I have a medication that was ordered on 12/7 that was supposed to be at my po box on 12/14. it left Wilkes Barre PAon the 7th got to Brockton MA on the 9th then to Nasha NH later that day then on to Metro NY on the 10th and back out the door on the 10th to roam around the galaxy. The table that I ordered on the 14th and supposed shipped, Walmart email, has not been received by USPS yet. A gift for my wife on the 14th from Bloomindales has a similar problem.
All of the shipping places, as in UPS, USPS and others are always slow this time of year and even worse now with this pandemic thing going on. Compared to UPS and USPS, Amazon is super fast, even this time of year. We were shocked at how fast they can deliver. But, then again, that is for an Amazon product, not someone selling thru Amazon.
All the retailers are inundated with holiday orders and short-staffed due to Covid. So they are slow to package and ship stuff, then the carriers (Fedex, USPS, UPS, etc.) are deluged and similarly short-staffed. It's just a mess right now. The USPS delivered a package here this morning (items ordered from Macy's 3 weeks ago) so they are putting in extra hours to try to move things along. Another annoyance is the cheaper services such as "Mail Innovations" that hand off packages from UPS to the post office for final delivery. That must be a money saver for shippers but it is slooooooooooow. Seems that they should give special consideration to medications.
To be sure, our mail delivery has actually improved in the last 2 or 3 weeks. We have a new postal manager here and suddenly everything has changed for the better. It used to be that the mail would make its way to our house in the late afternoon and package delivery was horrendous. If whoever didn’t feel like breaking down the pallets, they didn’t get broken down for as long as 2 or so days. Uh, my mail lady is a Republican Californian and is very generous with information but above all, she’s a very nice lady. I digress. Lately, we’ve had package delivery from the USPS as early as 0700 and the regular mail by 0930. If our mail lady doesn’t have but a few packages, we get everything by 0930. They’ve even made 2nd runs in the afternoon just to make sure they’re starting fresh the next day. A few of the Amazon deliveries are crazy good and have actually shown up a day or two earlier than they were expected. I noticed also the UPS has started to double up on the delivery guys which is normal for this time of year.
I've been getting speedy Amazon deliveries too, which is a huge improvement from a couple of weeks ago, but they come by UPS, not USPS. I'm not sure what's going on with USPS, since I don't get much of importance from them, other than my quarterly 25-cent stock dividend checks. We used to get our mail at 10:00 am every weekday, but now it sometimes comes in the morning, but at other times it's in the late afternoon. But that's okay since I don't care if my junk mail is late. When it's something important, most people use UPS or FedEx.
I recently had maybe 10 open items on order from 7-8 retailers. Maybe one of them hit when the USPS said it was going to per their website tracking system. All the others were at least several days later than the USPS website saying "Scheduled for Delivery Today." I can certainly understand long delivery times due to high volume, but when USPS says "The mail carrier has it and you'll get it today," and then it falls into a black hole for several days or changes to "In Transit from another facility," I put that squarely on the shoulders of the post office. That's not a volume problem, it's a system problem.
Well today my meds showed up after wandering the galaxy since 12/14. I also got a notice that my tablet was in a locker at the PO but since there was no-one there to ask for it(since it wasn't in locker). The amazing thin about this is that I never got a notice that the item was received at the shipping PO.
That's rather concerning to have meds floating around for that long (nearly 4 weeks), especially for the healthy & safety of the recipient. If nothing else, you gotta think they are out there in some pretty harsh environments. I got caught short a couple of weeks ago when I converted the refill on a new script to mail order, and my prescription plan cancelled the in-person refills after promising not to. But my meds showed up in just 2 days, surprisingly fast given my other recent USPS experiences.
Except for name brand meds they're all on automatic refill so I wasn't in danger of running out because the auto refill send them out pretty early.
I have Humana, and they remind me when mine are due, and I do everything online at the Humana pharmacy website.
My health plan tried to get me on their mail order prescription plan and I refused; one of the reasons is to avoid the above. I would rather have personal control, plus we are encouraged to support local businesses so that's what I try to do. They employ our neighbors. My pharmacists know me and call me by name, and are nice, friendly local folks.
It's all well and good to support local business but the brand name drugs are wicked expensive at local pharmacy.