Warning for Holiday Shipping of packages!

I paid 20 dollars to ship a package to someone for Christmas by the Post Office, insured, stamped fragile all over it. They smashed it, caused one of the items to leak out all over everything else, and if I want to file a claim, i have to either have them send it ALL back to me, for a cost of 20 dollars....ot they have to take it in and i have to mail them the receipt, and THEY get reimbursed...

If you are sending packages by USPS, insurance is a joke. It's usually cheaper to send by UPS anyway and its automatically insured and they actually replace the items without all that hassle. Use UPS for anything bigger than a card! I don't want to see this happen to you too.

OH how horrible. I'm glad you posted this though, I just went thru my closet to find boxes to start my christmas packages for PT'ers!

Sounds like they're scamming people to me.

The reason is packages can be thrown in the Post office distribution centers. Verses- UPS that the package rides on a conveyor belt all the time. Also at christmas time, we would hire hundreds of temporary people, with literally no post office experience.
Past loyality or not to the post office as a Supervisor- I use UPS.. lol..

Yes, I definitely recommend UPS or Fedex for packages. At my last job, we shipped UPS for customers, and 3 or 4 times had to make a claim in for either lost or damaged packages. No joke we received payment within 3-4 days after the claim was received, no questions asked.

Talk to the postmaster of the office you shipped it from. Not a clerk, not a supervisor, not a manager, the postmaster. The postmaster should be able to facilitate things. Yes, the PO is going to have to see both the damaged items and the reciepts for the items. However, there's nothing barring the Postmaster from getting creative and having the PM in the other office send digital pics of the damaged items and a sworn statement that he/she saw the damage instead of the items.

If the postmaster won't assist (He/she probably will, but just in case) ask to speak to the district customer service rep.


The mechanized and automated machinery that handles packages does far more damage than any person ever could. Doesn't matter whether you ship USPS, UPS, or FEDEX, occassionally it happens. If a machine is mis-timed, no matter who owns it, things happen. Also consider that the machine doesn't know whether the package weighs 4 pounds or 40 pounds, it has to have enough force to handle everything. You can stamp anything you want on the outside of the box, it doesn't get read.

I've never had trouble with damage from shipping USPS, Airborne Express or DHL, but UPS left several hundred dollars worth of computer parts in a snowbank.

Thank you for the information. I had packed things well and put lots of cushion for safety but i had no idea a machine would send it flying at a high rate of speed. They should tell you that when they put "fragile" all over it for you. Nobody has ever told me that they just let things fly LOL. I knew letters were handled by machines, but not that larger packages were as well, since they are of such varying sizes.

For myself, UPS is the only company who has never sent me damaged goods. I've had problems in the past with everyone else, but it can happen with any company I guess, I have just had good luck with UPS myself. I was just quite upset that my gifts were damaged after I paid so much to send them and then got a run around and VERY difficult to get any sort of reimbursement for it.

About 2-3 years ago the USPS started deploying an automated parcel sorting machine (APPS). That changed the way parcels are handled. They used to be handled by a mix of machinery and personnel. Now, once the clerk at the PO puts the parcel in the wiretainer to ship, it goes from there to the nearest distribution facility with an APPS, and from there it gets sorted almost exclusively by machine. The one exception to this is live animals, which are manually handled from door to door.