0921: "Delivery Notification"

[sarahbau]

Several people have said to have things shipped to where you work if you want things delivered properly. Well, I own a business, and UPS can't seem to get those deliveries right either. I've called them several times, and they always say their policy is to only deliver during posted business hours, but I still get notices on the door. Even worse, they'll leave our packages at a neighboring business, even though I've asked them not to. The worst case of this was when they left over $30,000 in computer parts from NewEgg (in clearly marked NewEgg boxes) in the entryway of the restaurant next door. Anyone could have just picked up one of the 35 boxes on their way out, and no one would have noticed (the restaurant has no security cameras).

As for home deliveries, I'm normally waiting for a knock since I obsess over the package tracking and know when it's on the truck. One day, while waiting for a package, I heard a faint scratching at the door. I jumped up, ran to the door and opened it. It was the UPS guy, writing on the Info Notice he'd stuck to the door. I can understand not wanting to wait around too long for someone to answer, but wouldn't it be faster to wait 30s or so and deliver it on day 1 rather than stick notices on the door for 3 days, then have to remove the package from your truck?

[jozwa]

I like the art. Not all stick figure-y.

[Posthumane]

In Canada, getting things delivered by Canada Post (or Purolator, their package service) is generally much more convenient and reliable compared to UPS or FedEx. Also, it's usually much cheaper, especially if things are being sent from the US. UPS charges outrageous customs brokerage fees on most packages, on the order of 25% of the package value sometimes. I always try to have things shipped by USPS when ordering from the US for that reason alone.

Interestingly enough, there are several "receiver" companies near the US/Canada border where you can have packages shipped in the US. My friend uses one in Sweet Grass, Montana all the time. Apparently is is often cheaper for him to drive 3-4 hours round trip to pick things up at the border than it is to have them shipped to his house across the border or just buy them in Canada.

[eviloatmeal]

There should be a question mark, not an exclamation mark, after the "WHAT" in the second panel.

Sorry...

WE GET SIGNAL

WHAT!

MAIN SCREEN TURN ON.

IT'S YOU!!

HOW ARE YOU GENTLEMEN!!

[Shiyiya]

I fail to even imagine how more than one mail service could *work*. How do you mail things? Do you have to buy different stamps depending? The mail is run by the government, and they've been having to close offices all over the place because people email instead of sending letters and there are other package shipping companies, so I don't think a rival would be at all commercially viable anyway.

Strangely, that is more or less exactly the same reasons why us Europeans are wondering about health insurance in the USA. IMHO, the same arguments hold, including that of "communities which mail companies would not want to service, because they are not profitable".
Odd, no ?

Cris

Hey, I'm not arguing there, the system here is bullshit. But OMGSOCIALISM!!!! crap means it's unlikely to change.

[bocian]

I had this happen just a couple weeks ago. I came home for a late lunch because I knew my package was likely to be delivered then. When I arrived, there was no note on my door. I sat in the living room, less than 20 feet from the door, the whole time. There was neither a knock nor a doorbell ring. When I left an hour later, a missed delivery notice hung in plain sight.

My regular UPS guy is awesome; he has my phone number, and I have his. He understands that leaving a notice means more work the next day, and is willing to go to some pretty extraordinary lengths to make sure I get it on the first delivery ... once even hand-delivering it to me when I was stuck in a committee meeting. He called the day after the stealth notice to ask if I wanted my package delivered at home or to my office, and he said he'd just gotten back from vacation. I told him about the ninja non-delivery by his substitute the day before, and he said he would make sure their manager knew about the bad behavior. Whether there was chastisement or not, I felt better.

[mrmoses]

I started shipping items to work so I wouldn't have to pick up my packages, but the crossover wasn't easy. I messed up the street address using my work street number but my home street name. For example, if I live at 123 Home St. and work at 987 Work Rd., I had the package shipped to 987 Home St. I didn't notice until the package had been shipped, so there was no way to change it. I ended up going to the wrong address and it was an abandoned building, so I had hope that someone else had not received my package. As I was walking back to my car I noticed a piece of paper on the ground. I noticed it because it was so clean. I picked it up and it was the delivery notification (yes, on the ground). So I was able to go and pickup my package (and it was a new laptop).

Here's another, more recent, delivery failure story. My sister-in-law ordered us the Traders & Barbarians expansion for the Settlers of Catan board game. The package was delivered and left outside (by FedEx I think). She found the game and open package in her neighbors yard. Quite The Friendly Robber

[Oflick]

Having a post office box has prevented me from ever being in this situation. The most I get are notes in the box telling me they have something that doesn't fit in the box so go to the counter to pick it up.

In other words, I can relate to the people who didn't particularly get it. I got the delivery notification part at least, got lost in the middle though. Just not something that I can relate too on a whole though.

[gingermrkettle]

And then there's UKMail. So I was having a pair of fairly large and quite delicate speakers delivered after having some servicing work done. The company sending them told me when they had arranged for it to be sent on, so I was at home all day. Nothing.

Now this was a pair of speakers, each in an individual box. They were going from the same place to the same place, which didn't stop them going to different depots, which they didn't tell me until the end of the day when I called them to find out why I had wasted a day. Several rants later they agreed to redeliver out of hours only to take them upstairs by rolling the boxes up the stairs to the flat despite the fragile symbols (which the delivery oafs didn't recognise). Small sample I know but 1 experience, 1 full and extensive quota of uselessness.

[AvatarIII]

Having a post office box has prevented me from ever being in this situation. The most I get are notes in the box telling me they have something that doesn't fit in the box so go to the counter to pick it up.

In other words, I can relate to the people who didn't particularly get it. I got the delivery notification part at least, got lost in the middle though. Just not something that I can relate too on a whole though.

ditto, my town actually has 2 post offices that are used for parcel depots, and i've had to pick things up from the several times after finding "you weren't in/too big for letter box" slips come through the door (as far as i know, in the UK posting things through the door is perfectly legal for anybody) the only thing i've ever had to get re-delivered was a bed, but they were good enough to deliever in 2 hours slots and on weekends, so i didn't have to wait around, or take a day off work, and they were on time.

[Aitamen]

I have to wait outside of my apt. building to get packages the day after it's due, because the shipping center is ~20 miles away (I don't drive), and because we don't have landlines (both cellphones, and Hawaii numbers no less (I live in Denver)), we can't link a phone to the buzzer like everyone else. Luckily, the guy knows me by name now, and waits a little bit if he's early to deliver to my place...

It's totally balls, though... really, why can't we find a better way?

[dr pepper]

I have to wait outside of my apt. building to get packages the day after it's due, because the shipping center is ~20 miles away (I don't drive), and because we don't have landlines (both cellphones, and Hawaii numbers no less (I live in Denver)), we can't link a phone to the buzzer like everyone else. Luckily, the guy knows me by name now, and waits a little bit if he's early to deliver to my place...

It's totally balls, though... really, why can't we find a better way?

Buy a pair of walkie talkies. Leave one on your porch and one in the living room or kitchen.

[TheSoberPirate]

For packages that aren't super expensive or when I'm only going to be gone an hour or two (or while I'm taking a shower, etc.), I just leave a note (signed, don't know if that matters) taped to the door telling UPS/Fedex/USPS that it's okay to leave the package on the doorstep. I think this has always worked for me.

If you have a problem with ninja-deliveries, maybe put a note on the door even if you're sitting on the couch 20 feet away?

[zephalis]

This comic had me totally confused until I realized that the yellow thingies on the door were supposed to be those notifications. And not of delivery, but of failure of delivery. Is that an American thing? Them nailing those to the door? Here in NL we just use the mailbox for that.

It's a sticky note. In the U.S., private companies such as UPS and FedEx aren't allowed to put things in a mailbox. In fact, it's illegal for most people to do so. By federal law, only employees of the U.S. Postal Service are allowed to place items in mailboxes.

Double-U-T-F? You're kidding right? That's gotta be one of the most absurd laws I've ever heard of. We're talking about the US here right, not Soviet Russia?

What about other postal services? How do they deliver their mail? What about newspapers, magazines, house-to-house magizines, flyers, notices from the local council, etc, etc? Do they just throw them on your porch? Ring your doorbell every time?

Quite apart from being absurd, how is that even constitutional? A man's house is his castle, except for his mailbox? Do police break into your house at night to check if someone deposited illegal materials in your mailbox?

I'm... confused. I'm half-thinking that you're joking, but it'd be a very weird joke to make in an otherwise serious post. But it's just so ... huh?

Uh, dude, mail BOXES, not mail SLOTS. It is a box on a stick out by the street, not a flap in the front door. And there ARE no other mail services. USPS delivers the mail, period. Newspapers are generally deposited in driveways or in a plastic box bolted underneath the mailbox (ours lands in the driveway in a plastic bag). Flyers and such are generally stuck to or by the door, or behind the flag of the mailbox. No idea what a house-to-house magazine would be.

I already suspected functoruser was only talking about the box-by-the-side-of-the-road type (though the word mailbox really also refers to slots in your door). But that still doesn't make any sense. It's a box on your property, why does the federal government get to decide what you'd want to put in there? Mailboxes often aren't even marked as such. And even if they could constitutionally make such a law, why would they want to? Do Americans seriously prefer their newspapers thrown out in the rain on their porch? Or the dozens of other things for which mailboxes are useful. Sure you could add a secondary mailbox under your primary mailbox, just for newspapers. But you have to admit that's just completely unnecessary overhead.

There not being any other mail services also hugely surprises me. I so often hear people complain about USPS. And monopolies are hardly ever efficient. How can a competing mail service not be commercially viable? I'm from the Netherlands, a country which is practically the size of a postal stamp, and we still have several.

It's to prevent any excuse for mail tampering. From what I understand, at one time there were other delivery services and they would take the mail out of the box. Sometimes they would mistakenly take the wrong letter (similar to how you can sometimes receive a piece of your neighbor's mail); sometimes they would intentionally take mail out. At first it was unscrupulous employees stealing because the blame would shift to the other service (also why you aren't supposed to mail cash). Eventually as the USPS got bigger and small companies couldn't compete and some of them began tampering with the mail in a vain effort to make their service more reliable [which likely failed also because they weren't as reliable].

Magazines, and local municipal notices are delivered through USPS at different rates (which reduces the overhead of having special companies for each type of mail). Newspapers are typically delivered to special boxes or in plastic bags (although most people don't get print papers anymore unless they are a local paper). Flyers are rolled up and placed in door handles or rubber banded, or slipped in the side of an outer storm door.

As for the domain issues (i.e. "a man's house is his castle), there are two issues at hand that I'll handle separately:

• The box itself is yours (you payed for it). The air-space inside the box is wholly owned by USPS and the owner of the box is given permission to deposit materials that comply with postal regulations, provided that they have affixed proper postage, and to remove materials deposited by on-duty postal carriers.
• Ownership is of physical things. A landowner owns the land and a homeowner owns the structure (they are usually the same person but not always). The airspace and mineral rights are owned by the individual state's department of natural resources (up to a certain altitude where it's owned by the FAA). This is why someone has to get permission to build a structure on "their" property. The homeowner is typically a sub-lessee of the airspace that the city leases from the county who leases it from the state (not on paper, but through the tax system). [property ownership in the states is actually a very complex section of law. It's complexity stems from the philosophical nature of "ownership" coupled with the inability of the masses to understand the huge mounds of intricately placed verbiage (read: horseshit).] Actually, landowners (aside from native american tribes) don't own their land here either which most people don't realize, but that's a different argument.

It the case of the efficiency of a monopoly, it works because of the way it's set up. USPS is not a free reign corporation, nor is it a department of the US government as it once was [this is commonly confused especially because postal workers get government pensions due to the nature of the negotiations when it was split from the government]. USPS is a regulated monopoly (similar to our electricity and natural gas services). This means that they are not only a non-profit corporation but they are regulated to prevent them from raking exorbitant amounts of money like a vast amount of non-profits do. They're prices are capped to keep them from charging whatever they want. The efficiency comes from the size of the corporation which is fairly self-sufficient (they have their own engineers to make equipment, their own vehicle repair service, etc) which is something that isn't possible unless you are making a lot of money (which you can't do with cheap prices unless you are a monopoly or near to it).

As for the loss of jobs to email. USPS has said that the shift to email has had a significant effect on the total volume of mail but the population increase has far outweighed that AND most of their mail comes from certified letters (email is not guarantied to get there), official documents that need a real signature or a special seal, and packages which can't be done electronically. Most of the lost postal jobs are from new machines and technologies taking over peoples jobs (optical character recognition is a big one). Most of this is in response to two main factors: population increase (volume increase) and demand for low prices. [I would cite all of that but I read it a couple years ago on the USPS website and don't know which document it was]. I actually graphed the prices over time once (wish I could find it) of the price of 1st-class mail for the first ounce and additional ounces and it came out very linear!

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As for the people getting bad UPS service, I feel sorry for ya. We've had the same driver for 15 years and he's awesome. Always has a smile on and on the ball at all times.

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EDIT: for the people who don't get their bells rung, it may be because of complaints in that area of bells being rung being the annoyance.

EDIT: Forgot to be on topic...I've had that type of this happen only it was setting an alarm. I spent so long setting it I missed what I was setting it for...twice...in a row

The mineral rights typically belong to the "original" landowner [read: first landowner once the concept of mineral rights was established]. Most of the time when land is sold to someone else, they don't bother buying the mineral rights. Because of this, my grandfather has the mineral rights for a large section of rural land even though my family hasn't lived on or owned the land in several generations.

I was going to get into things like that but my post was already past long-winded-rant-fest 8o). A huge example is that a huge quantity of property was never purchased back and that it's theoretically possible to purchase the parcels from the heirs, albeit a complicated process (esp if the heirs don't know they own it).

Your response actually made me wonder if mineral rights are a legal place (volume in space) or just a reference to the actual "minerals". If it's a place then it could be a good place for a home (underground) in case of crazy stuff like the initiation of marshal law. But if it's the substance...could this not be argued in court by the definition of mineral? Oil is not a mineral...and yet is included...hmmm [[need to stop thinking no.....www..::head explodes::]]