The popular perception may be that trackable mailpieces are scanned when deposited, during processing, and at delivery and that, in turn, the places, dates, and times reported by the Postal Service are accurate reflections of real events, including where and when they occurred.
However, a situation reported by a Mailers Hub subscriber not only suggests that perception is incorrect, but that the Postal Service’s scanning practices and subsequent tracking information are deliberately providing inaccurate reports.
Deposit vs scan
Our colleague detailed the situation:
“As someone knowledgeable about the Postal Service, I was contacted about a problem with a series of package shipments using USPS Ground Advantage. The person who contacted me operates an e-commerce business selling organic personal hygiene products, and ships approximately 30-50 packages on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday each week.
“She had a particular problem with a package that went east coast to west coast back-and-forth three times before finally being delivered. To help, I asked her to provide a series of tracking codes so that I could get a sense of how the packages were being handled by the USPS. I was sent over 30 tracking codes for packages dropped on a Monday, and I used those codes to get specific data for each item.
“The service performance looked to be very reasonable. In fact, virtually every package to an address west of the Mississippi was delivered quicker than I would have expected. It was quite clear that Ground Advantage was being flown west; there was no possible way these packages could get that far in 24 hours if being transported on a truck.
“However, I noticed the entry, or ‘start-the-clock’ event was not accurate for any of the packages. My contact uses Shopify to pay the postage and produce the label, and drops the packages at her local post office in the 4-to-5pm timeframe. It is a suburban post office that has a late afternoon closeout dispatch to the local Regional Processing and Distribution Center, and closes at 6pm.
“What I found was that the tracking data for ALL these packages had a scan event of acceptance at the local post office on Tuesday morning between midnight and 1am. Even more interesting, the scan event showing entry at the RPDC for every single package was exactly one hour and fifteen minutes after the time of entry at the local post office – which was closed at that time.
“My contact also receives packages of raw materials from suppliers throughout the US. I looked at tracking data for packages out of Denver; again, the timeframe between post office entry and RPDC entry was exactly one hour and fifteen minutes.
“I had another inquiry from a relative in the northeast US who also was having package delivery problems. Investigating the scan events, I found the same one hour and fifteen minute offset between post office deposit and RPDC entry.
“It appears that the Shopify label is identified with the planned post office of entry. However, no scan takes place at that post office; instead it is first scanned at the RPDC. This first scan at the RPDC provides an entry time but, utilizing the label data, the tracking system reports it as occurring back to the local post office. Thus, a package deposited with the USPS on Monday is recorded as entering the network on Tuesday. “The system performs a ‘systemic’ scan exactly one hour and fifteen minutes later that indicates when it was entered at the RPDC. The fact is that neither one of these data points is an accurate depiction of when or where the package is in the network.
“Such misrepresentation of data defeats the very purpose of a tracking system. When a package is received early or on time, there may be little use for the tracking system data. However, when a package is delayed, that data can be helpful in determining where it is and how is it being routed. But that is only true if the tracking data reflects actual scan events and not the ‘systemic’ scans that are being provided to the sender.”
Later, after further research, our subscriber reported another curious coincidence:
“I looked more closely at the routing of the items I was tracking, the intermediate stops, and the claimed scan times at those stops. I referred to Google Maps to determine the distances and the predicted travel times based on the time of day that was shown on the USPS tracking reports. I noticed that the travel time between stops reported by the Postal Service and the travel time forecast by Google Maps was the same, and I found that repeatedly for every point-to-point query for each item whose USPS tracking I examined. Unless this is an exceptional coincidence, it strongly suggests that these elements of the tracking reports provided to customers also are not based on real scans but rather on times calculated by Google Maps or similar software.”
Fact vs fiction
Under Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, observers with even a passing familiarity with USPS operations can detect that its statements, claims, and public information have a conspicuously positive spin. Apparently, this editing also extends to the tracking information provided to shippers.
If an item is deposited with the Postal Service – such as at a retail counter – the sender reasonably believes that the item is thereafter in USPS custody until it is delivered to the intended addressee. In turn, a sender would conclude that the measured service for that item would be based on the time from deposit to delivery – but doing so would not always yield a result reflecting favorably on USPS service.
Therefore, the agency has developed measurement rules and exceptions to enable it to not count some of the time an item is in its custody, or simply not measure its service at all. As is reported quarterly in Mailers Hub News, significant portions of commercial rate market-dominant mail are excluded from measurement for any of fifteen reasons determined by the USPS. Performance data for the remaining mail homogenizes point-to-point service into a single score for each of the fifty postal districts, for both intra- and inter-district service.
For competitive products, like Ground Advantage, Priority Mail, and Priority Mail Express, there is no public report of service performance. The only indication of service would be what the sender can learn from the tracking data for an individual item. Even then, however, as our subscriber’s story shows, the reported service is only as accurate as the Postal Service’s scanning practices and data system policies allow. In this case, those certainly help make service look better.
The Postal Regulatory Commission has opened a docket about USPS service measurement and reporting; there’s clearly work to be done to make the agency’s service reports truly reflective of the service provided.
And as for how the USPS calculates service for a package, we can only assume that the agency’s lawyers found a way to legitimize what average senders might think is a deceitful misrepresentation of the actual times of deposit and later movements of an item.
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