Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Fed Ex ............

Just last week our local postmaster told me that even when FedEx and UPS hand-offs to the USPS do arrive earlier than estimated final delivery date they are not allowed to scan them into tracking information as received and ready for pickup/delivery until the estimated date of delivery.

I ordered THE Christmas gift for my daughter on 12/8. You know the one that Santa just has to bring? The number one gift of the year. Well, the website had a banner up - order by x date and it’s guaranteed there by Christmas. Now, granted, I live in Alaska, but they still told me two weeks tops using FedEx and I placed the order a week before their deadline.

So I start watching the tracking information and it makes it to Washington in about 5 days (from Massachusetts). It sat in the same city for 2 days before it moved again. Then it moved to another city that’s about 175 miles away, still in Washington. At that point, it sat there for another three days before the tracking information updated and said expected delivery was 12/30. It has since updated to something along the lines of having been turned over to USPS and tracking information is no longer available.

Obviously I wasn’t happy so I called FedEx and was told it would be turned over to the local post office because the seller chose the Smartpost option to save money. I can understand that when shipping a large item to Alaska. And, to be fair, the original delivery date was before Christmas so I don’t fault the company for choosing that method.

Now what is going to piss me off is the USPS. We live on what they refer to as a “contracted rural route,” even though I’m about 3 miles from the post office (and downtown) and live in a neighborhood across the street from one of the biggest high schools in the area. Because of this, their contracted delivery driver, who isn’t a sure enough USPS employee, rather a 1099 employee just delivering mail, has THE CHOICE whether or not she wants to deliver our packages. So any time we have a package coming, if it’s something bigger than about a shoe box, if it’s cold that day, if there has been snow within the last month, etc., this lazy woman (we’ve met in the driveway, she’s insanely worthless) will decide she doesn’t want to bring it to the house and then I’ll get an update that says “Delivery attempted, no one available to receive package.”

We then have to go to the post office to pick up our packages which kinda defeats the purpose, but I get it. My rant is that even if this Christmas gift gets here in time to make it under the tree, which is highly unlikely at this point, it’s going to sit at the post office rather than being delivered. IF that woman decides to do some paperwork, we might know it’s there and be able to grab it before Christmas; but it probably won’t happen and because of the way it’s all played out, I now have no way to track it. I’ve got a crisp $20 that says those 5 days it hung out in Washington are going to end up being critical when it’s all said and done.