Tag Archives: shipping delays

Holiday Shipping 2020

By on December 9, 2020
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The holiday postal rush is on! Our primary postal service remains the United States Postal Service. You still have plenty of time to order inside the United States for delivery by Christmas…and the end of Hanukkah. Overseas customers must ship by FedEx if they have any hope of their order arriving by Christmas.

These are the Post Office’s guidelines for timely shipping for Christmas, but we’re recommending that you give yourself more time as Covid-19 delays have occurred since this notice was printed.

Inside the United States, we are seeing weeklong delays for uninsured first class shipping. Upon contacting the USPS, they blame Covid-19, which makes sense given how out of control it is in the U.S. With that said, take the postal service’s posted shipping guidelines with a grain of salt.

The Post Office says:

Mail First Class by DEC. 18 for delivery in time for Christmas

Mail Priority Mail by DEC. 19 for delivery in time for Christmas

We say you’d  be safer to mail first class packages at least a week earlier than that. With hope and luck, if you mail a package DEC. 12 via first class mail it will arrive in time for Christmas. We can’t guarantee that, as we have no control over the post office, but we hope it is a useful rule of thumb.

Happy Hanukkah! Super Solstice! Merry Christmas! Have a great Kwanzaa! And enjoy any other holidays I left out.

More COVID-19 Postal Updates: Central Europe Edition

By on August 12, 2020
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Time seems to drag on forever when waiting for a pen in the mail. Packages to central Europe are now traveling by ship, so expect several months of lag time.

Further shipping delays to central Europe have prompted me to check in once again with the United States Postal Service. A shipment to Switzerland is more than a month overdue. (Luckily for customers in the United States, the United States Postal Service is on time with their regular 2- to 5-day delivery.)

Thus, I spoke with an international mail agent at the USPS. We have long been accustomed to daily flights to and from Europe for the mail in all of its countries. COVID-19 has completely disrupted that service and forced the USPS to adopt an old 19th century way of doing things: SHIPS!

According to the woman I spoke with, the USPS is chartering a cargo vessel to service central European nations. It picks up all of the accumulated mail from about 10 nations it services in New York. Then it sails them to the Netherlands (for Switzerland, at least) and several other ports around The Continent. The packages from the U.S. go through customs in port and then get driven by truck or train to their final destination countries that sort them and deal with them as they normally would. The ship then sails back to the U.S. with all of the mail to be delivered here from central Europe.

The whole process takes about 2 to 3 months, it would appear. Once we have successfully dealt with COVID-19, the old modern way of using planes will resume. It appears that letters might still be going by planes but not packages.

For those looking for faster service to Europe, it looks as if DHL and FedEx are shipping at their usual times, but their rates are insane. Whereas it costs the USPS $45 to ship a pen in a small box, these other services are chargeing $150 to $200 or more, depending on the size and insurance levels.

International Shipping Delays

By on June 13, 2020
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International Shipping has seen significant delays due to the lack of international air travel.

Several of our international orders lately have gone noticeably late in arriving. I spent more than two hours on the phone today trying to track down a shipment that was 28 days late in arriving. What I learned from the United States Postal Service employees that I spoke with is as follows:

• COVID-19 is having a terrible impact on international mail
• Most of my international orders are stuck in U.S. customs at O’Hare Airport in Chicago
• There are so few flights abroad that the mail is getting seriously backed up
• U.S. Customs will hold outbound packages for up to 45 days trying to find a flight out of O’Hare (the world’s busiest airport) to the desired country.
• After 45 days, the U.S. customs will return the packages to the United States Postal Service to take back to the senders with a full refund of their shipping expenses.
• Mail service to and from 106 nations is temporarily suspended as of June 12, 2020.
• Most European countries, Canada, Mexico, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand still have mail service to and from the United States. However, it will be severely delayed.
• Once a package arrives in another country, often those countries’ customs agents quarantine incoming packages for 21 days before sorting them for customs duties and delivery.

I am terribly sorry for the inconvenience of these delays.

For American customers, so far, we are not having any difficulties with intra-U.S. shipping. Most orders are arriving within the usual 3 to 5 days. Priority Mail has slowed a little, but, so far, seemingly not by more than a day.

These are extreme and unusual times. Many of our shipping woes will vanish when the pandemic is outlasted. When air traffic returns to normal, international shipping will get back on track and the suspensions will be lifted.