Pitney Bowes?
3So I heard when people buy crap off eBay out of country the item goes to Pitney Bowes and they open it and repackage it for customs. I bought some crap from the mehathon September 15. None of it I’m in a hurry for but 1 got delivered September 24. The package arrived as it usually does, goes to Rochester then to Buffalo them to my post office. The other 2 went to Rochester then Pitney Bowes and sits there. More of a curiosity by is that a new standard meh thing or is my stuff getting sent out of country?
- 4 comments, 3 replies
- Comment
Nothing is leaving the country as we don’t offer international shipping. Pitney Bowes does a variety of package handling both international and within the country. They primarily handle mass shipments that would regularly overload USPS. If you’d like us to send stuff around the world we can start but I somehow doubt it would look like a suitcase in the cartoons covered in cool stickers but rather just beat to crap and not worth receiving. Let me know if you’d like me to add that option for your future purchase.
@ExtraMedium Serious comment though… Working in 3PL, I see my fair share of carrier delays and exceptions. This is nothing new, and certainly nothing unique to PB. But… when you ship a package with a carrier, that carrier has agreed (and has an obligation) to deliver said package within a mutually-agreeable timeframe.
As the ‘shipper’, you are the only entity authorized to make inquiries to the carrier regarding shipment exceptions (the consignee has no contract with the carrier, and therefore has no ‘right’ to service levels, refunds, etc.).
I get that Mediocre takes a “Chill” approach to customer service, but in addition to lightheartedly offering to ship packages around the globe for cool postmarks, you could also request an update from PB as to why a domestic shipment is now more than 15 days in transit. Sometimes, simply reaching out to the carrier with an inquiry against a tracking number is enough to get that package rolling again. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, as they say.
I would say that if it has taken PB more than two weeks to deliver a package, either one of two things has happened: 1} PB has failed to provide adequate service to Mediocre, and a refund or rebate is due (that should frankly be passed on to the customer), or 2} The agreement between Mediocre and PB provides for unusually long transit times, and should probably be reviewed.
Just my $.02 though. Or $.04, as this turned out to be a pretty long reply.
@danlo Honestly, the way I understand it is that that PB will take packages and pile them up until they have enough to fill a truck going in your direction. Due to the high volume of package movement in the US this can be a day if you’re order is going to major city or going on a smaller truck, or it can be 2+ weeks waiting for something to get done and since there are so many packages in that pile it’s possible it’s just overlooked for an extra week. The sad part is that we really can’t do much at that point.
Once an order leaves our warehouse there is always the possibility it will be mishandled in transit and arrive with some bumps and bruises. Know that we do our best to package orders in the most safe, yet time efficient manner. I can’t promise the same from PB or any of our other shipping partners.
That seems like a fun option. I was more curious than anything else.
Nah – a couple years ago, Pitney Bowes bought Newgistics, which is a domestic parcel aggregator service that does bulk delivery and then hands off to USPS for the “last mile”. The packages stay within the US but they don’t/won’t move hub-to-hub until the it’s sorted and trucks are full.
Mostly they like to send the packages back and forth between different warehouses a few weeks apart
@spitfire6006006 In the earlier days of SmartPost, there were instances packages being bounced back and forth between two depots because the recipient happened to live right in the middle between the two and the system wasn’t smart enough at the time to say “close enough”.