The Journey of my Shoes

[nwhiker]

I wrote about how my shoes got trashed waaay too soon for shoes that expensive. They were outside the amazon return window, so I decided to return them to the company (the rep on twitter suggested it), even though they might not replace or refund, because eh, otherwise they were hitting the trash and after two months, I at least wanted to try to get some money back, LOL.

The company is in San Diego.

I bought the postage online on 19 October and dropped them in the package bin inside the post office the next afternoon.

A week later when I checked on them, the USPS had no record of them.

Now it's pretty hard to file a claim when a package hasn't been scanned into the system at all. As in, there is no easy way of doing it. I went to the post office, no dice, they pretty much blew me off. I sent an email through the grievance part of the site and got back a message in such broken English I am still not sure what it was supposed to mean. So I did some more research.

On 6 November, I initiated a "missing mail" claim on the package, figuring that would at least force the post office to look for it.

A few weeks go by. Nothing.

Then, miracle! Package has been located, it seems, in the "Unclaimed/Being Returned to Sender" bin in Redmond? Is victory mine? Hint: no.

The next day, it's in Seattle. OK, maybe it's going to leave from there, headed south to San Diego.

Nope. Spokane. On the east side of the state... almost Idaho. WTF?

It only gets worse from there. After Spokane, my shoes spend a few days "In Transit to Next Facility" before resurfacing in... Indianapolis. Now even someone terrible at geography can tell just by looking at a map that San Diego and Indianapolis are... not in the same direction.

A few days later they're in.... Ybor City, Florida. Yeah, Indiana wasn't so bad, I guess. For the past 10 days, they've been bouncing back and forth from Ybor City and Seminole, Florida. I'm pretty sure that's a toll bridge. I'm glad I'm not paying their tolls.

What the ever-loving hell is going on?

Full details of the journey, if you read from the bottom up!





Dear USPS, please admit you've lost my shoes, and send me a check for $97.91, what I paid for the shoes, and $9.20. Total of $107.11, and you can toss them in Tampa Bay (really, though, don't) and stop paying the tolls to transport them back and forth and back and....

Comments

[camelsamba]

that's insane! i had a package for Cassie get lost in transit last year because the online ordering system somehow screwed up the address (California street address but Michigan city & zip code) and I didn't realize until I tried to figure out what was taking so long. But clearly that's not what happened to you since you prepared the package! (I also once tried to track a package and accidentally used a tracking number that was a couple years old - it had been reused, and the journey for the new package totally confused me.)