despite the fact that the box of yarn and teabags I was sending my mother weighed half as much as the box of electronics, it was going to cost twice as much to ship because it was going to Florida instead of Missouri.

I could have taken both bags of stuff to the UPS store, had THEM pack them up, and ship them, and paid less.  And it would have taken less than ten minutes.  And I wouldn’t have gotten any kind of hassle about what box or had to repack anything.  UPS shipped a 300-lb. trailer hitch for me to Oregon in a huge blue Rubbermaid tub sealed with bands of silver duct tape.  There was no issue whatsoever, and they even hauled it out of the car for me to boot!  The post office?  God only knows what kind of hoops they’d have made me jump through for the same thing.

The U.S. Postal Service is whining about losing money, how no one ships anything through them anymore, how they are just not going to make it financially.  I say, they have brought these problems on themselves.  When you make it difficult to do a simple thing (ship some yarn to your mother, for instance), they’ve completely lost touch with not only what their customers want, but what their customers are willing to put up with.

I wasted an hour of my Saturday, doing something ridiculous easy (at least, it should have been).  And they wonder why people are shipping their packages through different services?  It’s not all about price.  Sometimes it’s about convenience, and lack of hassle.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 12th, 2011 at 7:36 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.