Warning! Do Not Ship via USPS!

If you value the item you are shipping do not ship it via the United States Postal Service! Speaking as a business owner that ships worldwide let me warn you of the USPS trap. In the past two years the United States Postal Service has attempted to step up it's image. They have lost a great deal of business to United Postal Service UPS, and in an attempt to reclaim that lost business they have offered free shipping supplies, very cheap shipping prices, and online services from printing shipping labels to stamps. I fell for it. I paid a hefty price for that choice.
Three packages lost in four months. Merchandise totaling $650.00 is now gone. Three potential repeat customers are now buying elsewhere. The first two packages were sent surface shipment. I was lucky that I had insurance on those two items, although 5 months later, and I still have not received any money back. The last one ( I will ever send via USPS) was sent Global Priority Mail. A month later the customer contacts me to let me know they had not received the package. I pull up my shipping information, do a track and confirm, and they claim they never had the package presented to them.

I grabbed up all my documentation and went down to my post office, showed them the stamp they had placed on my customs form. They scrambled around in the back office for about five minutes then came out with there standard 1800 number for me to call. By the way, the only way to actually talk to a real person using that number is to speak gibberish into the phone, otherwise they keep looping you back to track and confirm. I had already ben thru this twice, so I went home and called the 1-800 -no- service customer service line. The “customer no service rep” told me I would just have to wait and see if the package came back to me. There was nothing else I could do. Global Priority mail is not a track-able service. Ok, then I need to file a claim. “Sorry sir there isn't a claim service for global priority shipment”. WOW.. If I provided my customers with that kind of service, I would be out of business in a year from all the Better Business Bureau reports.

Well, I can't accept that answer. I decided to contact the Postal Inspectors Office, and the Inspector Generals Office and report theft of my mail. They only investigate mail theft if you think your neighbor is stealing your mail, they do not investigate the United States Post Office. In the USPS attempts of improving their image, they seam to have forgot one important portion. Customers are customers and should always be treated as such.

The next time you buy something on line, and you wonder why the seller is using the more expensive UPS, then remember, they have to uphold a reputable image, and so does UPS, USPS doesn't seam to care what their image is. We want you to receive your item, and we will ship Fed X, or UPS, Never USPS.