Discussion - Member to Member Sales - Research Center
Discussion - Member to Member Sales - Research Center
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Seems like the USPS is taking advised from the airlines.
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CA, PA. What's the difference!
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"CA, PA. What's the difference!"
Try PU!
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No wonder they seems to be in the red every year
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I just checked the tracking, and now the package has gone from one city in Pennsylvania to another, which is a little further east. The package is going east when it should be going west!
I looked at my receipt, and it does show the correct destination town and ZIP Code, and it should have been delivered on September 3. That's not going to happen.
I have been in touch with the buyer to let him know that USPS has screwed up delivery. Some buyers hold the sellers accountable if USPS delivers one minute late. I don't know if this buyer is like that, however.
Here is the tracking from USPS (most recent information is at the top):
Arrived at USPS Facility Sep-02-16, 18:07 PM, PHILADELPHIA, PA
Departed USPS Facility Sep-02-16, 05:49 AM, LEHIGH VALLEY, PA
Arrived at USPS Facility Sep-01-16, 23:52 PM, LEHIGH VALLEY, PA
Departed USPS Facility Sep-01-16, 03:28 AM, AUSTIN, TX
Arrived at USPS Origin Facility Sep-01-16, 01:32 AM, AUSTIN, TX
Acceptance Aug-31-16, 13:16 PM, ROUND ROCK, TX
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Hopefully, the Philly office will see what was going on and send that package on its way to California.
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I had a similar experience. I purchased a stamp on Ebay from a dealer in New York City. They promptly mailed it but it only got as far as Minneapolis when USPS sent it back to New York as undeliverable. I live about 4 hours west of Minneapolis and it was never sent this far. To make matters worse, the dealer mailed it again by Certified Mail, It then ended up in Tucson, Arizona. After I got my local post office involved, it got turned around and I finally received it.
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Years ago, we shipped a very expensive item (U$D >50k) to an element of the US military.
After awhile, the end user asked when he might expect delivery.
The tracking showed that the item flew to London, flew to New York, trucked to the receiving facility, was delivered, was taken back the next day, trucked to New York, flown to London, flown to New York, and was once again on a truck to that same receiving facility.
Why? The carrier had not cleared the shipment thru US Customs. Period. Full stop. And the rules, very sensibly, required that the item physically leave the USA and re-enter ... from scratch, as it were.
This rule is sensible because it maintains the integrity of the customs clearing process; otherwise, you would need supplementary rules & procedures to cover the "oops we already delivered it" loop and, human nature being what it is ...
Sensible or not, the tracking report was an eye-opener.
I've omitted the name of the carrier because, when I told this story to the OEM - and swore I would never ship with those clowns again - she shrugged her shoulders and said "I've got stories about every one of them".
It was not long before I could say: so do I.
Cheers,
/s/ ikeyPikey
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Vince, it's still sitting in Philadelphia. I might need you t go there and "push" things along!
Regarding DHL, I had a wild experience with them years ago. I may even have posted about it here, or possible StampWants. I do not buy from any company that ships using DHL, unless the company offers me an alternative shipping method.
Ikey, you are absolutely right. Sometimes tracking befuddles the senses and the sensible.
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I always wondered about this. I order an item in Hamilton, OH 1 hour north of me in Cincinnati, OH the item goes down I-75 right past my house ( I can see the road out my back window) all the way to Lexington, KY only to be put on another truck and sent back to Cincinnati. I don't claim to know much about things, but I always wanted to get a CB radio and call the driver and ask him to meet me at an exit and I could pick up my package!
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No wonder the USPS is in such financial straits. Look at all the extra fuel and man hours they are wasting.
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Wasting money?
You gotta load the truck, and you gotta unload the truck ... these costs are the same, no matter how far the truck travels.
You pay the driver by the hour, but you probably pay the driver for a full day whether s/he drives one 4-hour trip or one 6-hour trip. There are, after all, only so many trips being driven in a day.
And you pay to keep sorting facilities operating - ground leases, building maintenance, HVAC, management overhead, etc - no matter what capacity utilization you enjoy.
USPS has figured that they can save a boatload of cash by driving the mail further ... to a smaller number of sorting facilities.
They are probably right, even if you don't like them very much.
Cheers,
/s/ ikeyPikey
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It's the FedEx principle: wherever you're sending your package, it's going to Memphis, first.
Ted
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The single hub was a great idea when there were zero hubs with zero traffic.
In addition to scaling-up, FDX has gotten a bit more complicated:
FedEx SmartPost Hub Network
Cheers,
/s/ ikeyPikey
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...and for the latest update...the package is now in San Jose, California. Salinas is the delivery point.
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I've been to the FedEx hub in Edison, NJ. Many years ago I was looking at conveyor equipment for a project at work, so the conveyor company took us there to witness their products in use.
Everything is pretty much automated. The volume they were handling was staggering. What I saw there was an entry point for packages going into their system, rather than skids of packages shipped from elsewhere being sorted.
Cranbury, NJ is a big warehouse area and home to many mail order fulfillment centers like Amazon, Bean, and many more. These companies do such volumes of packages that a dedicated FedEx tractor makes hourly trips to these companies for a switch box. I witnessed one of these trailers fresh from Amazon being unloaded. The companies floor load these with those flat plastic mailers. A single employee can unload them one package at a time.
What happens is that they open the rear door and the trailer is loaded up to the top. The employee stands there and pulls packages, and puts them on a conveyor belt between lines drawn on the belt. As the employee progresses into the trailer, the belt extends to follow him. So nobody brings anything from the front of the trailer to the rear. The belt will extend itself all the way into the trailer. This was the piece of equipment I was there to see.
Once the packages are on the conveyor, there's a section where lasers record all the dimensions and it goes over a scale. All that info is added to the package's information and the correct postage assigned. Then the conveyor system takes and puts that package in the correct bin to be sent to the next facility.
There were loads of bin locations. There were bins for local routes, and then bins for different states and regions. There was a skid under each bin and once the bin was full, it would automatically get shrink wrapped and moved down a conveyor to be shipped out.
Quite an operation.
I did buy a smaller copy of the unloading conveyor. I was working with a team to automate truck unloading and receiving for a pharmaceutical manufacturing facility. All the truck unloading and trucking the loads to where they'd be sorted was labor intensive. Once installed the truckers pretty much unloaded the trucks onto the extending belt, and the packages traveled to the sorting area themselves. We saved about two headcount.
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To bring the original subject to a conclusion, the package was delivered on September 6. Seven days for first class delivery, which is two days past the USPS first class performance delivery window.
I'm glad I mailed it the day after the buyer paid for it.
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My hometown mentioned on Stamporama. Ah, good ole Edison, NJ. 
I'll be up there in December.
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I understand that they leave the lights on in Edison.
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Talk about fast shipment. Check out this tracking update I received today, when the package arrived at Facility ISC Chicago IL. !!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Shipment Activity Location Date & Time Shipping Partner
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Arrived at Facility ISC CHICAGO IL (USPS) September 11, 2016 12:42 pm
Arrived at USPS Facility CHICAGO, IL 60701 September 8, 2016 9:10 am
Departed USPS Facility CORPUS CHRISTI, TX 78469 September 6, 2016 7:54 pm
Arrived at USPS Facility CORPUS CHRISTI, TX 78469 September 6, 2016 7:44 pm
Acceptance CORPUS CHRISTI, TX 78412 September 6, 2016 1:20 pm
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"
In addition to scaling-up, FDX has gotten a bit more complicated:
FedEx SmartPost Hub Network"
It looks like FedEx still has some work to do. Their map indicates they don't know where Indianapolis and Denver are located in their respective states!
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I spent almost all my working life in road passenger transport and freight logistics,as a Manager,driver and in warehouse operations.
Whether we ( or they) admit it or not, post offices collection and delivery function ( as opposed to retail operations) is a freight logistics operation in it's broadest sense. It is the most labour intensive logistics operation in the world, dealing with a potentially infinite number of individual items to and from a potentially infinite number of locations.
As any transport student will tell you the most efficient ( but not necessarily the most timely) way to deal with this potentially inefficient operation is to reduce it's operations staff by creating streams of "bulked" items for as much of the journey as possible ( even if the items travel ever increasing distances - the cost per item-mile with bulk consignments as opposed to individual items being less by a factor of thousands -this more than paying for multiple handling of multiple items).
The optimum way to do this is collection-spoke-regional hub-spoke-national hub-spoke-regional hub-delivery, sometimes with sub hubs(local delivery offices in the case of a post office) between regional hubs and collection/delivery. In fact dependant on the level of business and the local geography there can be several levels of sub hub ( usually more for letters than parcels as far as post offices are concerned). This works very well in a small country like the UK, but in large geographical areas the time penalties are severe. Therefore many logistics operators superimpose a direct regional hub to regional hub operation upon the national system - and here lies the problem. Any misdirection on RH direct RH operation is far less easily rectified, especially where automated sorting systems are used, as the original misdirection error can be repeated several times. In fact such misdirection is probably relatively rare, but the chaos caused to the handling of one misdirected item probably gives a distorted impression to the customer of the overall efficiency of the operation.
Unfortunately given the necessity for a universal one-price delivery to every community ( and in some cases household), a profitable postal service is impossible in todays world,and corporate strategies have to reflect this.
The UK's answer is to accept that the letter post will continue to lose money - but the parcels have been hived off into a seperate operation (Parcel Force)to better compete with the likes of DHL,FedEx and UPS (and the many domestic commercial parcel operators), and they are actually better at corporate parcel delivery than some of the competition, while still being able to retain much of the individual, former post office business, and of course the expansion of e-commerce has helped no end, as they are able to keep market share in a rapidly expanding market.
Given the millions of items handled by post offices I would suggest that errors are statistically insignificant ( not helpful if your item is the statistic !), but the other wild card is that politicians know better how to run the operation than the professionals (?), and continually inflict loss-making decisions on those who then have to carry the can when the system goes down the toilet.
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Delays of single items may be insignificant in the whole, but Linn's reports that delivery delays of mail being handled by the USPS is increasing. It appears that the one here and one there is starting to add up to many here and many there.
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I read somewhere that USPS uses bar code scanners to 'read' an address. What sometimes happens is something affects the code, like a stray mark from a pen, something adhering to the label, and so on. The scanner misreads a destination and sends a package on it's wrong way. In time a human intervenes and then it gets correctly directed.
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"I read somewhere that USPS uses bar code scanners to 'read' an address. What sometimes happens is something affects the code, like a stray mark from a pen, something adhering to the label, and so on. The scanner misreads a destination and sends a package on it's wrong way. In time a human intervenes and then it gets correctly directed. "
That would happen with scanners of 20 years ago. Scanners of today are very intuitive.
Once the computerized reader has converted the address and zip code to zip plus four, errors don't make sense as the address doesn't match the zip code it read, so it cannot create the zip plus 4 which narrows an address down to a specific part of a street in that zip code. The items rejected by the readers go off to be read by humans.
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Michael
While admitting that delays might be increasing, it would be interesting to see statistics on how this relates to a percentage of items handled.
It has to be said that in a country the size of the US, it is difficult to arrive at a "norm" of how long an item should take and then calculate the delay. For instance an item which should normally take 3 days but takes 5, would still be within the parameters of a "norm" where some items between a different pair of points might have a "norm" of 7 days.
Additionally we are talking about reported events rather than actual events. It is like rape statistics where it is alledged that between 50% and 90% ( depending on who you listen to) are never reported. More sympathetic handling of cases by the police and a general acceptance that the woman is not at fault increases the number reported, but does not necessarily mean that more have taken place. Like the advertisements about cosmetics that claim that 90% of women agree - and then say " of 147 asked" - statistical nonsense.
I am not a statistician, but comments made without benefit of some numerical certainties should be taken with more than a pinch of salt. It is also a fact that modern man is now much more vociferous in complaining today than years ago.
My logistics experience is in distribution from a central warehouse to retail shops rather than a parcels type operation, and while "mispicks" did happen, we reckoned on 99.5% accuracy being the minimum acceptable - and 99.8% was regularly achieved. However the fall-out from the 0.2% was considerable!
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05:17:43pm
A few days ago, I shipped an eBay purchase to a chap in California. Per USPS tracking, the package is currently in Pennsylvania. Remember that I live in Texas. Instead of traveling about 1000 miles to get to its destination, it will now travel at least three times that distance.
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re: Boy, This Is Not Fast!
Seems like the USPS is taking advised from the airlines.
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re: Boy, This Is Not Fast!
CA, PA. What's the difference!
����
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10:52:14pm
re: Boy, This Is Not Fast!
"CA, PA. What's the difference!"
Try PU!
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11:22:03pm
re: Boy, This Is Not Fast!
No wonder they seems to be in the red every year
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12:49:55am
re: Boy, This Is Not Fast!
I just checked the tracking, and now the package has gone from one city in Pennsylvania to another, which is a little further east. The package is going east when it should be going west!
I looked at my receipt, and it does show the correct destination town and ZIP Code, and it should have been delivered on September 3. That's not going to happen.
I have been in touch with the buyer to let him know that USPS has screwed up delivery. Some buyers hold the sellers accountable if USPS delivers one minute late. I don't know if this buyer is like that, however.
Here is the tracking from USPS (most recent information is at the top):
Arrived at USPS Facility Sep-02-16, 18:07 PM, PHILADELPHIA, PA
Departed USPS Facility Sep-02-16, 05:49 AM, LEHIGH VALLEY, PA
Arrived at USPS Facility Sep-01-16, 23:52 PM, LEHIGH VALLEY, PA
Departed USPS Facility Sep-01-16, 03:28 AM, AUSTIN, TX
Arrived at USPS Origin Facility Sep-01-16, 01:32 AM, AUSTIN, TX
Acceptance Aug-31-16, 13:16 PM, ROUND ROCK, TX
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re: Boy, This Is Not Fast!
Hopefully, the Philly office will see what was going on and send that package on its way to California.
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re: Boy, This Is Not Fast!
I had a similar experience. I purchased a stamp on Ebay from a dealer in New York City. They promptly mailed it but it only got as far as Minneapolis when USPS sent it back to New York as undeliverable. I live about 4 hours west of Minneapolis and it was never sent this far. To make matters worse, the dealer mailed it again by Certified Mail, It then ended up in Tucson, Arizona. After I got my local post office involved, it got turned around and I finally received it.
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re: Boy, This Is Not Fast!
Years ago, we shipped a very expensive item (U$D >50k) to an element of the US military.
After awhile, the end user asked when he might expect delivery.
The tracking showed that the item flew to London, flew to New York, trucked to the receiving facility, was delivered, was taken back the next day, trucked to New York, flown to London, flown to New York, and was once again on a truck to that same receiving facility.
Why? The carrier had not cleared the shipment thru US Customs. Period. Full stop. And the rules, very sensibly, required that the item physically leave the USA and re-enter ... from scratch, as it were.
This rule is sensible because it maintains the integrity of the customs clearing process; otherwise, you would need supplementary rules & procedures to cover the "oops we already delivered it" loop and, human nature being what it is ...
Sensible or not, the tracking report was an eye-opener.
I've omitted the name of the carrier because, when I told this story to the OEM - and swore I would never ship with those clowns again - she shrugged her shoulders and said "I've got stories about every one of them".
It was not long before I could say: so do I.
Cheers,
/s/ ikeyPikey
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11:13:00pm
re: Boy, This Is Not Fast!
Vince, it's still sitting in Philadelphia. I might need you t go there and "push" things along!
Regarding DHL, I had a wild experience with them years ago. I may even have posted about it here, or possible StampWants. I do not buy from any company that ships using DHL, unless the company offers me an alternative shipping method.
Ikey, you are absolutely right. Sometimes tracking befuddles the senses and the sensible.
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re: Boy, This Is Not Fast!
I always wondered about this. I order an item in Hamilton, OH 1 hour north of me in Cincinnati, OH the item goes down I-75 right past my house ( I can see the road out my back window) all the way to Lexington, KY only to be put on another truck and sent back to Cincinnati. I don't claim to know much about things, but I always wanted to get a CB radio and call the driver and ask him to meet me at an exit and I could pick up my package!
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re: Boy, This Is Not Fast!
No wonder the USPS is in such financial straits. Look at all the extra fuel and man hours they are wasting.
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re: Boy, This Is Not Fast!
Wasting money?
You gotta load the truck, and you gotta unload the truck ... these costs are the same, no matter how far the truck travels.
You pay the driver by the hour, but you probably pay the driver for a full day whether s/he drives one 4-hour trip or one 6-hour trip. There are, after all, only so many trips being driven in a day.
And you pay to keep sorting facilities operating - ground leases, building maintenance, HVAC, management overhead, etc - no matter what capacity utilization you enjoy.
USPS has figured that they can save a boatload of cash by driving the mail further ... to a smaller number of sorting facilities.
They are probably right, even if you don't like them very much.
Cheers,
/s/ ikeyPikey
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re: Boy, This Is Not Fast!
It's the FedEx principle: wherever you're sending your package, it's going to Memphis, first.
Ted
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re: Boy, This Is Not Fast!
The single hub was a great idea when there were zero hubs with zero traffic.
In addition to scaling-up, FDX has gotten a bit more complicated:
FedEx SmartPost Hub Network
Cheers,
/s/ ikeyPikey
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10:52:50am
re: Boy, This Is Not Fast!
...and for the latest update...the package is now in San Jose, California. Salinas is the delivery point.
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re: Boy, This Is Not Fast!
I've been to the FedEx hub in Edison, NJ. Many years ago I was looking at conveyor equipment for a project at work, so the conveyor company took us there to witness their products in use.
Everything is pretty much automated. The volume they were handling was staggering. What I saw there was an entry point for packages going into their system, rather than skids of packages shipped from elsewhere being sorted.
Cranbury, NJ is a big warehouse area and home to many mail order fulfillment centers like Amazon, Bean, and many more. These companies do such volumes of packages that a dedicated FedEx tractor makes hourly trips to these companies for a switch box. I witnessed one of these trailers fresh from Amazon being unloaded. The companies floor load these with those flat plastic mailers. A single employee can unload them one package at a time.
What happens is that they open the rear door and the trailer is loaded up to the top. The employee stands there and pulls packages, and puts them on a conveyor belt between lines drawn on the belt. As the employee progresses into the trailer, the belt extends to follow him. So nobody brings anything from the front of the trailer to the rear. The belt will extend itself all the way into the trailer. This was the piece of equipment I was there to see.
Once the packages are on the conveyor, there's a section where lasers record all the dimensions and it goes over a scale. All that info is added to the package's information and the correct postage assigned. Then the conveyor system takes and puts that package in the correct bin to be sent to the next facility.
There were loads of bin locations. There were bins for local routes, and then bins for different states and regions. There was a skid under each bin and once the bin was full, it would automatically get shrink wrapped and moved down a conveyor to be shipped out.
Quite an operation.
I did buy a smaller copy of the unloading conveyor. I was working with a team to automate truck unloading and receiving for a pharmaceutical manufacturing facility. All the truck unloading and trucking the loads to where they'd be sorted was labor intensive. Once installed the truckers pretty much unloaded the trucks onto the extending belt, and the packages traveled to the sorting area themselves. We saved about two headcount.
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03:20:44pm
re: Boy, This Is Not Fast!
To bring the original subject to a conclusion, the package was delivered on September 6. Seven days for first class delivery, which is two days past the USPS first class performance delivery window.
I'm glad I mailed it the day after the buyer paid for it.
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re: Boy, This Is Not Fast!
My hometown mentioned on Stamporama. Ah, good ole Edison, NJ.
I'll be up there in December.
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09:44:56pm
re: Boy, This Is Not Fast!
I understand that they leave the lights on in Edison.
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re: Boy, This Is Not Fast!
Talk about fast shipment. Check out this tracking update I received today, when the package arrived at Facility ISC Chicago IL. !!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Shipment Activity Location Date & Time Shipping Partner
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Arrived at Facility ISC CHICAGO IL (USPS) September 11, 2016 12:42 pm
Arrived at USPS Facility CHICAGO, IL 60701 September 8, 2016 9:10 am
Departed USPS Facility CORPUS CHRISTI, TX 78469 September 6, 2016 7:54 pm
Arrived at USPS Facility CORPUS CHRISTI, TX 78469 September 6, 2016 7:44 pm
Acceptance CORPUS CHRISTI, TX 78412 September 6, 2016 1:20 pm
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re: Boy, This Is Not Fast!
"
In addition to scaling-up, FDX has gotten a bit more complicated:
FedEx SmartPost Hub Network"
It looks like FedEx still has some work to do. Their map indicates they don't know where Indianapolis and Denver are located in their respective states!
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05:50:44am
re: Boy, This Is Not Fast!
I spent almost all my working life in road passenger transport and freight logistics,as a Manager,driver and in warehouse operations.
Whether we ( or they) admit it or not, post offices collection and delivery function ( as opposed to retail operations) is a freight logistics operation in it's broadest sense. It is the most labour intensive logistics operation in the world, dealing with a potentially infinite number of individual items to and from a potentially infinite number of locations.
As any transport student will tell you the most efficient ( but not necessarily the most timely) way to deal with this potentially inefficient operation is to reduce it's operations staff by creating streams of "bulked" items for as much of the journey as possible ( even if the items travel ever increasing distances - the cost per item-mile with bulk consignments as opposed to individual items being less by a factor of thousands -this more than paying for multiple handling of multiple items).
The optimum way to do this is collection-spoke-regional hub-spoke-national hub-spoke-regional hub-delivery, sometimes with sub hubs(local delivery offices in the case of a post office) between regional hubs and collection/delivery. In fact dependant on the level of business and the local geography there can be several levels of sub hub ( usually more for letters than parcels as far as post offices are concerned). This works very well in a small country like the UK, but in large geographical areas the time penalties are severe. Therefore many logistics operators superimpose a direct regional hub to regional hub operation upon the national system - and here lies the problem. Any misdirection on RH direct RH operation is far less easily rectified, especially where automated sorting systems are used, as the original misdirection error can be repeated several times. In fact such misdirection is probably relatively rare, but the chaos caused to the handling of one misdirected item probably gives a distorted impression to the customer of the overall efficiency of the operation.
Unfortunately given the necessity for a universal one-price delivery to every community ( and in some cases household), a profitable postal service is impossible in todays world,and corporate strategies have to reflect this.
The UK's answer is to accept that the letter post will continue to lose money - but the parcels have been hived off into a seperate operation (Parcel Force)to better compete with the likes of DHL,FedEx and UPS (and the many domestic commercial parcel operators), and they are actually better at corporate parcel delivery than some of the competition, while still being able to retain much of the individual, former post office business, and of course the expansion of e-commerce has helped no end, as they are able to keep market share in a rapidly expanding market.
Given the millions of items handled by post offices I would suggest that errors are statistically insignificant ( not helpful if your item is the statistic !), but the other wild card is that politicians know better how to run the operation than the professionals (?), and continually inflict loss-making decisions on those who then have to carry the can when the system goes down the toilet.
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09:43:40am
re: Boy, This Is Not Fast!
Delays of single items may be insignificant in the whole, but Linn's reports that delivery delays of mail being handled by the USPS is increasing. It appears that the one here and one there is starting to add up to many here and many there.
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re: Boy, This Is Not Fast!
I read somewhere that USPS uses bar code scanners to 'read' an address. What sometimes happens is something affects the code, like a stray mark from a pen, something adhering to the label, and so on. The scanner misreads a destination and sends a package on it's wrong way. In time a human intervenes and then it gets correctly directed.
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re: Boy, This Is Not Fast!
"I read somewhere that USPS uses bar code scanners to 'read' an address. What sometimes happens is something affects the code, like a stray mark from a pen, something adhering to the label, and so on. The scanner misreads a destination and sends a package on it's wrong way. In time a human intervenes and then it gets correctly directed. "
That would happen with scanners of 20 years ago. Scanners of today are very intuitive.
Once the computerized reader has converted the address and zip code to zip plus four, errors don't make sense as the address doesn't match the zip code it read, so it cannot create the zip plus 4 which narrows an address down to a specific part of a street in that zip code. The items rejected by the readers go off to be read by humans.
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06:21:30pm
re: Boy, This Is Not Fast!
Michael
While admitting that delays might be increasing, it would be interesting to see statistics on how this relates to a percentage of items handled.
It has to be said that in a country the size of the US, it is difficult to arrive at a "norm" of how long an item should take and then calculate the delay. For instance an item which should normally take 3 days but takes 5, would still be within the parameters of a "norm" where some items between a different pair of points might have a "norm" of 7 days.
Additionally we are talking about reported events rather than actual events. It is like rape statistics where it is alledged that between 50% and 90% ( depending on who you listen to) are never reported. More sympathetic handling of cases by the police and a general acceptance that the woman is not at fault increases the number reported, but does not necessarily mean that more have taken place. Like the advertisements about cosmetics that claim that 90% of women agree - and then say " of 147 asked" - statistical nonsense.
I am not a statistician, but comments made without benefit of some numerical certainties should be taken with more than a pinch of salt. It is also a fact that modern man is now much more vociferous in complaining today than years ago.
My logistics experience is in distribution from a central warehouse to retail shops rather than a parcels type operation, and while "mispicks" did happen, we reckoned on 99.5% accuracy being the minimum acceptable - and 99.8% was regularly achieved. However the fall-out from the 0.2% was considerable!
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