U.S. Postal Service Express Mail carries a guarantee: your package will arrive by noon the next day after it’s accepted at the post office, depending on what time you hand it over to a clerk in person. Okay. The problem, as Consumerist readers have learned, comes in when your package arrives late and you actually try to cash in this guarantee.
Kyle complains that the package he sent was supposed to arrive on Saturday, June 15th. It just barely made it to the recipient’s local post office that morning, so the employees sort of shrugged and put it in the system as “available for pickup.” Even though nobody had told the recipient that they needed to pick it up at the post office. Good enough.

Oh, well: surely they managed to get the envelope onto a truck sometime over the weekend, right? No. Kyle writes:

You would think that they would get their act together and finally deliver it on Monday. But, of course, you would be wrong.

Because on Monday, they didn’t deliver it either, nor did they leave any notice at the door.

But they can’t admit that now can they?

So they added a new message to the tracking status on Monday: “Notice Left (No Authorized Recipient Available).

So maybe I made a mistake and there was no one at the door to answer?

Well why don’t you guess what time it was that they made their “delivery”?

That’s right, it was at 11:45AM.

Now what are the chances of that happening twice in a row at that exact time?

Once you add the fact that there was a “Waiver of Signature” on the envelope so they didn’t need anyone to “receive” it and could [have] had just left it with the rest of the mail, you see why the Postal Service is where it is today.

I attached a picture of the tracking status blacking out some possibly sensitive information. I did not actually contact USPS to get a refund this time since I don’t have the time, and I actually paid for the label with PayPal- and from past experience that means I will be going in circles as to who is supposed to refund me.

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