[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by j.p.s

USPS tracking is often a work of fiction.

Originally Posted by 4691mls

I once ordered something from an eBay seller one state over. Probably a 2 hour drive from my town to theirs. Bur the Post Office routed it from the seller's town to a larger city in their state (opposite direction from me), then sent it to a large city in my state (nowhere near me) and eventually back to me. The whole process took several days and hundreds of miles.

That's been happening for decades, even for standard size envelope first class letters. It has its own (perverse) logic. They quit sorting outgoing mail at local post offices and only sort at processing centers. That resulted in very local first class mail delivery times taking at least a one day hit.

Forget interstate, I live in a town midway between two large cities less than 100 miles apart. If I send a letter to my own town, it goes to the city to the north then back to my town. If I send a letter to the next town in the direction of the other city, it goes to the city to the north, then the other city, then to the town whose border is only a few blocks away. (The entire space between the cities is filled in with suburbs.) This allowed USPS to greatly reduce the number of employees and macines doing mail sorting.

My reference to fiction was because some of my packages supposedly made multiple large trips all over the country in very short times.