Posting to the USA from UK

[Pleater]

In one of my other lives I send a fair few things to different parts of the world, including the USA and in doing so recently discovered that there is now a separate zone just for them, and it is more expensive than the other two.

I thought I would point this out for anyone making purchases from the UK, that there is now a Zone 3 at the UK post office counter, and they are no longer giving a decisive delivery time but a longer period of time before an item is considered lost.

I don't know if this would also apply to the carriers, but suspect that it will have to be taken into consideration.

The limit for an Air Mail package is 2Kg, and there are restrictions on the size of parcel which can be accepted, but the regulations seem unchanged for the moment.

It is something I will have to keep an eye on, so will report any further developments.

Anne the Pleater

[The Q]

I know on another forum there is a long discussion about the US postal service failing to deliver even within the USA, and their general inability to deliver on time.

[Katia]

Thanks, that's good to know. I have very little trust for postal in my area right now (namely the main city hub, which I have experience with because I must mail (certified) letters through them for work frequently, and have seen letters going even in the same city take weeks to arrive, go AWOL, not have tracking scanned meaning no proof of delivery, etc.-- things that are horrifyingly ridiculous), and even domestic shipping makes me nervous. But there is something I was considering ordering from the UK (I don't think I can get it in the U.S.) and as it could take long enough to reach me even just once it gets into my state, obviously ordering from outside of the country which could add weeks to a process that could already take a week or two would be a bit nerve-wracking...

[OC Richard]

I've usually had things arrive promptly from the UK and elsewhere for that matter.

Within the last month or two I've had something from Germany, something from Australia, and a few things from the UK all arrive in a week or two.

With kilts you have Customs, and what a strange Dark Art that is! If your kilt is seized by US Customs, Heaven help you.

Back in the 1980s I worked at a Highland Outfitter and at that time (and probably now) there were numerous arcane categories, so "wool garment" was one and "fringed garment" was another.

The import duty for "fringed garment" was much higher, so our kilts all arrived from Scotland with the fringe not pulled out.

That was one of my jobs, combing out the fringe of kilts as they arrived from the UK.

[Pleater]

This is something fairly recent though - apparently the US has pulled out of a reciprocal agreement with the rest of the world meaning that the cost to post is now the former amount, plus what the US adds on for the privilege of having the item handled by the US postal system.

Anne the Pleater

[MichiganKyle]

There are unfortunately a lot of political fights going on right now in the USA over how the postal system is run. I used to work in prepress for printing, and many of the things we printed (not junk mail - magazines, professional organization newsletters, etc.) went out via the post office's presorted bulk mail system, so I got to see a small part of the impact of some of this stuff. Without going into a lot of detail and turning this political:

- Some of our politicians are trying to kill the USPS entirely to privatize the postal system, and if you look at the voting records, these politicians are not who you'd assume they'd be. This has been an ongoing effort for years.

- Private lobbying has massively complicated the process of setting postal rates within the USA. For the average citizen, this part is largely invisible. The post office now sells "forever" stamps to make this invisible to the consumer instead of selling stamps in monetary denominations and obsoleting them every few years as they're forced to change rates. But despite how invisible it is, it makes an enormous difference in the way the postal system operates, due to being required to offer postal services to some customers at a loss. There are aspects of this "you must operate this service at a loss and you're not allowed to charge market rates for it, and we won't provide funding for it and/or will tax you extra for providing the service" in the telephone system as well, which has resulted in some really strange dynamics in how telecom operates, but that's a different subject.

- Some postal reciprocal agreements are wildly one-sided thanks to mismatches between how the USA's and other countries' postal systems are funded (there are good points to be made on both sides, but with just about any change there will be collateral damage until the bugs are worked out). And unfortunately, sometimes one country's agreement has repercussions on other countries' until things are renegotiated. Some of the one-sided deals were intentionally negotiated with countries for other reasons completely unrelated to the way their postal systems work, with the postal agreements themselves as collateral damage to a larger trade deal.

- The postal system in the USA has had to deal with some wild changes over the last 15 years or so as the political climate above them changes.

As for me, I'm downright impressed that the USPS has been able to survive the nonsense that has been shoveled their way over the years, much less operate as well as it has been, and my hat's off to the folks that do it. But if I want something to reliably get somewhere else on time, I usually end up choosing FedEx or UPS instead. I've also had very good success with DHL for international shipping. Letters via the USPS usually arrive in 2-3 days from just about anywhere in the country, unless it's 2-3 weeks (which happens sometimes), or 2-3 months (which happens extremely rarely). I almost never have anything go through the USPS that gets permanently lost - it's usually just delays. And they are generally the least expensive for domestic shipping. Packages I've received have been destroyed by all three, but quite often the local post office will take responsibility and apologize for the damage if it was their fault or even if it was damaged upstream of them at another post office. Customer service has sort of a feel of a ragtag bunch of misfits fighting the system vs. the unfeeling cold corporate feel of FedEx and UPS. I can't imagine FedEx or UPS accepting shipment of a box of live chickens, but that's precisely what I received one time (totally would have thought they'd have shipped them by courier or something instead, but nope, they chose to ship via the post office - the call from the local post office asking to have them picked up was hilarious). I just wish the USPS's job wasn't intentionally made so hard for them. They really are kind of the scrappy underdog that just keeps going, not complaining, in the face of completely unfair situations they're thrust into, which is a sad state for a core part of our government services to be in.

[Tobus]

With all that's going on in the world right now like Brexit, coronavirus pandemic, and political chicanery here in the USA, it's a miracle anything gets shipped and delivered at all between our countries.

In years past, I have had very good luck getting items from the UK delivered within a few weeks and at fairly reasonable cost. But in the last few months, it has turned into chaos. As I recently posted about here, deliveries from the UK don't seem as reliable. And the problem seems to be here on the US side, at least in my case. Tracking information just doesn't seem to get updated at all, and things go missing for weeks at a time with no update. Right about the time you give up and consider it lost for good, it magically appears. Sometimes, at least.

Since the pandemic started raging, my wife and I started ordering a lot of things online that we would normally have bought in person. Within the last month or two, it seems to be about 50-50 on whether we actually get our package. Amazon has had to refund a lot of our orders because they just never show up. I've even reordered the same item again after it got lost, and the replacement got lost in the mail too. I'm to the point where I cannot trust our USPS to actually deliver anything. I never thought I would have that problem in the United States of America. This is a truly alarming trend that I fear is a sign of where things are headed for us across the spectrum. Whether it's political sabotage or simply incompetent management, we are losing our way. When we get to the point as a nation where we cannot trust our basic government services to operate reliably, it is a bad sign. I would expect that in third-world countries, but not here. The USPS is the proverbial canary in the coal mine.

Anyway, this latest change in rates between the UK and USA seems to have to do with a renegotiation that took place last year between the USA and the UPU (Universal Postal Union). The USA had threatened to withdraw entirely, as I understand it, but actually renegotiated some things. According to this article, the USA got to start setting its own rates starting in July 2020, which would seem to align with what you're experiencing. Apparently all the parties involved consider it a good thing. But it sounds like consumers get stuck with higher prices, as usual.

[OC Richard]

Offtopic I know but a puzzling thing was several years ago when bagpipes and bagpipe parts were often going between myself and the UK, and myself and Canada, was that it was much more expensive to ship to Canada than to the UK.

The other strange thing was, due to the postage cost being shown on the packages, I saw that it was half the price for somebody in the UK to ship something to me, as it was for me to ship the same item to the UK.

None of it made any sense to me.

[Digger1]

Of late, I have had experiences on two ends of the shipping spectrum...both from Scotland to Iowa. One item ordered took just shy of three months to come from Inverness bi Royal and U.S. Posts. One the other hand, I recently had a package shipped by a non-postal carrier that left Ayrshire early on a Thursday morning and was delivered to my door at about 5:00pm on Friday. Yes, the following day! So....I have concluded that the "Posties" in both nations may actually be strapping their items to dolphins and giving swim directions, whilst some of the private carriers are still actually flying packages!

[Pleater]

We get a few things sent for repair, and it has sometimes been surprising to see just how much it costs to send things to us. We have had people reluctant to post things in the past, thinking it will be as expensive to return it as to send. When we give an estimate they sometimes think we have forgotten to include the cost of the repair.

Now that the costs have gone up, though, I suspect that we will not see anything like the same amount of work coming in, which is a pity for those in the US who can't get the work done 'at home'.

Anne the Pleater