General Forum

What I have been experiencing personally was reported on in the Washington Post this morning.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/12/15/postal-service-holiday-packages-delays/

The USPS is overwhelmed by extermely higher than normal volumes and staffing issues due to the pandemic.  I know I have 10 trades in the system which are bogged down in transit.  I have an important legal document that I sent via Priority Mail to a client 5 miles away which has been stuck "In transit" for almost two weeks.  I don't understand how a Priority Mail document can be in transit for 13 days when it's only going five miles.  The reality is, USPS just can't move the mail fast enough right now because of the volume they are facing.

Perhaps traders on TCDB can make a small gesture towards helping out by holding off on sending out trades for a while.  You might as well wait, because what might normally take a week to travel may take two weeks or more anyway.  It's not going to solve the big problem, but you may lessen your own worries wondering when a trade will arrive under these circumstances.

This might be a very good idea. I know I recently won an auction on sportlots, the seller provided a tracking number the next day (12/9) and it didn't scan into the system until last night (12/14). I asked him yesterday about it, and I doubt he's lying (of course, he could be, but the timestamps indicate he's not), but he wrote "I've noticed some very serious delays from drop off to first scan."  If this is true, 5 days from drop off to finally getting out of the building is astounding. Maybe it is not the right time to be adding to the burden. And UPS and FedEx have their hands full because this season is normally high, with the pandemoc, shipping has been higher than normal anyway, and to add to all that, we now have vaccines being shipped (with utmost priority - as they should be!). 

One of those trades (I assume) are the cards that I sent to you on Monday last week.  
Hopefully they will arrive soon. 
I purchased 4 Basketball cards and 1 Baseball card for Christmas presents off eBay at the beginning of the month. 2 of the Basketball cards have arrived.  The other 3 cards are.... somewhere.  One left NJ on the 4th and arrived in Flushing NY on the 8th.  It supposedly left there the evening of the 8th but has not been updated since.  Both of the other cards are similar.  They left their original city and arrived/were processed in a couple of days at the next stop. Left? but have not been processed or updated in over a week.  
Kudos to all the hard working Postal Employees.  I'm sure it's not a fun job right now.

I have had a couple of things that I have bought that ended up in purgatory for a bit. I had a Project 2020 shipped by Topps on 11/30. It was scanned in the next day (12/1) and was marked to be delivered 12/5. On 12/5 it was marked as In Transit, but never scanned out of the depot. I put in a request to the USPS to get a update. It was delivered yesterday. During that time I had another package sent by Topps that has since followed the same process. Scanned in with a delivery date, then marked In Transit and delayed without being scanned out. Today I had another package marked shipped by Topps. If this one follows the same process I am wondering if it is just the postal hubs that Topps packages go through. Which I can understand would probably be overloaded with Topps packages alone.

I sent two identical flat rate packages from NJ to  Florida and Texas on Monday the 8th.    Florida was delivered on Friday the 12th.   Texas took a bit longer and arrived Monday the 14th.  Not bad.

Still waiting for a couple of trades from early July.  They are out there somewhere and I still believe one day they will be in the mailbox.

Might have extra delays due to Winter Storm Gail expected to hit most of the Northeast Wednesday afternooon through early Friday morning. Forecasting 10-18" in the NYC area.

I've been pretty lucky. I have not seen any delays with incoming cards. For instance, in one of my latest trades, one member accepted and sent cards in a photo mailer from Indiana on Friday 12/11 and they arrived today (Tuesday 12/15) in SoCal.

The deliberate sabotage that is affecting the post office this year isn't helping any either. 

My Secret Santa package went to Canada and it got there pretty quickly...faster than a Christmas present to my cousin in Latham, 2 hours north in fact. Hopefully next year we will be able to deliver it in person. A friend of mine ordered something from Australia last month and got it in 5 days....fastest either of us have ever gotten anything from that vendor, whom we have both been buying from for years (I think my first order was in 2005). 
It seems like international might be faster right now. 

i just sent out my first trade in months. Most of my trade stash is inaccessible but I opened a box that I got on the Black Friday sales and came up one card short on the set. Got around 70 duplicates though. I was able to turn 8 of them into the card I needed to complete the set and two parallels. I probably won't do anymore until next year. 

Edit to add: My mom drove by the PO at 7:30 this morning. There was already a line waiting to get in...even though it doesn't open until 9 AM. That's kind of crazy. 

For some inside perspective, my local post office is set up for 400 packages per day. The week after Thanksgiving was over 3000 packages per day, and now is up to over 5000 packages per day. Carriers working 12+ hour days to get everything delivered. Amazon goes first with priority, then first class then pwe. In terms of what gets pushed thru sorting facilities faster.